The questions started long before the Forrestal returned home and they would continue for a long time afterward. How did the fire start? How did it get so bad? Why did the bombs blow up so quickly? Could more lives have been saved? For days and weeks, the men sorted out who was killed and who survived, who was missing and who was injured but alive. Young men like Ken Killmeyer and Frank Eurice survived relatively unscathed, while others like Paul Friedman and John McCain made it through with minor injuries. Rowland survived another tragedy to cap off his long military career, and Beling survived the fire itself but knew that he faced more heat from the navy.
The Forrestal sailors started reflecting on their own experiences soon after the fires were out, after they had a little time to rest and get over the initial shock. There already was talk of heroics and how well the crew had responded, but there also was talk of the errors they had made. Fate has a way of showing itself in the aftermath of such a deadly incident, inviting survivors to praise it or curse it, quite often both. After the men had time to compare notes, they marveled at the small coincidences and twists of fate that spared their lives, as well as the ones that killed their buddies. Quietly, a sailor told of going on a coffee break, during which everyone at his workstation was killed. Others told of being on a hose team, fighting to control a raging fire hose with several other men, when one of the big bombs went off. After the blast, there might be one man left, the rest of the hose team on either side of him obliterated by the explosion. That man forever wondered why.
For the aviators on the flight deck, their location when the fire started played a large role in whether or not they survived. The three pilots who died in the fire were all to the rear of McCain’s plane, where the fire started, their planes caught up in the conflagration as burning fuel spread to the rear of the ship. Their planes were equipped with ejection seats that could fire while the plane was sitting still, but apparently none of the trapped pilots tried that escape option. Ejecting from a plane is always a last resort, extremely violent and risky, and the Forrestal’s situation introduced new hazards that made ejecting even less desirable. The pilot could have floated down right into the fire, and landing out in the water was never a good idea. And why eject if you could just jump out of the plane or wait mere seconds for the firefighters to rescue you? In the end, it became clear that the aviators who made it out of their planes safely were the ones who scrambled out as soon as they saw the fire; even a slight hesitation might have cost some pilots their lives. Those who survived wondered for years if the dead aviators might have been spared by a quick decision to eject, but they also understood why they decided against it.
For most of the sailors, however, there was no accounting for who survived and who didn’t. Men tried to reason out the circumstances, certain that there must be a sensible explanation to something so important, but often the answer was nothing more than the capriciousness of a bomb fragment flying this way instead of that way. Over time, odd anecdotes appeared from the tragedy, some merely curious and some more poignant. The crew did not learn for a long time that a father and his own stepson had both died on the Forrestal that day. Two brothers were on board as well, one caught up in the blaze on the flight deck and the other fighting his way through the crowd belowdecks to get to him. One brother died. (Though the navy has avoided assigning family members to the same ship since World War II, exceptions were granted if the family requested it and the ship was not thought to be in danger of enemy attack.) They also learned of wives who had been coping with the absence of husbands while they were pregnant, only to receive the horrible news that their children would be fatherless. At least one wife miscarried when she was told her husband had died on the Forrestal.
In the days following the accident, while sitting around the table at chow time or in their quarters playing cards at night, the men of Forrestal swapped stories about the odd things they felt and saw during the fires. One aviator told his buddies about how he had lost his navy-issued survival knife while escaping the fire on the flight deck. The knife was a specialized piece of equipment for use if the aviator was shot down on a mission, and under most circumstances he could expect a serious reprimand for losing it. Even in the heat of the moment, he feared that reprimand so much that it momentarily outweighed his fear of the fire. He told the story to his buddies and they laughed at the absurdity of it all, but many of them understood because they, too, had seen the strange ways the human mind works in such a crisis.
Not everyone showed the stress. Even for those who managed to cope with what they had seen and experienced, their first weeks back home were rough. Young men tend not to acknowledge that they’re hurting inside and they can be remarkably successful at hiding the pain even from their loved ones. But these men and their families found that sometimes the demons would reveal themselves at the most unexpected times.
Gary Pritchard, the sailor who was asleep in his bunk when the explosions started, and ran to the flight deck to help with the wounded, managed to shove aside most of what he had seen, repeatedly assuring his wife and family that he was okay, and offering little explanation of what happened to him. His wife sensed that he didn’t want to tell her everything, at least not yet, so she didn’t press him. Besides, he seemed to be dealing with it pretty well.
Soon after Pritchard returned to Norfolk, his family threw him a welcome-home party, more of a celebration than he expected, but he knew why. His family wasn’t just glad he was home, they were relieved he was alive. Pritchard welcomed the party and had a good time seeing so many relatives and friends, especially because he had expected to be away from them for much longer. For most of the evening everyone enjoyed the food and drink, and no one bothered Pritchard with questions about what happened. But then as the evening wore on and many of the guests had left, the setting became a little more intimate with just Pritchard, his wife, and a handful of close relatives. As they sat and talked, there was a pause in the conversation, and Pritchard’s sister-in-law finally asked what had been on everyone’s mind all night long.
“Gary, what really happened out there?”
That was pretty much the last thing Pritchard remembered for a while. The next thing he knew, he felt like he was snapping out of a trance. A lot of time had passed and everyone around him was crying. He had no idea what he had been saying, nor could he ever remember.
On the drive home, Pritchard and his wife sat silently for the longest time. Her eyes were still red from crying and he felt bad about making everyone so sad. Finally, Pritchard couldn’t resist asking.
“Honey, what did I say?” he asked quietly.
“You did all right, Gary,” she replied, with a squeeze of his hand. “You’re okay.”
Pritchard didn’t know exactly what that meant, but his wife wouldn’t say anything more. He kept thinking about the tears and the look on everyone’s faces, and before he arrived home, Pritchard decided that he should never answer that question again. It would be many, many years before he changed his mind. Like most others who survived the ordeal, he was always reluctant to share the worst memories with anyone, especially anyone he loved, because he preferred to carry that burden alone.
It didn’t take long for some of the crew to get a feel for how the navy viewed the fire. The ship was out of commission for a while, so many of the crew were sent to various training programs, including firefighting. Ed Roberts had received no firefighting training before the Vietnam cruise, so he was sent soon after the carrier’s return. He was sitting in a classroom one day, just one sailor among a couple dozen from various ships and divisions. The instructor started talking about how to fight fires and said, “Now this is what you’re supposed to do, not like those idiots on the Forrestal.”
Roberts’s blood boiled and it was all he could do to sit quietly. You motherfucker, he thought.
Rear Admiral Forsyth Massey’s investigation continued for months after the Forrestal was home. Massey and his team of investigators interviewed nearly every surviving crew member to determine just what happened that Saturday morning. The information they collected was voluminous, the final report eventually reaching seven thousand five hundred pages.
Even with a wealth of data and hard facts at their disposal, the investigators depended on the men on board to help them sort out just what happened. They interviewed anyone who might have even the smallest bit of information that might prove useful, and they meticulously dissected the procedures on the ship to determine how something as devastating as the mistaken firing of a rocket could have slipped through the navy’s safety procedures. The big question for the investigators was whether the navy’s safety procedures were somehow flawed or whether the crew had simply not followed the proper procedures. The answer was both, but in the big picture, the investigators may have been asking the wrong question.
As it became clear that the Zuni rocket had fired, the investigators focused on the many redundant safety procedures that should have prevented that accident. They interviewed dozens of people involved in the arming procedures for the planes that day, as well as others not working that day, in an effort to determine what was standard procedure on the Forrestal. Much of the questioning involved the TER intervalometer pins that should have been left in the rocket firing device as a safety measure until the very last minute before the plane was launched on the catapult. The crew had a habit of removing them early as a way to speed the launching process, but the practice had never been officially approved. When it came time for the crew to explain their actions on the flight deck, more than a few sailors squirmed when asked about removing the pins. They were being questioned under oath by lawyers from the Judge Advocate General’s office and by some of the navy’s highest-ranking officers. Their answers had to be truthful or they risked criminal penalties and the end of their navy careers. But they also knew that telling the truth might get them in trouble for failing to follow safety procedures to the letter.
Some of the crew who worked on the catapult teams reported that sometimes planes came to the catapults with the TER intervalometer pins already removed, but other planes had them still in place as required by the safety regulations. After many crew members were interviewed, the investigators could see that there had been no official change in the policy involving TER pins, but some of the crew had decided to take a shortcut. One crewman, nineteen-year-old Andrew Sappe, was especially helpful in explaining the circumstances of the TER pins. On the day of the fire, he was working on the forward catapults, responsible for the final arming of the rockets and missiles just before the plane was launched. Among other last-minute adjustments, Sappe was supposed to remove the TER pins to make the rockets fully armed.
Sappe spent an hour being deposed by a naval lawyer on the trip home to Norfolk, resulting in his official written statement to the board. In that statement, Sappe said he did not know what the policy was for removing TER pins.
In August he sat in front of a board of investigation and was advised of his rights not to incriminate himself. Then Sappe changed his story somewhat and said he now understood that the TER pins were supposed to be in place when the plane reached him. He told the investigators that he sometimes found the TER pins had already been removed, but he did not always report the missing pins to superiors because he had heard that some aviation crews preferred removing them early. The investigators insisted that Sappe be specific about who had said it was okay to remove the pins early.
“I don’t think anyone said directly that we should take them out,” he explained. “This was just a thought, just casual talk, and I didn’t say anyone said we should actually take them out. This was just two sides of the story I’ve heard—why should we leave them in and why should you take them out.”
Admiral Massey himself addressed the young sailor with a follow-up. “Why were you so impressed with the pins?” he asked Sappe.
“I think it’s safer. It is safer. That’s what it is for.”
“Then it would seem to me that anyone that would advocate pulling it out would be unique. He would be unusual, wouldn’t he?” Massey asked.
“Not actually,” Sappe replied. “It depends on how your system was set up.”
“There are a lot of people that feel that way, is that what you are trying to say?”
“There are some people.”
“You can’t remember anyone who was for outs?”
“No, sir. Not by name. No one actually said out.”
“What did they want to do with them?” Massey asked.
“We were discussing both sides of the story. Nobody said they actually wanted them out.”
Massey was losing patience with the sailor’s equivocation. “Well, what did they want? Halfway in or what?”
Sappe felt the pressure and thought for a moment before answering.
“They wanted them in all the way like they were supposed to be.”
Another investigator then asked Sappe who had recommended following the navy procedure and leaving the pins in.
“I guess all the senior petty officers wanted them in,” Sappe said. “Anyone that knew anything about ordnance I think would want them in.”
Sappe went on to explain that, in actual practice on the Forrestal, he saw differences between the way aviation groups armed their planes. The group known as VF-11, Sappe’s own squadron, followed the safety procedure and left the pins in until the plane was on the catapult. But Sappe said that he often helped arm planes from the VF-74 squadron, and it was common for those pins to be missing.
“Are you saying, then, that you thought it was VF-74’s practice, policy, to take them out?”
“Yes, sir. Well, I couldn’t actually say, but that’s what it seemed to me from the majority of planes that had no intervalometer pins.”
Sappe then told the investigators he remembered one time in which a VF-74 plane had come to the catapult with the pin in place on one side of the aircraft and missing on the other side. When questioned on whether he had always reported the missing pins, Sappe said he hadn’t, even though he was fully aware of the rule requiring them and even the purpose they served. He just assumed that VF-74 had their own system and he shouldn’t interfere. The investigators noted that a key person in the arming of rockets was confused about what was allowed and what he should do when procedures were not followed.
Others in the system also testified to the same circumstances, and the board flatly accused some crew members of lying to the board when they tried to say there was no habit of removing pins early. In some cases, the safety officers who had been looking the other way when pins were removed early wanted to cover themselves. One safety officer, the last man responsible for ensuring the safety of the arming system, tried to explain away a subordinate’s charge that he was ignored when he reported missing TER pins. The subordinate had reported missing pins by holding up the number of pins he had removed from a plane and using hand signals to indicate that some were missing. The safety officer responded by shrugging his shoulders as if to say he didn’t care. When the board asked the safety officer for an explanation, he produced an elaborate explanation about how the shoulder shrug actually was a special signal he had developed with another member of the catapult crew and not a response to the missing pins. The board didn’t buy it.
Having established that the Forrestal crew, or at least certain parts of its crew, were in the habit of removing TER pins back in the pack instead of waiting for the plane to reach the catapult, the board then turned its attention to the pigtail connectors. Even with the TER pins removed, the rocket still should have been safe from accidental firing if the pigtail cables were not plugged in. And navy regulations required that the pigtails be left unplugged until the plane was on the catapult.
This problem was a little easier for the board to figure out because the deviation from procedure actually had been documented. The board reviewed the records of the Weapons Coordination Board, made up of ordnance experts and other representatives from the aviation groups, which had met on June 29, 1967, just before the Forrestal reached Yankee Station. In that meeting, the ordnance experts reviewed some navy regulations that pertained to the safe handling of bombs, missiles, and rockets, with the intention of relating what they considered “ideal” handling to the real-world requirements of a combat situation. The weapons board determined that some requirements for handling weapons in a noncombat situation were impractical in the fast-paced demands of bombing runs on Yankee Station, so they decided to officially circumvent some specific navy requirements. Even so, the Forrestal crew was not running wild; as the first East Coast carrier to arrive in Vietnam, they had been advised by the West Coast carriers that some “normal” safety requirements had to be altered for combat. The other carrier crews suggested plugging in the rocket pigtails while the planes were still bunched up back in the pack, instead of waiting until they reached the catapult.
After considering the time demands when launching aircraft and the possible safety risks, the ship’s Weapons Coordination Board officially determined that the crew should be allowed to deviate from navy regulations: “Allow ordnance personnel to connect pigtails ‘in the pack,’ prior to taxi, leaving only safety pin removal on the cat.”
The weapons board clearly saw the TER safety pins as their backup, the other safety measure that would still ensure the rocket could not fire until it was on the catapult. To underscore the point, the weapons board stressed in its report that if the pigtails were to be plugged in early, “Safety pin will not be removed prior to aircraft being positioned on the catapult.”
In hindsight, the conflict was clear. Admiral Massey and the rest of the investigations board could see that there was a terrible convergence. An official change in safety procedures collided with an unofficial change in safety procedures. In addition to that major conflict, the board’s investigation determined that the Forrestal crew had violated several other safety procedures. Some, such as failing to have the pilot place his hands in view while crew performed certain tasks on the rockets, appeared not to be a cause of the fire but still were safety risks. Others, such as plugging in the pigtails and conducting stray voltage checks before the plane switched to internal power, were considered a direct cause of the rocket launch. The investigation revealed that the rocket had been able to fire because the pigtails had been plugged in and the TER pins had been removed. But it did fire because a freak surge of electricity jumped through the plane’s system at the moment the pilot switched from the outside electrical generator to the plane’s internal power system. The voltage surged through five sequential safety devices designed to prevent just such a stray charge from reaching the rockets.
The strange chain of events could not have happened without just one of the sequential causes. All of the causes had to come together at the same time, in the right order, on one plane, to make the Zuni rocket fire.
Now the board knew why the Zuni rocket fired and started the fire. But they still didn’t know why that fire killed 134 men.
One of the last steps for the board investigating the Forrestal fire was to hear from Captain Beling. He had not been involved in the investigation by the board other than to make available his men and any information he might have at his disposal. He was, after all, one of the chief witnesses to the fire and potentially to blame for whatever failings the board might find. When Beling was finally called to testify, he knew that his career was on the line. He had no way of knowing what the board’s findings ultimately would be, but he realized that this was his chance to address whatever problems may have occurred. Accordingly, he prepared a lengthy statement to read to the board before they questioned him.
The room was heavy with anticipation before Beling entered. The board already had some evidence that there had been problems in procedure, and the incident itself was one of the most dramatic that anyone in the navy could remember for many years. When Captain Beling walked briskly to the table in front of the board members, everyone knew that what he said might determine his future.
Beling never showed that he felt the pressure. He maintained his composure from the start and all the way through, addressing the board in a firm voice and never sounding defensive or angry. With the courtly manner that had become his trademark, Beling began his address to the board by reviewing some facts related to how he came to be in command of Forrestal, and then how the ship arrived at Yankee Station. The board members and others in attendance listened quietly, their ears perking up when they heard Beling approach the topics that most interested them.
“I have always had a deep respect for the destructive powers of modern ordnance—even in small quantities,” Beling said. “Visualizing last summer the potential for disaster inherent in the pattern of operations in Southeast Asia with bomb assembly on the mess decks and bomb farms on the hangar and flight decks, I had extensive discussions with the weapons officer and others searching for safer operating patterns and procedures. The fire on Oriskany served as a concrete and shocking example that made it easy to create and maintain a climate of respect for ordnance and of willing adherence to safety regulations.”
Beling went on to say that some standard procedures had been altered in anticipation of combat, and he pointed out that the navy had approved those changes in the ship’s Operational Readiness Inspection (ORI) before she sailed for Vietnam. But he specifically denied that he had approved any significant changes thereafter.
“It was recognized that in Southeast Asia it would be necessary to vary somewhat from peacetime Atlantic Fleet training procedures. The policy was enunciated to the executive officer, air-wing commander, weapons officer, operations officer, air-wing ordnance officer, and to other key officers that safety was primary. These officers were instructed that variations from peacetime ordnance procedures were to be made only where essential on a case-by-case basis; that current WESTPAC [Western Pacific Fleet] procedures could be used as guides but that they must be upgraded for safety in every respect possible.”
“These procedures were discussed with the ORI inspectors by opposite numbers whenever controversy or any question of safety arose. No subsequent relaxation of any aspect of safety ever was authorized by me, either specifically or by implication.
“With reference to the Zuni rocket, which surely has a special role in the matter under investigation, I am certain that the arming procedures validated on the ORI were more conservative, and safer, than those practiced generally on Yankee Station.”
In other words, Beling was saying that the Forrestal had sailed for Vietnam with a safe policy on arming the Zuni rockets. He did not approve any change in that policy, even if others on board had.
Beling then turned his attention to how the crew had responded to the fire. “Fire prevention, firefighting, and damage control have received heavy emphasis during my tenure in Forrestal,” he told the board. He pointed out that during the ship’s forty weeks of overhaul before she went to Vietnam, there had been sixty-two fires on board, about one fire every five days. (Most of the fires were related to construction work on board.) With pride, he noted that every fire had been extinguished so quickly by the crew that the Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s fire department never had a chance to respond. In the navy’s major inspection of the ship just before she went to Vietnam, her crew was graded “outstanding” in fighting flight-deck fires. Beling made reference to previous testimony that 1,332 of the crew had undergone firefighting training in the year prior to the Vietnam journey, and then with a note of annoyance in his voice, he explained that he would have trained even more of his crew before going to Vietnam if the navy had let him. The firefighting schools were all booked up.
“Incidentally, my recent request for one hundred quotas on return to Norfolk and one hundred quotas per week thereafter had to be turned down because of present commitments of the firefighting schools,” Beling said. He paused to let the board realize what that meant. Even after nearly losing his carrier to a major fire, he still couldn’t get his men in the firefighting schools.
Beling was trying to show the board that he did not blindly sail the Forrestal into disaster. He knew the risks the ship would face from a high-tempo combat operation, and he had done everything he could to prepare. Beling knew that he had gone out of his way to prepare the Forrestal and her men, taking more steps than some captains would have. He hated to sit in front of the board and outline every little thing he did, because it felt too much like a blend of bragging and defensiveness. Neither came naturally to him.
But Beling also was a pragmatic man, a career naval officer who knew exactly why he was sitting there. He had been at the helm of a high-profile warship when disaster struck. If he didn’t defend himself vigorously, the board could be expected to put the responsibility at Beling’s feet. Without evidence to the contrary, that outcome would be almost obligatory.
Beling went on to describe a host of other precautions he had taken against fire and other accidents on board, noting in particular that he had used the Oriskany fire as a teaching opportunity for his crew. He explained that the Forrestal had changed some procedures relating to the storage of magnesium flares, for instance, and he showed the board the information on the Oriskany fire that he distributed to his crew. Beling also offered proof that he had spent $189,472 in discretionary funds on additional firefighting, medical, and damage-control gear that the ship was not required to have.
The reference to educating the crew about the Oriskany fire got Admiral Massey’s attention. He soon asked Beling about it.
“You mentioned that you published to all hands a tract of some kind that came from the Oriskany fire. I would like to get on the record what that was, where you obtained it, and if it was part of the official board of investigation of the Oriskany fire.”
Beling welcomed the question. He explained that, no, the article was not a product of the Oriskany investigation, and in fact, he had never been provided any official report on the Oriskany fire or informed of any lessons learned in that incident. He had sought some sort of report that outlined the seriousness of the fire for his crew and suggested improvements, but the navy had not provided any such materials.
“The document to which I refer, and which was only an isolated example of the efforts made on this ship to instill an awareness of the dangers of fire into the crew, was taken from Reader’s Digest,” Beling explained. “We wrote to Reader’s Digest and requested reprints, some three thousand, and offered to pay for them. They said they couldn’t provide them because it came from some other publication, and they had used a condensation. Accordingly, we reprinted it on our own and I believe informed them that we had done so. I made sure that every single man had a copy of it.”
Admiral Massey was noticeably annoyed by what he was hearing. He took a deep breath and responded, speaking more to the other board members than to Beling.
“Well, it seems to me that for years we have been following this kind of routine where a board of this kind spends a number of weeks intensively looking at accidents of one kind or another, and somehow the system just never provides that the result of the board’s work gets to the people that need to know it,” he said. “And just for the record, I think this is one of our navy-wide weaknesses that must be corrected. For example, you had to go to the Reader’s Digest to find out what’s happening to carriers, carrier fires today! It just seems to me that is a pretty serious indictment of our system, that after six weeks possibly with a board of officers to determine all these facts, we have to go to a civilian writer to get it.”
Beling agreed completely, but he was glad that he had led Massey into stating the absurdity of the situation instead of having to do it himself.
Continuing with his statement, Beling conceded to the board that, based on the evidence presented to it in the previous month, “a decision was made at a low level in VF-11 to shortcut approved procedures.” Even though he repeatedly made clear that the Weapons Coordination Board had not sought his approval for the early plug-in of rocket pigtails, Beling told the board he didn’t think that was the real cause of the rocket firing. The real cause, he said, was that the crew plugged in the rocket pigtails while the plane was still on external power.
“In my personal opinion, the rocket fired when the pilot of F4B number one-ten moved his generator switches from the external to the internal positions,” Beling explained. “If this is in fact correct, it is tragic that squadron personnel were unable to apply enough common sense to conclude that stray voltage checks should be made and pigtails plugged in while on internal power. It is at least equally tragic that there does not seem be a recognition in any applicable publication of the wisdom of such an elementary precaution.”
But Beling also made an important follow-up point. Though he was critical of how his own crew had made such a serious error, he insisted that the error could not have been overlooked for long. He pointed out that of the 486 aircraft the Forrestal launched on Yankee Station, only three were VF-11 planes carrying rockets. That gave the supervisory crew little opportunity to spot the problem.
“It is my carefully considered opinion that had normal Yankee Station operations continued, supervisory authority above the level of squadron commander would have detected these violations soon,” Beling said. “I can assure positively that they would have been stopped as soon as detected.”
Beling knew the board needed to hear that. It was one thing for the crew to make an error. It was quite another if Beling’s command structure was so flawed that supervisors could not detect the problem quickly and take the appropriate action.
Not content to blame his own crew for failing to follow safe procedures in arming the rockets, Beling went on to tell the board that he had serious misgivings about the rocket-arming system itself. Drawing on his MIT education in physics and aeronautical engineering, he provided the board with his own analysis of the circuits and safety devices of the LAU 10 device that fires Zuni rockets, saying he had concluded that the system was fundamentally flawed and overly sensitive to human error. Even if proper procedures had been followed, Beling said, “similar discharge of a Zuni rocket would have been inevitable.”
“It is evident that Forrestal’s ordnance personnel never had a safe system to work with and never had the technical information needed to design prudent, sailor-proof rocket-loading and-arming procedures. If Forrestal were still on Yankee Station, I would not permit any use of the LAU 10 with my present knowledge.”
After the lengthy discussion of the rocket firing, Beling moved on to the question of how the sailors fought the fire. He cited information already presented to the board regarding how quickly the crew responded with fire hoses and fog foam, and he emphasized the extremely short interval between the start of the fire and the first bomb blast that killed so many firefighters and others on the flight deck. In his statement to the board, his answers to the follow-up questions, and indeed throughout the entire investigatory process, this was the only point where Beling ever officially addressed the issue of the old, decaying bombs that the navy had sent to his ship. And even then, he referred to them only in an indirect sense by citing the short cook-off time before the first thousand-pound bomb exploded. The explosion of the first bomb after an astonishingly fast one minute and thirty-four seconds in the fire turned a crisis into a catastrophe.
“The diagram shows that a massive effort to control the fire was under way and that hoses from the starboard catwalk and forward were surrounding it,” Beling said. “About one additional minute would have been required to bring enough hoses into action to affect the fire and they would have been ideally placed to contain it. I feel, therefore, that had the bomb not exploded, significant headway could have been made against the fire by about three minutes after its inception. However, I consider it utterly beyond the bounds of possibility that the fire could have been suppressed in ninety-four seconds by any group of men with the equipment available.”
Beling paused before moving on to his closing comments. He had said what he wanted to say, and he did so without directly accusing the navy of killing those 134 men by sending him faulty ordnance. But he wondered if the message had gotten across to the board.
We only needed three minutes. Just three goddamn minutes and we could have controlled that fire.
Beling took a moment for a sip of water and then proceeded to his closing. It was not just a perfunctory, polite end to his statement. He meant it, and it was the first time in his twenty-minute-long statement that he felt a bit of emotion welling into his voice. His own career was on the line, but at this moment, he was thinking about his men. While everyone was listening, he was going to make damn sure they got the credit they deserved.
“After an intense effort in the fields of material and training, Forrestal deployed to Southeast Asia well prepared to do her job. She had made a promising beginning on Yankee Station when a deeply tragic accident occurred. The cause was a combination of faulty rocket-safety devices and inadequate technical documentation of rocket-arming procedures. The quantity of high explosives detonated on board exceeded that in any marine disaster since World War Two.”
Beling put down his prepared comments and finished from memory. He wanted to look the board members in the eyes.
“The crew responded with consummate skill and bravery. They saved their ship in a classic demonstration of damage control, so minimizing the injury that Forrestal can steam at more than thirty-two knots and retains her ability to launch and land aircraft.
“The men of Forrestal return to home port for a full repair looking to the future instead of the past. My pride in their behavior is so immense that I never will have the words to express it adequately.”