care to share any?

well he has this daughter......

Sure got smoked in that election...

I happen to prefer the guys who don't get caught

.
Attachments:

Hard to believe some people are calling him a war hero.

Ahhhhh....memories.
Attachments:

I remember John before cancer ate his brain and turned into a blithering idiot. Sad.

In July 1967, a fire broke out on board the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. An electrical anomaly had caused the discharge of a Zuni rocket on the flight deck, triggering a chain-reaction of explosions that killed 134 sailors and injured 161. At the time, Forrestal was engaged in combat operations in the Gulf of Tonkin, during the Vietnam War. The ship survived, but with damage exceeding US$72 million, not including the damage to aircraft.[2][3] Future United States Senator John McCain and future four-star admiral and US Pacific Fleet Commander Ronald J. Zlatoper were among the survivors.

By 1967, the ongoing naval bombing campaign from Yankee Station represented by far the most intense and sustained air attack operation in the U.S. Navy's history, with monthly demand for general purpose bombs (e.g., "iron bombs") greatly exceeding new production. The on-hand supply of bombs had dwindled throughout 1966 and become critically low by 1967, particularly the new 1000-lb Mark 83, which the Navy favored for its power-to-size ratio: a carrier-launched A-4 Skyhawk, the Navy's standard light attack / ground attack aircraft of the period, could carry either a single 2000-lb bomb, or two 1000-lb bombs, with the ability to strike two separate hardened targets in a single sortie being seen as more desirable in most circumstances. Until 1971, the U.S. Air Force's primary ground attack aircraft in Vietnam was the much heavier, land-based, F-105 Thunderchief, which could simultaneously carry two 3,000-lb M118 bombs and four 750-lb M117 bombs (of which the Air Force had large stockpiles available), and thus that service did not need to rely as heavily on the limited supply of 1000-lb bombs as did the Navy.[citation needed]

Forrestal had departed Norfolk, Virginia, in early June 1967. Upon completion of the required inspections for the upcoming West Pacific cruise, it then went on to Brazil for a show of force. It then set sail around the horn of Africa, and went on to dock for a short while at Leyte Pier at Naval Air Station Cubi Point in the Philippine Islands before sailing to Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin on 25 July. For four days in the Gulf, aircraft of Attack Carrier Air Wing 17 flew approximately 150 missions against targets in North Vietnam.[4]
In training, the damage control team specializing in on-deck firefighting for Forrestal (Damage Control Team #8, led by Chief Petty Officer Gerald Farrier) had been shown films of Navy ordnance tests demonstrating how a 1000-lb bomb could be directly exposed to a jet fuel fire for a full 10 minutes and still be extinguished and cooled without an explosive cook-off.[5] However, these tests were conducted using the new Mark 83 1000 lb bombs, which featured relatively stable Composition H6 explosive and thicker, heat-resistant cases, compared to their predecessors; H6, which is still used in many types of naval ordnance due to its relative insensitivity to heat, shock and electricity, is also designed to deflagrate instead of detonate when it reaches its ignition point in a fire, either melting the case and producing no explosion at all, or, at most, a subsonic low order detonation at a fraction of its normal power.[6]
On 28 July—the day before the accident—Forrestal was resupplied with ordnance from the ammunition ship USS Diamond Head. The load included sixteen 1000-lb AN/M65A1 "fat boy" bombs (so nicknamed because of their short, rotund shape), which Diamond Head had picked up from the Naval Base Subic Bay and were intended for the next day's second bombing sortie. Some of the batch of AN-M65A1s Forrestal received were more than a decade old, having spent a portion of that exposed to the heat and humidity of Okinawa or Guam,[7] eventually being improperly stored in open-air Quonset huts at a disused ammunition dump on the periphery of Subic Bay Naval Base. Unlike the thick-cased Mark 83 bombs filled with Composition H6, the AN/M65A1 bombs were thin-skinned and filled with Composition B, an older explosive with greater shock and heat sensitivity. Composition B also had the dangerous tendency to become more powerful (up to 50% by weight) and more sensitive if it was old or improperly stored. Forrestal's ordnance handlers had never even seen an AN/M65A1 before, and to their shock, the bombs delivered from Diamond Head were in terrible condition; coated with "decades of accumulated rust and grime" and still in their original packing crates (now moldy and rotten); some were stamped with production dates as early as 1953. Most dangerous of all, several bombs were seen to be leaking liquid paraffin phlegmatizing agent from their seams, an unmistakable sign that the bomb's explosive filler had degenerated with excessive age, and exposure to heat and moisture.[8]
According to Lieutenant R.R. "Rocky" Pratt, a Naval Aviator attached to VA-106,[9] the concern felt by Forrestal's ordnance handlers was striking, with many afraid to even handle the bombs; one officer wondered out loud if they would survive the shock of a catapult assisted launch without spontaneously detonating, and others suggested they immediately jettison them.[10] Since no one wanted to be responsible for scrubbing the next day's missions, Forrestal's ordnance officers reported the situation up the chain of command to the ship's commanding officer, Captain John Beling, and informed him the bombs were, in their assessment, an imminent danger to the ship and should not be kept on board.
Faced with this, but still needing 1000-lb bombs for the next day's missions, Beling demanded Diamond Head take the AN-M65A1s back in exchange for new Mark 83s,[11] but was told by Diamond Head that they had none to give him. The AN-M65A1 bombs had been returned to service specifically because there were not enough Mark 83s to go around. According to one crew member on Diamond Head, when they had arrived at Subic Bay to pick up their load of ordnance for the carriers, the base personnel who had prepared the AN-M65A1 bombs for transfer assumed Diamond Head had been ordered to dump them at sea on the way back to Yankee Station. When notified that the bombs were actually des

tined for active service in the carrier fleet, the commanding officer of the naval ordnance detachment at Subic Bay was so shocked that he initially refused the transfer, believing a paperwork mistake had been made. At the risk of delaying Diamond Head's departure, he refused to sign the transfer forms until receiving written orders from CINCPAC on the teleprinter, explicitly absolving his detachment of responsibility for the bombs' terrible condition.
With orders to conduct strike missions over North Vietnam the next day, and with no replacement bombs available, Captain Beling reluctantly concluded that he had no choice but to accept the AN-M65A1 bombs in their current condition. In one concession to the demands of the ordnance handlers, Beling agreed to store all 16 bombs alone on deck in the "bomb farm" area between the starboard rail and the carrier's island until they were loaded for the next day's missions. Standard procedure was to store them in the ship's magazine with the rest of the air wing's ordnance; had they been stored as standard, an accidental detonation could easily have destroyed the ship

At about 10:50 (local time) on 29 July, while preparing for the second strike of the day, an unguided 5.0 in (127.0 mm) Mk-32 "Zuni" rocket, one of four contained in an LAU-10 underwing rocket pod mounted on an F-4B Phantom II (believed to be aircraft No. 110 from VF-11[1]), accidentally fired due to an electrical power surge during the switch from external to internal power. The surge, and a missing rocket safety pin, which would have prevented the fail surge, as well as a decision to plug in the "pigtail" system early to increase the number of takeoffs from the carrier, allowed the rocket to launch.

Damage Control Team No. 8 had been assured of a 10-minute window in which to extinguish the fire and prevent the bombs from detonating, but the Composition B bombs proved to be just as unstable as the ordnance crews had initially feared; after only slightly more than one minute, despite Chief Farrier's constant efforts to cool the bombs, the casing of one suddenly split open and began to glow a bright red. The Chief, recognizing that a lethal cook-off was imminent, shouted for his team to withdraw, but the bomb detonated seconds later — one minute and 36 seconds after the start of the fire.[14]
The detonation destroyed White's and McCain's aircraft, along with their remaining fuel and ordnance, blew a crater in the armored flight deck, and sprayed the deck and crew with bomb fragments and burning fuel. Damage Control Team No. 8 took the brunt of the initial blast; Chief Farrier and all but three of his men were killed instantly; the survivors were critically injured. Lieutenant Commander White had managed to escape his burning aircraft, but was unable to get far enough away in time; White was killed along with the firefighters in the first bomb explosion. In the tightly packed formation on the deck, the two nearest A-4s to White's and McCain's (both fully fueled and bomb-laden) were heavily damaged and began to burn, causing the fire to spread and more bombs to quickly cook off.

Lieutenant Commander Herbert A. Hope of VA-46 (and operations officer of CVW-17) was far enough away to survive the first explosion, and managed to escape by jumping out of the cockpit of his Skyhawk and rolling off the flight deck and into the starboard man-overboard net. Making his way down below to the hangar deck, he took command of a firefighting team. "The port quarter of the flight deck where I was", he recalled, "is no longer there."[1] Two other pilots (Lieutenant Dennis M. Barton and Lieutenant Commander Gerry L. Stark) were also killed by explosions during this period, while the rest were able to escape their aircraft and get below deck.
Nine bomb explosions eventually occurred on the flight deck, eight caused by the AN-M65 Composition B bombs cooking off under the heat of the fuel fires, and the ninth occurring as a sympathetic detonation between an AN-M65 and a newer 500 lb M117 H6 bomb that it was lying next to on the deck. The other Composition H6-based bombs performed as designed and either burned on the deck or were jettisoned, but did not detonate under the heat of the fires.
The explosions (several of which were estimated as up to 50% more powerful than a standard 1000 lb bomb, due to the unintentionally-enhanced power of the badly degraded Composition B) tore large holes in the flight deck, causing burning jet fuel to drain into the interior of the ship, including the living quarters directly underneath the flight deck, and the below-decks aircraft hangar.
Sailors and Marines controlled the flight deck fires by 12:15, and continued to clear smoke and to cool hot steel on the 02 and 03 levels, until all fires were under control by 13:42. Assistance was provided by one of the ship's accompanying destroyers, USS Rupertus, which maneuvered around Forrestal, getting as close as 20 feet from the burning carrier, for 90 minutes using her own on-board fire hoses directed at the flight deck and hangar deck on the starboard side, and the port-side aft 5-in. mount.[15] The commanding officer of the Rupertus, Commander Edwin Burke,[16] received praise for what Rear Admiral Harvey P. Lanham, aboard Forrestal as the Task Group commander, called an "act of magnificent seamanship".[15] The fire was not declared defeated until 04:00 the next morning, due to additional flare-ups.[1]
Throughout the day, the ship’s medical staff worked in dangerous conditions to assist their comrades. HM2 Paul Streetman, one of 38 corpsmen assigned to the Forrestal, spent over 11 hours on the mangled flight deck tending to his shipmates. The large number of casualties quickly overwhelmed the ship’s medical teams, and the Forrestal was escorted by USS Henry W. Tucker to rendezvous with hospital ship USS Repose at 20:54, allowing the crew to begin transferring the dead and wounded at 22:53