Inferno: The USS Forrestal Fire, July 29, 1967

Trial by Fire: The USS Forrestal Disaster of July 29, 1967

On the morning of July 29, 1967, USS Forrestal was doing exactly what she had been designed to do. The Navy’s first true postwar “supercarrier” was steaming on Yankee Station off Vietnam with her flight deck crowded with aircraft being fueled, armed and prepared for another strike against North Vietnam. F-4B Phantoms and A-4E Skyhawks sat wingtip to wingtip across the aft deck, engines were coming to life, ordnance crews were completing last-minute work and pilots were strapped into cockpits waiting for an 11:00 a.m. launch. Forrestal had arrived on station only four days earlier, and her air wing had already flown more than 150 combat sorties without losing an aircraft. At approximately 10:53 that morning, a single 5-inch Zuni rocket accidentally fired from an F-4B and crossed roughly 100 feet of crowded flight deck. Within minutes, one of the most powerful warships in the world had become a burning battlefield, and by the time the disaster was over, 134 men were dead, 161 were injured, 21 aircraft had been destroyed and another 40 damaged.

The fire aboard Forrestal has sometimes been reduced to a simple story about an accidental rocket launch. That explanation is technically correct but misses almost everything important about why the accident became so catastrophic. The rocket started the fire, but a chain of decisions, hurried wartime procedures, aging ammunition, crowded aircraft, enormous quantities of jet fuel, weaknesses in firefighting preparation and sheer bad luck transformed a serious flight-deck accident into a disaster. Just as important is what happened after the explosions began. Sailors who had been cooks, mechanics, technicians, aviation ordnancemen and deckhands only moments earlier suddenly became firefighters and rescuers. Many entered smoke-filled compartments knowing men were trapped below them, while others remained on a flight deck where bombs and missiles were still exploding. The ship survived because her crew kept fighting long after the original trained flight-deck firefighting teams had been virtually wiped out

The ship called Forrestal

USS Forrestal, CVA-59, was itself a major step in the development of the modern American aircraft carrier. Laid down at Newport News in 1952, launched in December 1954 and commissioned on October 1, 1955, she was widely described by the Navy as its first supercarrier. Her enormous flight deck, angled landing area, powerful catapults and large air group were designed around the rapidly increasing size, speed and weight of jet aircraft. She represented the transition from the modified World War II carrier designs of the early Cold War to the gigantic carrier platforms that eventually led to Enterprise and the Nimitz class.

By 1967, Forrestal had spent most of her career with the Atlantic Fleet and Sixth Fleet rather than in the Pacific. Her Vietnam deployment was therefore something of a proving ground. She departed Norfolk in June and reached Yankee Station on July 25. Captain John K. Beling and his crew were eager to demonstrate that an Atlantic Fleet carrier could maintain the same demanding combat rhythm that Pacific Fleet carriers had already established during years of operations off Vietnam. During Forrestal’s first four days of strikes, her aircraft flew more than 150 missions against North Vietnam without losing a plane. That success contributed to a tremendous sense of momentum aboard the ship, but it also placed the crew inside the relentless launch-recover-rearm cycle of wartime carrier aviation.

A carrier flight deck during combat operations is dangerous before anything goes wrong. Aircraft are packed close together because every foot of deck space matters. Jets contain hundreds of gallons of fuel. Bombs, rockets and missiles are attached to wings and racks while engines run nearby. Aircraft arriving from one strike have to be moved, refueled and serviced while another group is being positioned for launch. Procedures exist to separate ignition sources from explosives and to prevent weapons from being accidentally armed, but the pressure to launch aircraft rapidly creates a constant temptation to perform certain steps early. On Forrestal, several of those compromises were about to intersect.

The bombs nobody wanted

The conditions aboard Forrestal were made considerably more dangerous by the ammunition shortage affecting naval aviation in Southeast Asia. The ship needed bombs for the tempo of operations being demanded of her, and shortly before the disaster she received a shipment that included 16 old AN-M65A1 1,000-pound bombs. These were not modern Mk 80-series weapons manufactured for the current war. They had been made in 1953 and had reportedly spent years stored under tropical conditions on Guam or Okinawa. The weapons were filled with Composition B explosive and had relatively thin bomb casings compared with newer bombs.

The condition of some of those weapons alarmed Forrestal’s ordnance personnel. Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s later historical account records that ordnance handlers were concerned enough about leaking paraffin phlegmatizing material to recommend that the old bombs be disposed of rather than placed in the ship’s magazines. Captain Beling reluctantly accepted the weapons because the air wing needed ordnance to continue combat operations, but the old bombs were kept on the flight deck rather than stored below. That decision unintentionally prevented an even greater disaster. Had deteriorated bombs detonated inside a magazine deep within the ship, the resulting damage might have threatened Forrestal’s survival in a completely different way.

For the strike scheduled on the morning of July 29, approximately 80 bombs containing roughly 24½ tons of explosives had been loaded aboard 15 attack aircraft. Sixteen of the bombs were the old 1,000-pound AN-M65A1 weapons. Modern Mk 80-series bombs aboard the ship had heavier cases and considerably better resistance to fire, while the older Composition B weapons could become dangerously sensitive after prolonged exposure to heat. The difference would become a matter of seconds once the fire began.

The rocket

At approximately 10:50 a.m., more than 20 aircraft were crowded onto Forrestal’s aft flight deck, with nearly 20 more positioned elsewhere on the ship. Pilots and deck crews were making final preparations for the 11:00 launch when an electrical problem occurred aboard F-4B Phantom II aircraft No. 110 of Fighter Squadron 11. The aircraft carried LAU-10 pods containing 5-inch Zuni rockets. When the Phantom’s electrical power was transferred from external power to the aircraft’s own system, a transient electrical surge reached one of the rockets.

Two safety measures were supposed to make that impossible. The electrical “pigtail” connecting the launcher to the aircraft was not normally supposed to be connected until late in launch preparation, and a mechanical safety pin prevented the launcher from firing. Under the high tempo of combat flight operations, however, procedures had evolved that sometimes allowed pigtails to be connected and safety pins removed earlier to speed the launch sequence. The investigation concluded that the combination left the launcher vulnerable to the electrical spike generated when the Phantom switched power sources. The rocket motor ignited while the aircraft was sitting on the deck.

The Zuni streaked approximately 100 feet across Forrestal’s flight deck and struck the external fuel tank of A-4E Skyhawk No. 405, piloted by Lieutenant Commander Fred D. White of VA-46. This detail is worth emphasizing because a persistent story claims that the rocket struck John McCain’s aircraft and that McCain somehow caused the fire with his own engine. The Navy’s investigative report identified White’s A-4 No. 405 as the aircraft struck by the rocket and found no responsibility on McCain’s part. McCain’s A-4, No. 416, was parked immediately nearby and was quickly surrounded by the resulting fire.

The Zuni’s warhead did not detonate. It did not need to. The impact ruptured White’s external fuel tank, releasing hundreds of gallons of JP-5 across the deck. Burning rocket propellant ignited the fuel, and flames spread immediately beneath the closely packed aircraft. Aircraft farther down the deck contained additional fuel, bombs, rockets and missiles, giving the growing fire an almost continuous path from one loaded jet to another.

Ninety-four seconds

The initial fire was terrible, but the Navy later concluded that it probably could have been controlled if the crew had been given several more minutes before major ordnance began exploding. Instead, at least one old AN-M65 bomb fell from the burning A-4 area onto the flight deck. Its thin casing was directly exposed to burning jet fuel.

Chief Aviation Boatswain’s Mate Gerald W. Farrier led Damage Control Team No. 8, the flight-deck crash and firefighting team responsible for responding to exactly this kind of emergency. Farrier reached the burning aircraft and began applying a handheld extinguisher directly around the bomb. Based on the behavior expected from modern ordnance, the firefighters believed they had roughly ten minutes before a bomb casing exposed to fire might fail. They did not know that the old Composition B weapon in front of them was capable of detonating far sooner.

The bomb exploded approximately 94 seconds after the fire began. Farrier and most of the professionally trained firefighters closest to the weapon were killed or terribly wounded. Aviation Boatswain’s Mate Third Class Gary Shaver, who survived the blast, later recalled working near Farrier when the explosion struck, blowing him through the air and hitting him with fragments. The detonation did more than kill the men best prepared to fight the fire. It tore open the flight deck, showered nearby aircraft and personnel with fragments and spread the burning fuel even farther.

Only nine seconds later, another bomb exploded. Within approximately five minutes, Forrestal’s aft flight deck was rocked by seven additional major explosions involving 1,000-pound bombs, while smaller detonations from rockets, missiles, ammunition and other ordnance became almost impossible to count. The blasts ruptured aircraft tanks and fuel cells until an estimated 40,000 gallons of jet fuel were feeding the fire.

The difference between the old bombs and the newer ordnance was stark. Seven of the old AN-M65 weapons detonated violently in high-order explosions. Of the 64 modern bombs prepared for the strike, only two detonated high order and another two low order; many of the others burned, melted or were pushed overboard before they could explode. Navy investigators estimated that firefighters might have contained the original fuel fire within roughly three minutes. The old bomb detonated at 94 seconds, taking away that opportunity.

Men trapped in airplanes

When the fuel first spread beneath the Skyhawks, pilots were strapped into aircraft containing live ordnance. There was no orderly evacuation. Some climbed from cockpits and jumped onto the deck. Others crossed burning areas or slid down parts of their aircraft because normal access routes were blocked by fire.

Lieutenant Commander David Dollarhide was seated in A-4E No. 417 near John McCain and Fred White. He later described seeing fire racing aft through the row of aircraft and sailors already burning on the flight deck. When he climbed from his Skyhawk, he caught his feet on the canopy rail, fell heavily to the deck and broke his hip and elbow. Another sailor helped him move away from the aircraft as the fire continued growing around them.

McCain escaped from his nearby A-4 as flames surrounded the aircraft. He got clear before the major bomb explosions began and then attempted to help another pilot. He suffered shrapnel wounds during the disaster but survived. Less than three months later, on October 26, 1967, McCain would be shot down over Hanoi and begin more than five years as a prisoner of war. The Forrestal fire was therefore only the first of two extraordinary events he survived in the span of several months.

Fred White did not survive. Nor did many of the deck personnel working around his aircraft. The tragedy of the first major detonation was that it occurred in the exact area where men had instinctively rushed toward the emergency. The sailors closest to the fire were not standing around watching it burn; they were the people attempting to extinguish it, free trapped pilots, move equipment and prevent the fire from reaching additional aircraft.

The flight deck becomes a battlefield

The explosions punched multiple openings through Forrestal’s armored flight deck. Burning and unburned fuel, firefighting water and foam poured through those holes into spaces below. Instead of remaining a fire on top of the carrier, the disaster began moving downward into the ship.

This transformed the emergency. Firefighters on the flight deck had space to move and at least some visibility. Below decks, sailors encountered darkness, smoke, toxic fumes, heat and narrow passageways. Water flowing downward carried flaming fuel with it because JP-5 floated across the surface. Men trying to attack the fire with water could therefore unintentionally spread burning fuel into additional compartments.

The trained flight-deck firefighting teams had been devastated by the first explosions, so men from throughout the ship rushed in to replace them. One of the investigation’s most important findings was that bravery was not the problem. Forrestal’s crew displayed extraordinary courage, but firefighting knowledge varied dramatically between sailors. Some understood that foam had to be used to smother a fuel fire, while others instinctively attacked flames with seawater. Streams from different hoses could interfere with one another, and water could wash away foam blankets that other teams had already laid down.

The distinction cost lives, but blaming individual sailors misses the point. The Navy had treated sophisticated firefighting largely as the responsibility of specialized damage-control personnel. When those specialists were killed, hundreds of ordinary sailors were left facing a catastrophic carrier fire that exceeded anything most of them had been trained to handle. One of Forrestal’s most important legacies would be the recognition that every sailor aboard a warship needed meaningful firefighting training because a major casualty could kill the specialists first.

Below decks

The worst part of the disaster was not necessarily what could be seen in the famous flight-deck film. Fifty of the men who died were asleep in their racks when the fire reached the compartments below, while only 28 of the dead had been on the flight deck itself. Burning fuel, heat and toxic smoke penetrated berthing spaces where sailors had little warning and sometimes no clear escape route.

Explosions distorted hatches and bulkheads. Electrical power was lost in damaged areas. Visibility disappeared. Sailors crawled through smoke trying to locate trapped shipmates while others carried wounded men upward. Some compartments became impossible to enter without breathing equipment, while fires continued burning overhead and additional fuel and water poured through the damaged decks.

The flight-deck fire was largely contained within about an hour, but fires below continued until approximately 4:00 a.m. on July 30. In other words, Forrestal’s crew fought the ship for more than seventeen hours after a rocket had crossed the deck in a fraction of a second.

Nearby ships moved to assist. The destroyer USS Rupertus came alongside Forrestal and directed streams of water onto the burning carrier, while helicopters evacuated badly injured sailors to other ships, including USS Oriskany. Official Navy photographs show wounded men being carried into helicopters even as Forrestal remained wrapped in smoke.

The casualty list

When the final accounting was completed, 134 sailors and aviators had been killed and 161 seriously injured. Many more suffered lesser burns, cuts, smoke inhalation and other injuries that were not included in the formal serious-injury total. The Navy considers the Forrestal fire the second-worst loss of life aboard a U.S. Navy ship since the end of World War II.

Twenty-one of Forrestal’s 73 aircraft were destroyed and another 40 damaged. The ship itself suffered catastrophic damage across roughly the after 200 feet of its flight and hangar decks. At least a dozen aft berthing compartments were heavily affected, all four of the carrier’s 5-inch gun mounts were destroyed, and damage extended forward beyond the obvious burned area. Investigators found effects running from the ship’s mainmast high above the island down to damage near or below the waterline around the port rudder. 

The financial loss exceeded $130 million in 1967 dollars. Naval Safety Command breaks that figure down to approximately $72 million to repair Forrestal herself, $44.5 million for destroyed aircraft, around $10 million for damaged aircraft, almost $2 million in lost ordnance and more than $3 million in destroyed equipment and supplies. The numbers are staggering, but they still do not capture what the carrier looked like afterward. The aft deck was burned black, aircraft had been reduced to twisted skeletons, large sections of internal spaces were gutted and temporary patches covered blast damage through the armored flight deck.

Why Forrestal did not sink

There has sometimes been a tendency to describe the disaster by saying that Forrestal nearly blew up, which is dramatic but imprecise. The carrier did not come particularly close to a magazine detonation that would have immediately destroyed the entire ship. What she did experience was an extraordinarily severe topside and internal fire involving tens of thousands of gallons of fuel and many tons of ammunition.

The decision to keep the suspect AN-M65 bombs out of the magazines may have been critically important. Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s historical review explicitly notes that had those deteriorated weapons detonated inside one of Forrestal’s magazines, the carrier could have faced a vastly more dangerous situation. Instead, most of the explosions occurred on the flight deck, where energy and fragments could vent into the open air even while they tore large holes downward into the ship.

The ship’s size and subdivision also mattered, but crew action mattered more. Fires were isolated compartment by compartment. Fuel sources were secured where possible. Explosives and aircraft that could still be moved were pushed or jettisoned away from the flames. Wounded men were evacuated while engineering spaces kept the carrier capable of maneuvering. Forrestal was catastrophically damaged, but propulsion and the core of the ship remained functional enough that she could leave the combat zone under her own power.

Subic Bay: making the ship safe enough to cross an ocean

On August 1, Forrestal reached Naval Air Station Cubi Point at Subic Bay in the Philippines. The purpose of the stop was not to restore her to combat condition. The damage was far too extensive for that. The immediate task was to recover remains, clear wreckage, restore basic systems and make the ship safe enough for the long passage back to the United States.

Emergency repairs lasted roughly eight days. Workers patched blast holes through the flight deck and repaired enough critical equipment that the carrier could make the voyage home. The deck patches were sufficiently substantial that Forrestal retained the ability to launch and recover aircraft if an emergency required it during the transit. The burned aircraft and wreckage were removed, temporary structural work was completed and the crew continued searching damaged spaces for missing shipmates.

On August 11, Forrestal departed Subic Bay. Before leaving the region entirely, she returned close enough to the war zone for the crew to hold a memorial and drop a wreath into the sea for the men who had been killed. She then began the long journey home. Forrestal reached Mayport, Florida, on September 12 to disembark Florida-based air-wing personnel and aircraft before continuing north to Norfolk, where more than 3,000 family members and friends greeted the carrier on September 14.

Five days later, on September 19, she entered Norfolk Naval Shipyard. The emergency patches that had carried her home were about to be replaced by one of the largest carrier repair projects the shipyard had undertaken in years.

Rebuilding the after end of a supercarrier

The extent of the repair work becomes clearer when looking at what Norfolk Naval Shipyard actually had to remove. Forrestal first berthed beneath the yard’s massive Hammerhead Crane, where the starboard aircraft elevator was taken off the ship. She entered Dry Dock No. 8 on September 21 and remained there until February 10, 1968. The elevator removal was necessary because major structural areas below and around it had been damaged, and the yard needed access to the carrier’s burned after sections.

The shipyard did not simply weld patches over the flight deck. Burned, weakened and distorted steel had to be cut away. Internal bulkheads and structural members required replacement. Electrical cable runs, piping, ventilation, firefighting equipment, crew spaces, aviation support systems and machinery damaged by heat, water and explosions had to be rebuilt or renewed. Even systems that had survived the fire had to be inspected because blast shock and heat could create damage invisible from outside.

One of the first major replacement pieces was a 42-ton bulkhead installed using a specially designed strong-back spreader. Norfolk Naval Shipyard later described that bulkhead as the first major structural installation and a critical part of the entire repair sequence. Workers were effectively rebuilding a large portion of the carrier’s afterbody around it.

Twelve railcars of high-strength HY-100 steel were brought into the shipyard for the reconstruction. The use of HY-100 was significant because the harder steel required different welding techniques from the HY-80 material with which many yard personnel had greater experience. More than 300 welders, including apprentices, worked around the clock after receiving additional training for the new material. By October 20, one large shipment had already brought the yard roughly 75 percent of the steel required for the repairs.

By November, the shipyard estimated that approximately one quarter of the work had been completed. The repair continued through the winter, eventually moving from the great structural reconstruction toward restoring the carrier as an operational aviation platform. That meant the repair could not end when the holes were gone. The flight deck had to withstand repeated arrested landings. Aircraft elevators had to safely move jets and weapons. Catapults had to launch aircraft at enormous acceleration without failure. Aviation fuel, electrical and fire-main systems had to be tested and certified before pilots could be placed back on the deck.

Putting the flight deck back into service

By early April 1968, shipyard personnel were testing Forrestal’s catapult systems. A wheeled test device was used to simulate the load of an aircraft so that the rebuilt systems could be proven before manned aircraft were launched. It was a small but important moment. Nine months earlier, Forrestal’s flight deck had been packed with airplanes when one accidental rocket turned it into an inferno. Now the repaired deck was being deliberately and methodically returned to its original purpose.

Forrestal began post-repair sea trials in early April with approximately 60 Norfolk Naval Shipyard personnel aboard. The full Norfolk repair period ran from September 19, 1967, through April 8, 1968, a little more than six and a half months of continuous work. In that time, the yard had reconstructed major portions of the ship, repaired the aviation facilities, restored damaged crew spaces and systems and returned a carrier that had looked nearly destroyed in July to an operational fleet unit.

The direct repair of the carrier cost about $72 million. That number does not include the destroyed aircraft, damaged aircraft, weapons and other equipment lost in the fire. More important than the cost was that Forrestal was not relegated to limited service afterward. She returned to the fleet and continued operating for decades. The disaster that had ended her first Vietnam combat deployment did not end the ship.

What the Navy changed

The Navy had experienced terrible carrier fires before Forrestal. During World War II, carriers had survived gasoline fires, bomb explosions and kamikaze impacts that produced many of the same problems. USS Oriskany had suffered another devastating fire in October 1966 that killed 44 men. Some lessons had been learned, forgotten or unevenly applied, and Forrestal forced the Navy to confront the problem on an institutional level.

One immediate lesson concerned ordnance. The old, deteriorated AN-M65 bombs had behaved catastrophically in fire, while the modern Mk 80-series weapons demonstrated considerably better resistance to heating. The aging bombs were removed from the ammunition pipeline, and later weapons incorporated improved protection intended to delay cook-off when exposed to fire. The objective was to give firefighters minutes rather than seconds.

The Zuni launcher procedures were also tightened. The sequence of connecting electrical components and removing safety devices received greater attention because Forrestal had demonstrated how seemingly minor deviations made multiple independent safeguards useless at the same time. One compromised safety measure might have been survivable. Two compromised measures plus an electrical spike produced the launch that started everything.

The largest cultural change concerned firefighting. The Navy could no longer assume that trained specialists would always be available to deal with a fire. Chief Farrier and the men around him had been killed within the first minutes, leaving the rest of the crew to fight a disaster for which many had inadequate training. Mandatory firefighting education for sailors expanded dramatically, and the Farrier Fire Fighting School at Norfolk was named for Gerald Farrier. Changes were also made to flight-deck fire-suppression systems and procedures for applying foam.

The importance of those lessons became tragically clear less than two years later. On January 14, 1969, USS Enterprise suffered another major flight-deck fire after heat from aircraft equipment ignited a Zuni rocket. The resulting explosions killed 28 men and injured more than 300, but the response was faster and the casualties considerably lower than Forrestal’s. Naval Safety Command specifically credits lessons learned from Forrestal, along with the absence of the unstable old bombs, with helping Enterprise contain its fire more effectively.

The film every sailor eventually saw

One reason Forrestal’s disaster has remained so powerful inside the Navy is that much of it was captured on film. Cameras intended to record ordinary flight operations continued running as the Zuni crossed the deck, flames erupted and the first explosions struck the firefighting crews. The resulting footage became one of the most unsettling training films ever shown to generations of sailors.

For years afterward, new sailors watched men on Forrestal make decisions under conditions no classroom could reproduce. They watched some hose teams apply water while others attempted to lay foam. They watched sailors rush toward aircraft loaded with explosives. They watched the first bomb detonate among the men trying to save the ship. The purpose was not to criticize the dead. It was to make sure the next crew understood exactly why procedures existed.

That may be Forrestal’s most important legacy. Nearly every major safety rule aboard a warship was purchased by somebody discovering what happened when the rule did not yet exist, had been forgotten or was ignored under operational pressure.

The men behind the numbers

The number 134 appears so often in accounts of Forrestal that it can become almost abstract. It was not abstract aboard the ship. Those deaths left empty racks, missing members of work centers, squadron personnel who never returned to ready rooms and friends whose bodies had to be recovered from compartments where the fire had burned for hours.

Chief Gerald Farrier became one of the best-known casualties because his actions were visible and because the Navy eventually placed his name on its firefighting school. He was not performing some ceremonial act of heroism. He was doing the job he had been trained to do, standing a few feet from a burning 1,000-pound bomb with an extinguisher because he believed there was still enough time to cool it and save the ship and the men around it. He did not know that the bomb had far less time left than his training suggested.

The same is true of the hundreds of sailors who went into the damaged spaces afterward. Many of the men fighting below decks were not professional firefighters. They became firefighters because the ship was burning and there was nowhere else to go. An aircraft carrier at sea cannot dial a municipal fire department and evacuate everyone into the parking lot. The crew either saves the ship or shares whatever happens to it.

Official photographs taken after the explosions show exhausted sailors continuing to hold hoses over smoldering wreckage. Others show injured men being lifted into helicopters while smoke still covers the deck. Those images are perhaps a more accurate memorial to Forrestal than photographs of the ship after reconstruction. They show the carrier at the moment when its steel mattered less than the people trying to keep it alive.

A ship rebuilt, a Navy changed

USS Forrestal returned to service after approximately six and a half months at Norfolk Naval Shipyard and continued an operational career lasting well beyond Vietnam. What happened on July 29 did not destroy the carrier, but it permanently changed her identity. Every later sailor walking her repaired aft flight deck was standing on steel that had been installed because other men had died there.

The physical repair was extraordinary. A burned and shattered section roughly 200 feet long had to be reconstructed, major bulkheads replaced, aviation facilities rebuilt, damaged systems renewed and the carrier’s flight deck recertified to handle high-performance jet aircraft. Hundreds of welders worked around the clock, thousands of tons of material and equipment moved through the shipyard and $72 million was spent restoring the vessel. Yet the more lasting repair was institutional. The Navy changed the way it handled bombs, changed launcher procedures, improved fire-suppression systems and made firefighting knowledge part of every sailor’s responsibility rather than something expected only from a specialized team.

The fire began with a rocket that should never have launched, but blaming the rocket alone hides the deeper lesson. Forrestal was a system under wartime pressure. Shortages placed questionable bombs aboard the carrier. Operational tempo encouraged shortcuts that defeated independent safety devices. The first explosion killed many of the men best equipped to respond. Confusion over firefighting techniques allowed water and fuel to move through damaged spaces. None of those conditions by itself necessarily produces 134 dead. Together, they did.

That is why the Forrestal fire still matters nearly sixty years later. It is a story about technology, ammunition and carrier design, but more than anything it is a story about what happens when small compromises accumulate inside an enormously complicated system. It is also the story of what sailors did after that system failed around them. The first major bomb exploded less than two minutes after the fire began, yet the crew continued fighting until the fires below decks were finally extinguished the following morning.

Forrestal survived because they did, and in many cases because men who did not survive bought the rest of the crew enough time to save the ship.