ANNIVERSARY
home in Whitehall, stood next to the fluttering American and POW/MIA flags and smoked a Kool cigarette.
While Heinrich was gone, his wife offered that he will be all right. He knew that this 50th anniversary of the day the Forrestal burned while in combat would stir up his emotions.
“This is not his story. This is about those souls that were lost,” Lisa Vanderbilt said of her husband. “He carries so much remorse for being left behind. Why did he live, he wonders, when so many others died. He doesn’t want them to be forgotten.”
Heinrich, a 69-year-old veteran of both the Navy and the Army, returned to his chair and said he was ready to go. He picked up his Navy cruise book: a thick, official yearbook of sorts of the Forrestal’s 1967 deployment to the Vietnam War. He scrolled through its pages. Documented there in words and photos is all that happened that day.
The aircraft carrier with more than 5,000 officers and enlisted men aboard was engaged in the war on July 29, 1967, its 4-acre flight deck loaded with planes. The ship was preparing to launch an attack when, just before 11 a.m., a rocket from one of the F-4 Phantom II jets on the deck was accidentally launched. It slammed into an A-4 Skyhawk also on the deck. Jet fuel poured out, a fire roared and a series of bombs exploded. The deck was alight in seconds.
The story has always been tragic, but it circulates sometimes for another reason: Then-Navy Lt. Cmdr. John McCain was sitting in the pilot’s seat of a Skyhawk. Whether the discharged rocket hit his aircraft or next to him has always been the subject of debate. Nevertheless, the future senator was wounded but narrowly escaped in the chaos.
The ship’s official fire crews mostly perished early on, but every available hand set about trying to save the vessel and those aboard for hours. History books tell the stories of the heroic efforts to save the ship and the thousands of men who remained on board and alive.
Photos show the ship’s deck in ruins.
When it was over, according to Navy reports, 26 aircraft were destroyed or jettisoned, and 31 were damaged. Temporary repairs were made, and the ship sailed on for the Navy’s base at Subic Bay in the Phillippines before eventually returning to the United States. It later went back in service but never returned to the Vietnam War.
As tragic as what happened aboard the Forrestal was, it led to a revolution in training for fires at sea.
Navy veteran Julius Lacano, an educator with the Hampton Roads Naval Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, recently wrote a piece recalling the Forrestal. He wrote that every Navy recruit learns its story.
“It’s really based in tragedy, all these things we go through,” he told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper as the anniversary approached. “As a sailor, when these anniversaries come, you think about, ‘Man, I could’ve been there. I could’ve been just some guy sitting somewhere, and all of a sudden you hear an explosion and have to go fight a fire, and you don’t know how.’”
A 50th anniversary memorial is planned for Saturday at Arlington National Cemetery. Heinrich won’t be going. Even if he wanted to, his health probably wouldn’t allow him: His post-traumatic stress disorder means he avoids crowds.
So much of what happened on the Forrestal that day colored his life. The images, he said, he just can’t shake.
When Heinrich joined the Navy in 1965, he knew he would eventually be sent to Vietnam. He wasn’t worried.
“It was a matter of you do what you gotta do,” he said. “At that age, I thought I was bulletproof.”
While the ship was at sea, his job was mostly to clean the compartments below deck. And that’s what he was doing that morning when he heard the first call of “fire on the flight deck.” He said that’s not uncommon on a carrier, so he headed up top to see what was happening. Men were sleeping in the compartments he was cleaning, as they’d just come off a shift. They were all right below the area of the deck where those 1,000-pound bombs would soon explode.
Heinrich left them while he explored.
He said he went through a hatch and made it to the flight deck.
“It was nothing but flames. I turned around, and I ran,” he said. “The next thing I know, I was waking up someplace else.”
He’d been thrown by an explosion.
“I was disoriented. There was no way to even tell which was way up, down or sideways,” he said. Even now he thinks only of those men who died in the bunks he had left behind.
“They never knew what hit them,” he said.
He spoke of the injured men he saw, the suffering, the dead, in the hours that followed.
“And if I hadn’t been nosy ... “— his words trailing off again.
Heinrich was among the lucky; he had only minor external wounds. But the damage to his heart and mind was done.
“I think of it every day, the heroism,” he said, pointing to his cruise book. “I want people to know about that. I want people to know about those men. They deserve that.”