Gerald Farrier reached the bomb fifty-four seconds after the fire began.

That number is in the Navy’s reconstruction.

So is another one.

Ninety-four seconds.

Chief Farrier led Damage Control Team Eight aboard USS Forrestal. His men had received specialized training for exactly the kind of emergency now spreading across the carrier’s after flight deck: fueled aircraft, burning jet fuel, live ordnance and very little room to separate any of them.

Their training gave them a useful piece of information.

A modern 1,000-pound Mk 83 bomb exposed to a fuel fire was expected to give firefighters something on the order of ten minutes before its casing failed and the explosive inside became an immediate cook-off threat.

Farrier did not have ten minutes.

He did not know that yet.

The deck was ready for war

Forrestal had been on Yankee Station off North Vietnam for only five days.

Shortly before eleven in the morning on July 29, 1967, the carrier was preparing aircraft for its second major strike of the day. The after flight deck was crowded with F-4 Phantom fighters, A-4 Skyhawks and other aircraft carrying fuel, rockets and bombs.

The arrangement was normal because the ship was doing what it had been sent there to do.

Then an electrical malfunction fired a 5-inch Zuni rocket from an F-4 on the starboard side of the deck. The Navy investigation concluded that the rocket crossed the flight deck and struck the external fuel tank of A-4E No. 405, flown by Lieutenant Commander Fred White. Later Navy historical work notes some ambiguity in eyewitness accounts about whether the rocket itself struck White’s aircraft or the adjacent Skyhawk, but that distinction does not change the physical result: fragments ruptured fuel tanks, burning rocket propellant ignited spilled JP-5, and fire spread beneath the armed aircraft.

The rocket itself continued overboard.

What it left behind was enough.

The bombs from another war

The two 1,000-pound bombs beneath White’s A-4 fell into the fire.

They were AN-M65A1s.

That detail is much more important than the designation makes it sound.

The carrier had received sixteen of the older bombs only the day before. The Navy’s current shipyard history says Forrestal’s ordnance handlers were alarmed by their condition; paraffin phlegmatizing material was visibly leaking from some of them, evidence that the explosive fill had deteriorated. Captain John Beling accepted the weapons reluctantly because the intense bombing campaign over North Vietnam had created a shortage of newer Mk 83 bombs.

Naval History and Heritage Command’s detailed history describes the AN-M65s as Korean War–vintage weapons more than a decade old. A fragment recovered afterward carried a 1953 date.

The deteriorated AN-M65 bombs were a major factor, but the Navy investigation treated the disaster as a chain of interacting conditions: wartime ordnance shortages, Zuni electrical vulnerabilities, a densely armed flight deck and uneven damage-control training. It recommended no disciplinary or administrative action against any individual aboard Forrestal or its air wing.

Fifty-four seconds

Farrier and Damage Control Team Eight moved immediately.

Fifty-four seconds after ignition, he was attacking the burning bomb with a handheld Purple-K extinguisher. About twenty seconds later, hose crews were working the edges of the fuel fire.

This is where hindsight gives the scene information nobody on the deck had.

The firefighters believed the bomb behaved like the ordnance on which their timing assumptions had been based.

The fire was still less than two minutes old.

Farrier therefore had reason to be close to it.

A little more than a minute into the fire, the M65’s casing split and the explosive began burning intensely. Farrier recognized the change and ordered his team to withdraw.

There was almost no time left in the order.

At about one minute and thirty-four seconds, the bomb detonated.

Farrier was killed along with nearly his entire specialized team. Only three members survived, badly injured. Fred White died as well.

Nine seconds later, another 1,000-pound bomb exploded.

Then the flight deck began coming apart.

Four minutes

The first large explosion did something worse than enlarge the fire.

It removed many of the people best trained to fight it.

The subsequent blasts threw aircraft components, bomb fragments and deck equipment across the carrier. Rockets and 20-millimeter ammunition fired through the burning area. Ejection seats launched. Explosions opened holes through the armored flight deck.

NHHC’s reconstruction says at least nine bombs exploded on the flight deck, eight of them old AN-M65s. Other bombs exposed to the same fire did what their designers intended and did not detonate merely because they were burning.

That comparison matters.

The aircraft fuel was dangerous.

The burning rockets were dangerous.

A carrier deck filled with ordnance is dangerous before anything goes wrong.

But the old bombs turned the first fire into a sequence of blast events powerful enough to tear open the ship.

Within roughly four minutes, Forrestal had been transformed from an aircraft carrier preparing to launch a strike into a damaged ship trying to remain afloat.

The fire found the holes

One of the worst consequences happened below the photographs.

Bomb explosions punched openings through the flight deck into compartments underneath. Burning and unburned jet fuel, water and firefighting foam poured through those holes. Fires that had begun in open air were now inside dark passageways, workshops and berthing spaces.

Fifty of the dead were in spaces where men had been sleeping.

The deck fire could be attacked from several directions.

Below deck, sailors worked in confined compartments filled with smoke, fumes, heat, water and damaged electrical systems.

There was another problem.

Many of them had never been formally trained to fight a major shipboard fire.

Everybody had a hose

The destruction of Farrier’s team forced people outside the specialist fire parties into the fight.

Some performed extraordinarily well.

Others made mistakes that make uncomfortable sense when you understand the training situation.

One team laid firefighting foam over a fuel fire. Another well-intentioned group arrived with water and washed the foam away. The fire reappeared and cut sailors off. NHHC preserves the incident because it became one of the clearest examples of why a ship could not afford to have only a fraction of its crew understand damage control.

Before Forrestal, about half of the ship’s company had formal firefighting training.

None of the embarked air wing had.

That seems astonishing now largely because what happened aboard Forrestal helped make it astonishing.

The crew still saved the ship.

The main flight-deck fire was controlled in roughly an hour. Fires below continued until around four the next morning.

One hundred thirty-four sailors and airmen died.

NHHC’s detailed history and current casualty database give 161 injured; a shorter Naval Aviation Museum page lists 62. This article uses 161 because the two more comprehensive Navy records agree on that figure, while preserving the discrepancy here.

Twenty-one aircraft were destroyed and dozens more damaged.

Forrestal’s Vietnam combat deployment lasted five days.

They filmed it

The Navy possessed something unusually useful after the fire.

Cameras had been running.

Flight-deck film captured the disaster as it developed, showing sailors attacking the fire, explosions breaking through the deck and untrained men attempting to continue the fight after the specialist team had been killed.

The Navy turned that footage into training material. The film became known as “Learn or Burn” and was required viewing for sailors learning firefighting and damage control for years afterward.

There is an uncomfortable efficiency to that.

A procedure manual can tell someone that water may destroy a foam blanket.

Film can show what happens immediately afterward.

The footage also made it harder to tell the disaster as the product of one bad action. The fire grew through a sequence: electrical failure, rocket launch, ruptured fuel, vulnerable bombs, blast damage, lost specialists, inconsistent firefighting knowledge, fire spreading downward.

The accident investigation reflected that complexity.

It did not find one sailor who had ruined the ship.

Eighteen months later

The Navy did not have to wait long to discover whether the training changes mattered.

On January 14, 1969, USS Enterprise suffered another catastrophic carrier-deck fire after hot exhaust from aircraft-starting equipment ignited a Zuni rocket.

Twenty-eight men died and 314 were injured. It was still a terrible accident.

But there was an important difference.

By then 96 percent of Enterprise’s ship’s company and 86 percent of its air wing had received formal firefighting training. NHHC attributes that directly to the changes made after Forrestal.

The fire was brought under control more effectively despite multiple explosions.

Enterprise was repaired and returned to operations.

The comparison does not prove that training alone explains the different casualty totals. The two fires involved different ordnance, initiating mechanisms, layouts and physical damage; Enterprise did not carry Forrestal’s deteriorated AN-M65 bombs. What the record does show is that the Navy had deliberately changed one variable: far more of the crew had formal firefighting training.

The school with his name

The institutional memory did not stop with a film.

The Navy now requires broad firefighting and damage-control training rather than treating shipboard fire as principally the responsibility of specialists. Flight-deck suppression systems and ordnance procedures were also changed in the aftermath of the disaster.

At Naval Station Norfolk, a firefighting school carries Gerald Farrier’s name.

The Farrier Firefighting School still trains sailors on ordnance fires and shipboard damage control. Navy reporting describes classes handling simulated fires with the same practical assumption that emerged from Forrestal: at sea, the people already aboard are the fire department.

That is a more concrete memorial than a plaque.

Farrier’s job was to know what to do when something on a carrier caught fire.

The Navy eventually decided that everybody else needed to know too.

A related case is Twenty-Four Feet from Air, the USS Tang investigation. The accidents were different, but both official records devote unusual attention to what trained crews did once conditions diverged from normal procedures.

Ten minutes

The timing matters because the firefighters were not simply charging toward a bomb they expected to explode at any second. Their procedures assumed a newer bomb would withstand a fuel fire for roughly ten minutes. Farrier reached the fire at fifty-four seconds, saw the old bomb begin to fail and ordered his team back; it detonated at about ninety-four seconds. The fatal gap was between the ordnance they had trained for and the ordnance actually on the deck.

Sources & Further Reading

• Department of the Navy, Manual of the Judge Advocate General Basic Final Investigative Report Concerning the Fire on Board USS Forrestal (CVA-59) (1967). The primary investigation establishing the inadvertent Zuni firing, sequence, ordnance issues and finding that no individual aboard should face disciplinary action.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, “H-008-6: USS Forrestal Disaster, 29 July 1967.” The strongest accessible institutional reconstruction of the deteriorated AN-M65 bombs, Farrier’s response, 1:34 first explosion and later ordnance analysis.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, USS Forrestal history. Current Navy synthesis of the accident, casualties, destroyed aircraft and JAG findings.
• Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, USS Forrestal. Particularly useful for below-deck firefighting, the foam/water error and subsequent Navy training film.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, “USS Enterprise Conflagration, 14 January 1969.” The crucial comparison showing formal firefighting training rising sharply after Forrestal.
• Norfolk Naval Shipyard, “The Heritage Hour: FORRESTAL, Fire and NNSY.” Current Navy account of the deteriorated bomb shipment, ship repair and firefighting legacy.
• Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, Farrier Firefighting School. Current official Navy documentation of the training institution that carries Farrier’s name.