Memorial held on 35th anniversary of naval disaster

WASHINGTON -- Tim Frudge was a 22-year-old Navy chaplain's assistant in 1967 when he was given the grim task of opening body bags containing the victims of the worst American naval disaster since World War II.

Frudge carefully unzipped each bag, then the chaplain repeated the victim's name and blessed the remains.

"He didn't want to give them just a mass blessing," Frudge recalled Monday, the 35th anniversary of the explosion and fire that killed 134 sailors and airmen on the carrier USS Forrestal.

Frudge also had to compile information on each victim so the chaplain could give death notices to the victims' next-of-kin.

Frudge was among the attendees at a Forrestal memorial ceremony held in Constitution Gardens, between the Vietnam Memorial and the Washington Monument.

The day was remembered with a prayer repeated by retired Rear Adm. John K. Beling, 82, who commanded the 56,000-ton Forrestal.

In front of the platform, each of 134 small U.S. flags bore the name of a man killed. Another 62 men were injured, burned by the jet fuel or blasted by one of the 1,000 pound World War II bombs that lay on the flight deck.

It was the same prayer Beling had read in 1967. After giving thanks for the victims' courage, he asked:

"Help us to rebuild and reman our ship, so that our brothers who died today may not have made a fruitless sacrifice."

On Monday he added from his wheelchair:

"That prayer has been fulfilled."

The ship -- named for James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense -- was the first of the "supercarriers," longer than three football fields and carrying a crew of more than 4,000. On its first deployment in the Vietnam war, it launched 150 sorties in four days.

It was preparing its second launch of the fifth day when a Zuni air-to-ground rocket went off. It was due to a short circuit, said Kenneth V. Killmeyer, the historian of the U.S.S. Forrestal Association, who presided at Monday's ceremony.

A new book on the disaster, Gregory A. Freeman's "Sailors to the End," says the rocket hit a man on the flight desk, severing his arm, and then a A-4 Skyhawk with Lieutenant Commander -- now Senator -- John S. McCain in the cockpit. The contents of his 400-gallon fuel tank spread and caught fire.

McCain, his flight suit in flames, managed to pat them out and run to safety.

"The scale of the tragedy aboard the USS Forrestal on July 29," the book jacket quotes McCain as saying, "was surpassed only by the bravery of the men who fought the inferno that should have consumed it."

The Forrestal was decommissioned in 1993 and is moored at the naval station in Newport R.I. The Forrestal Association is trying to raise money to turn it into a museum.