USS Forrestal survivor looks back, 50 years later

Fifty years after dozens of his shipmates lost their lives aboard the USS Forrestal, Navy veteran Bill Solt thinks God still has a purpose for him.

The 72-year-old Titusville resident isn't quite sure what that is yet — but when it happens, he says, "I'll be damn good at it."

Solt's confident in that outlook, he said, because he's looked death in the face more than once: as a child with polio in the early 1950s. When he got run over by a car at age 6. Battling cancer twice.

And on July 29, 1967, Solt was one of around 5,000 sailors on the USS Forrestal when a rocket was accidentally discharged. The ensuing catastrophe killed 134 and injured 64 others — the Navy's worst disaster in a combat zone since World War II. That tragic record, which remains today, led to changes in the Navy's fire protocol.

"We have to tell the stories. Let people know what happened," Solt said. "Brothers died. Fathers and sons were aboard that ship. They mattered."

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Solt joined the Navy in September 1961. After boot camp and a stint with the crash-and-rescue crew at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, he spent two years on the USS FDR and then with a helicopter squadron in New Jersey. He landed in Sanford Naval Air Station in Florida in November 1966 and by summer 1967, was deployed aboard the Forrestal.

He was 23 and a photo technician. His younger brother, Paul, was aboard the ship that day, too, and was among the survivors.

On what that "typical hot day in the tropics," the United States' first supercarrier was off the coast of Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, ready to launch airstrikes. Future Sen. John McCain was also on the ship, which was commissioned in 1955.

Solt was on the flight deck, under an aircraft, loading film into an aerial camera. Airstrikes had been carried out that morning and more were imminent.

Then, at around 10:50 a.m., a Zuni rocket fired accidentally and ruptured the fuel tank of an attack aircraft. Fire broke out and flames spread to other airplanes, including the A-4 Skyhawk flown by McCain. Nine 1,000-pound bombs exploded, punching gaping holes through steel plate.

"You heard fire, fire, fire on the flight deck," Solt said. "The guys who manned the gun mount ... caught in the fire doing their jobs, manning their stations."

Many of those who died, he said, "were right below the flight deck," in their berthing quarters. And as the conflagration grew, trained firefighters died: "We lost a lot of guys who were just trying to put the fire out," Solt said.

"It raced through my mind too: Are we under attack?" Solt said. "Very few knew right away it was an accident."

As he scrambled for safety and then followed orders, his training kicked in, he said.

"You heard, 'Take wounded up there, put him over there, we can't do anything for him," Solt said, voice shaking.

"And then you sit there and watch somebody die. This kid's got a cut finger; we'll take care of him so he can go back to work. Triage: It's one of the most overused words in the lexicon. You'll hear people talking about doing triage. No, you don't have a triage center. I've been to one."

As he flipped through the LIFE magazine his mother saved, and a yearbook-style collection of photos of media coverage of the Forrestal tragedy and rescue, Solt expressed lingering grief.

One picture in particular, he said, tells the story for him — a photo of a young man with newly cut hair, staring into the distance, turmoil around him. Solt tears up just looking at the black-and-white photo, though he "has no clue" about the sailor's identity.

"Look at his eyes," Solt said. "On our way over, when we crossed the equator going into Rio, all the pollywogs (sailors who had not crossed the equator before) got their heads shaved. Five thousand guys on there, but this picture, to this day, it's a haunting photograph. It's not fear.  You just ... you're a walking dead man. But once you accept that, you do your job."

The fire lasted through the day, with dead and wounded transferred to a hospital ship  — but the Forrestal, under its own steam, reached port in the Philippines a few days later, at Naval Base Subic Bay. 

It returned to Norfolk, Virginia, for extensive repairs and returned to service.

Solt's squadron redeployed to Vietnam on the USS Kitty Hawk in November 1967. He retired in 1972 on disability and pursued a career in law enforcement in New York. The Forrestal was scrapped in 2014, after being decommissioned in 1993.

Solt suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder to this day. He recalls seeing sailors younger than he was, "shoving the skeletons of airplanes over the side" of the ship. He's had night sweats and sought therapy at various times, "if you want to call it therapy. Just someone to listen."

"I knew I was gonna die," he said. "Here I was, a single dad with a 4-year-old daughter ... You read those stories about heroes on the battlefield. It's very easy to be that person. It's not like that thing with Gen. Patton where he slapped the kid. It's not that. Once you accept the fact you're dying, so what? You do your job until you don't do it any more. I know it's a simple analogy, but how else would you put it?"

Solt will always, he said, stay in touch with others who came home to their families. He's a member of the USS Forrestal Association and keeps up with others through social media.

And on this sobering anniversary that is anything but golden, he will join other survivors and their families at the amphitheater behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. U.S. sailors, 134 of them, will hold flags honoring the Forrestal's dead. 

Later, Solt and others will pay homage to their shipmates at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. 

But after years of looking back at reunions, this gathering will be his last, Solt said.

He wants to heal. Enjoy life with his wife of almost 30 years, Sharon, and their 19-year-old son, Nick, an Eastern Florida State College student. Sharon, too, is Navy, and a recently retired senior chief.

"Every year on this day, it kills me," he said. "But God’s given my 50 years. I’ve honored my shipmates. I’m getting old. This year I'm taking Nick, and my boy Billy, who's 43 and a Navy vet ... he and his wife and their two sons are going to meet us in D.C. and we'll spend the week together. I want them to be there ... so many kids today don't understand anything about this."

Solt plans to look forward from here; to search for that purpose "a higher power" has for him.

Maybe part of it, he said, is for "a boy who's now a great-grandfather" to tell his story.

"Just remember that 134 men gave their lives, and a lot of those deaths were men who worked to save their ship. Died saving their ship," he said.

"And they should be remembered as such."

Contact Kennerly at 321-242-3692 or bkennerly@floridatoday.com, on Twitter @bybrittkennerly or Facebook.com/bybrittkennerly.