McCain screwed up twice.. and did not follow orders when he got shot down... He also probably lied about the same missile. He was flying to low and got shot down by AAA. McCain graduated 894 or 899... crashed multiple planes. Got himself shot down by his own admission... got himself massively injured by ejecting stupidly... and then recorded tapes to aid the enemies propaganda. how did I know enough to suspect he probably got himself shot down by not following orders and being a dumbass? http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/McCain-Shootdown.htm ... So on October 26, 1967, the scheduled attack on the thermal power plant in Hanoi threw the Oriskany into a state of excitement. This was going to be a big one for McCain and everybody else. Bryan Compton had led a daring raid on the plant six weeks before McCain arrived and won a Navy Cross for the mission. But the power plant had been repaired by the North Vietnamese and was again on the target list. McCain pleaded with his squadron’s operations officer, Jim Busey, to be assigned to this new attack. The operations officer had nicknamed McCain “Gregory Green-Ass” because he had flown far fewer missions than the other pilots—only 22. At first, Busey resisted, but finally he gave in to McCain, who always charmed or cajoled to get his way. Another “new guy” was also going on the mission to hit the Hanoi power plant. Lieutenant Junior Grade Charles D. (Chuck) Rice, 24, had arrived on the Oriskany one month before McCain and had flown 36 missions. Rice, whose dad was a TWA pilot, was assigned to Swanson’s squadron as Dick Wyman’s wingman. Wyman, who was one of the best pilots on the Oriskany, literally took Rice under his wing to keep him from getting shot down. Rice recalled: “I said to Wyman when I got there, ‘Dick, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ Dick said, ‘I know. You just stay on my wing and do what I do. Don’t lose me. Just forget about everybody else.’” Unfortunately, Dick Wyman would not be there to protect Chuck Rice on October 26, 1967. Shortly after take-off, Wyman’s generator went down and he had to turn back, leaving Rice to fly with two other F-8 pilots from Squadron 162. The attack was scheduled for around noon and the pilots went for an early lunch of pork chops. The Oriskany was known for its good food and Rice and his friends figured they would be back in time for a second helping of pork chops, since a round-trip mission to Hanoi took only about an hour and a half. The mission was called an Alpha Strike, a designation used for only the biggest and most important attacks on North Vietnam. Burt Shepherd, the air wing commander, led the strike group. It included 20 aircraft from the various squadrons on the ship. As the strike group went over the beach, the North Vietnamese were waiting. They fired 22 SAMs at the Americans and unleashed a torrent of antiaircraft fire. For the pilots, it took a cool head to evade missiles and AAA being fired at them at the same time. “I recognized the target sitting next to the small lake from the intelligence photographs I had studied,” John McCain recalled in Faith of My Fathers. “I dove in on it just as the tone went off signaling that a SAM was flying toward me. I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers. . .But I was just about to release my bombs when the tone sounded, and had I started jinking [maneuvering to evade the SAM] I would have never had the time nor, probably, the nerve to go back in once I had lost the SAM. So, at about 3,500 feet, I released my bombs, then pulled back the stick to begin a steep climb to a safer attitude. In the instant before my plane reacted, a SAM blew my right wing off. I was killed.” By his own admission, then, McCain failed to follow instructions in combat. He did not try to evade the missile. Moreover, the pilots who were flying near him, one of them with a handheld camera, said he was not hit by a SAM. He had flown too low and was brought down by a barrage of antiaircraft fire. Since a SAM exploded in a bright orange fireball visible for miles around, it was unlikely that they had called it wrong. And since official navy records listed John McCain as downed by AAA fire, they were puzzled by why he later insisted in his political campaigns that it was a SAM. As other pilots saw it, John McCain, quite simply, had got himself shot down. But McCain also made another error in the next four to six seconds after he was hit. He failed to use the proper procedure he had been taught for ejecting. As a result, he injured himself critically, breaking both arms and his right leg. Chuck Rice got shot down at the same time as McCain. Rice was hit at 12:48 p.m. After Dick Wyman had to return to the carrier with a mechanical problem, Rice continued to fly as the wingman for one of the other two pilots from 162, his roommate Ron Coalson. When Coalson made a turn, Rice fell behind him. “Why’d I get slow?” Rice said. “Because I was stupid. I was looking around and got distracted.” Rice was trying to catch up when Coalson radioed, “Chuck, you got one at ten o’clock.”