I recently came across this article on Daily Kos claiming that McCain indeed was involved in napalm runs in Vietnam. The author quoted an old New York Times article that was summarized in another work:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Well, I tried to find the original article in the New York Times archives. I was unable to post a comment to the Kos article for some reason, so I'm starting a new post here for people to see.
Here's what I came up with. I had to do a search by DATE (October 28, 1967) because it's in pdf form and apparently can't be read by its own search software. Long story short -- it's all true:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/...
"SAIGON, South Vietnam, Oct. 27 - It was almost three months ago that the young, prematurely gray Navy pilot was sitting in a villa in Saigon, sipping a Scotch with friends and recalling the holocaust that he had managed to live through.
"He was John Sydney McCain 3d, a lieutenant commander. The day before, he had watched from the cockpit of his Skyhawk attack plane as flames suddenly engulfed the flight deck of the Forrestal, on which his squadron was based.
" 'It's a difficult thing to say,' he remarked after a long time. 'But now that I've seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I'm not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.' " (more at the above link)
One other note -- I recently posted the following link elsewhere, because rumors on the internet said that this is actual footage of one of McCain's bombing runs. I couldn't confirm that anywhere, so I didn't tell folks about the rumors in that post. But the intro to this quite graphic video on Fallujah is indeed a napalm run over Vietnam:
http://video.google.com/...
Also, here are a couple of interesting links from mainstream news sources. I've read similar things from other sources:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...
http://www.democracynow.org/...