Last week Stars and Stripes reported that the USS Forrestal, the Navy’s first supercarrier, will be towed from the Navy’s inactive ship facility in Philadelphia to All Star Metals’ facility in Texas, where it will be broken down into scrap metal.

The Forrestal  played a major role in the war in Vietnam. In 1967 there was a tragic fire on the ship which killed 134 men and injured more than 300 men.

The article reports:

The Navy’s first “supercarrier,” the Forrestal was in the Gulf of Tonkin the morning of July 29, 1967, for the Vietnam War effort when stray voltage triggered a rocket to launch from an F-4 Phantom on the flight deck.

The rocket struck an armed A-4 Skyhawk — piloted by a young Lt. Cmdr. John S. McCain III — rupturing the fuel tanks and sparking a chain reaction of fires and explosions on the deck, which was parked full of planes.

The crew fought the flight deck fire for an hour, but other fires blazed into the next day.

A piece of history is now become scrap metal.