After 33 years of naval service and years spent in Asia in diplomatic service and on business, it can be said that Jack DeWenter has led a life worth writing about.

He enlisted in the Naval Aviation Flight Program in 1945 as a young high school graduate. In the early 1950s, following a carrier combat tour in Korea, DeWenter applied and was accepted to the Chinese Language School in Washington D.C.; after a year and a half of intensive instruction, he served as interpreter at the armistice talks in Korea.

Fluent in Chinese, DeWenter says that, upon request, he was granted tours of duty in Asia following his service in Korea.

“I didn’t want to lose what I had learned,” said DeWenter.

Serving in Asia, DeWenter would become a participant in one of the Navy’s worst tragedies.

On July 29, 1967, DeWenter was serving as Air Wing Commander on the USS Forrestal in the Tonkin Gulf. Shortly before 11:00 a.m., a Zuni rocket fired accidentally on deck, setting off a fiery chain reaction that would, by the end of the ordeal, claim the lives of 134 sailors.

Twenty aircraft had to be pushed overboard and men were casting bombs off the ship to prevent the explosives from adding to the destruction.

“That has always had an effect on me,” said DeWenter, leafing through pictures of stunned young sailors covered in soot, “it lasts for years.”

A young John McCain served under DeWenter on the Forrestal and was inside one of the first aircraft hit that day.

Though their interaction lasted only a few months, DeWenter remembers McCain as a candid squadron representative.

“I had a great deal of admiration for him,” said DeWenter. “He wasn’t excessively polite. When you asked him a question you got a straight answer.”

Following the tragedy on the Forrestal, DeWenter served as Defense Attaché to China. During that time McCain was a POW in Vietnam.

“Mao was still alive; it was very difficult to travel in China,” said DeWenter. But DeWenter made friends in China that would serve him well. He returned there a few years later as a representative for the Council for U.S. Chinese Trade.

And amid the military and cultural accomplishments, DeWenter still managed to fly. He piloted the Blue Angels number five plane, and it was as a Blue Angel pilot that DeWenter would endure a second near fatal catastrophe.

The Blue Angels were flying a routine show for a crowd in New York when DeWenter’s aircraft suffered a crippling injury.

“We broke out of formation at 8,000 feet when I heard an explosion in the engine compartment,” said DeWenter.

DeWenter and the pilot of the number six plane abandoned the show and headed for the Niagara Falls Naval Air Station nearly 30 miles away. But with the aircraft losing altitude and power, DeWenter decided on an emergency landing at the Buffalo International Airport five miles away.

The runway at the Buffalo Airport is only 5,000 feet long and DeWenter’s jet was 1,000 lbs. overweight with fuel. Sliding off the end of the runway, the jet’s landing gear ripped off in a ditch and sent the plane onto its wing.

Dewenter as a young Naval officer. He served as Wing Commander on the USS Forrestal in the Tonkin Gulf.

The jet continued to slide across the field behind the air strip, up and over the highway, finally coming to rest in the parking lot of a gas station, just feet from a pump.
“You don’t think about being scared,” said DeWenter, “You’re too busy doing everything you can to stop the jet.”

“That [experience] has lasted with me more than anything else,” he said.

So now, after over three decades of military service, Jack DeWenter is able to relax just a bit and play golf. But his mind is still on the issues that matter most to him. National defense is not something to be handled casually, he says, nor is the task of electing a president.

DeWenter said that McCain is unflinchingly straight forward; and that, he believes, is a quality we should look for in our leaders.

“I basically agree with the policy of putting enough force there [in war] to ensure that we win,” said DeWenter. “The consequences of losing are [too great], especially with the radical Muslim potential for doing damage within our own borders. We’ve got to stop them.”