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The domino theory was right and we should have gone in and won the war. However, it would have been better to have stayed out of it than to do it the way we did
Indeed,they were never trying to win it,they had their hands tied.
Yep. I come from a military family and military community. One family friend was a pilot. He would fly over factories making weapons to kill Americans and if he had fired one shot at them would have been court marshaled, it killed him to not be able to do that.
Johnson turned the war into his economic policy
It was a civil war gotten into with the phony gulf of tonkin "incident", fast forward: over 58,000 Americans used for cannon fodder, hundreds of thousands Vietnamese dead. Now we have diplomatic relations , have trade and are going to have joint military exercises
The
Gulf of Tonkin incident (
Vietnamese:
Sự kiện Vịnh Bắc Bộ), also known as the
USS Maddox incident, involved what were originally claimed to be two separate confrontations involving
North Vietnam and the
United States in the waters of the
Gulf of Tonkin. The original American report blamed North Vietnam for both incidents, but eventually became very controversial with widespread claims that either one or both incidents were
false, and possibly purposefully so. On August 2, 1964, the
destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a
signals intelligence patrol as part of
DESOTO operations, was pursued by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.
[1][2] The
Maddox fired 3 warning shots and the North Vietnamese boats then attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire.
[2] The
Maddox expended over 280 3-inch and 5-inch shells in what was claimed to be a
sea battle. One US aircraft was damaged, three
North Vietnamese torpedo boats were allegedly damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were said to have been killed, with six more wounded. There were no U.S. casualties.
[3] The
Maddox "was unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun round."
[2]
It was originally claimed by the
National Security Agency that a
Second Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred on August 4, 1964, as another sea battle, but instead evidence was found of "Tonkin ghosts"
[4] (false radar images) and not actual North Vietnamese torpedo boats. In the 2003 documentary
The Fog of War, the former
United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara admitted that the August 2 USS
Maddox attack happened with no
Defense Department response, but the August 4 Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened.
[5]
The outcome of these two incidents was the passage by
Congress of the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President
Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any
Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "
communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying US conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.
In 1995, former Secretary of Defense McNamara met with former
Vietnam People's Army General
Võ Nguyên Giáp to ask what happened on 4 August 1964 in the second Gulf of Tonkin Incident. "Absolutely nothing", Giáp replied.
[6] Giáp claimed that the attack had been imaginary.
[7]
In 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that
Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2, but that there were no North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident of August 4. The report stated regarding the first incident on August 2 that "at 1500G,
[note 1] Captain Herrick ordered Ogier's gun crews to open fire if the boats approached within ten thousand yards. At about 1505G,
[note 1] the
Maddox fired three rounds to warn off the communist boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first
Gulf of Tonkin incident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia