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Chapter฀6 the฀฀ perplexIng฀฀ War,฀฀ 1964–1968 It was not the sort of beach landing so many young men endured in Europe and the Pacific during World War II. The marines who came ashore in a drizzling rain at Danang, South Vietnam, on March 8, 1965, met neither bullets, barbed wire, nor concrete but flowers and pretty girls. And they were not the first American military personnel to arrive in the country. Others had been in Vietnam for years advising the chronically unstable South Vietnamese military in its struggle against the indigenous communist forces of the National Liberation Front (nlf), pejoratively known as the Vietcong. But now the marines were in the country to protect an American air base, soon to serve not as advisers but as a fighting force. Their appearance on the beach near Danang culminated a year-long process of escalation that dramatically raised the stakes of American involvement in Indochina.1 Early in 1964 South Vietnam was in turmoil, ten years after the country had been split from North Vietnam by the Geneva Convention in what was supposed to be a temporary partition. A series of coups brought Gen. Nguyen Khanh into power in January 1964. In Saigon, capital of the beleaguered nation, Buddhists and Catholics persisted in a bitter rivalry carried over from the 1950s and early 1960s, when President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic, had ruled over the majority-Buddhist state. In the countryside, Khanh’s new government held negligible authority. All over South Vietnam, increasingly bold nlf strikes threatened the regime’s tenuous legitimacy. Meanwhile, the communist nation of North Vietnam was stepping up support for its southern revolutionary ally, the nlf. In early 1964 the north was improving the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a maze of supply routes to the south, and organizing its own troops for infiltration into South Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers, cold warriors committed to the preservation of a noncommunist South Vietnam, looked with increasing concern at the infusion of northern supplies and men into the south. They wished to strike North Vietnam, but without direct provocation from the communists it would be di;cult to defend an attack in the court of public opinion. That provocation came, Johnson said, in August 1964 on two dark nights in the Tonkin Gulf o= of North Vietnam. On August 2, the American destroyer Maddox exchanged shots with North Vietnamese patrol boats. Two nights later, with a strict directive from the president to “attack any force that attacks them,” the Maddox and the destroyer C. Turner Joy came 172 | the vietnam era under fire again—or so the sailors initially thought.2 It is now clear that inexperienced seamen panicked in turbulent weather and repelled an assault on August 4 that never happened. Pentagon o;cials, however, itching for an excuse to strike the North Vietnamese, announced the second attack even as the Maddox’s chief o;cer, Capt. John Herrick, was still trying unsuccessfully to confirm it.3 Most Americans accepted the president’s version of events and supported retaliation. The immediate reprisal came in the form of air strikes against North Vietnamese marine bases and oil storage facilities. Far more significant , however, was Johnson’s use of the Tonkin Gulf incident as a pretext for widening the American military commitment in Vietnam. The president adroitly described the incidents in a statement released to the press, calling them “renewed hostile actions” that “required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.”4 Congress approved a “Tonkin Gulf resolution” almost without debate, though two Democratic senators, Wayne Morse (Oregon) and Ernest Gruening (Alaska), voted against the resolution because of its open-ended authorization to use “all necessary measures ” to retaliate against future attacks. These men feared the resolution might be used to widen the war—a prophetic view—though doing so was not Johnson’s intention at the time. The resolute president’s approval ratings jumped from 42 to 72 percent almost overnight; convincing the American people of the value of containing communism was not a di;cult task in 1964.5 Ultimately the United States would unleash enormous destruction upon Vietnam in the long wake of the Tonkin Gulf incident, its murky nature eventually seeming an apt beginning to a murky conflict. To some portion of the American public in later years, moreover, the lack of a Pearl Harbor–type opening salvo surely helped sap enthusiasm for this violent, stalemated conflict...

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