JFK sent in 16,000 troops, no JFK, then no American Vietnam war.
No JFK and America would have survived, and not had the 1960s.
“JFK sent in 16,000 troops, “
Yeah I know, my dad and his Pentagon office partner were two of them. I had the opportunity to listen to them discuss Vietnam in the years before it made the front pages.
The majority of the 16,000 were not combat troops. The combat troops who were sent by Kennedy were there to train ARVN and they weren’t ‘supposed’ to be fighting. Special Forces were there to teach the ARVN how to fight counter insurgency warfare.
The American combat role started after LBJ got the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through Congress in August 1964. The first deployment of regular ground combat troops began only after that. Gen Westmoreland began building up to a strength of 300,000 in the summer of 1965 with the first major battle occurring in Nov 1965 at Ia Drang Valley, the battle memorialized in “We Were Soldiers Once and Young”.