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Gulf of Tonkin Incident...or the beginning of the Vietnam War for the US.

Modern history furnishes other examples of incidents deliberately set up to achieve a political result. The Pentagon Papers disclose that for six months before the Tonkin Gulf incident in August, 1964, the US had been mounting clandestine military attacks against North Vietnam, including kidnapping North Vietnam citizens for intelligence information, commando raids to blow up rail and highway bridges, and bombardment of North Vietnamese coastal installations by PT boats. (Pentagon Papers, pg. 238). This was done while planning to obtain a Congressional resolution that the Administration regarded as an equivalent to a declaration of war. (Pentagon Papers, pg. 234.)

On August 5, 1964, President Johnson called congressional leaders to the White House and told them that North Vietnamese naval vessels had flagrantly and without provocation attacked two US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Johnson had the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution drawn up, and it flew through both the House of Representatives and the Senate with virtually no debate. On August 7, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had been passed, continuation and escalation of military reprisals against the North were given congressional blessing. "In the heat of the Tonkin clash, the Administration had accomplished . . . preparing the American public for escalation" (Pentagon Papers, pg. 269).

"The Tonkin Gulf reprisal constituted an important firebreak and the Tonkin Gulf resolution set US public support for virtually any action" (study quoted in Pentagon Papers, pg. 269).

Several years later the Senate Foreign Relations Committee conducted an inquiry into the events of August, 1964. Senator Fulbright would later write that the Pentagon had misrepresented the actual event, and that the US had provoked the attack.

"Only when we began those later hearings on the Tonkin Gulf did it really begin to dawn on me that we had been deceived. In the beginning--before Vietnam, that is--it never occurred to me that presidents and their secretaries of state and defense would deceive a Senate committee.

"I thought you could trust them to tell you the truth, even if they did not tell you everything. But I was naive, and the misrepresentation of the Tonkin Golf affair was very effective in deceiving the Foreign Relations Committee and the country, and me, because we didn't believe it possible that we could be so completely misled." (J. William Fulbright, The Price of Empire, pg. 107.)

This was just the start, it was a political war run by the politicians in Washington D.C. Contrary to what you have heard, the US Military won every battle they were in.

Senator Fulbright would later write that the Pentagon had misrepresented the actual event, and that the US had provoked the attack.

Senator Fulbright Billy Jeff's earliest mentor? Hardly a source likely to be thought authoritative in this forum. ;)

We were in there a long time before the Tonkin incident. The CIA was running operations in support of the French.
Disgraceful the way we left the harbors alone to resupply the Cong, almost like we had no intention of ever winning.