From: Jasper
Date: 9/29/01
Time: 5:50:57 PM
Kari,
The amount of misinformation about American involvement in Vietnam is staggering. The facts are available but you will play hell trying to find them all in one place. That's one reason I wrote The Invisible Warriors -- to put the essential facts all in one place.
Our government lied to us about Vietnam. So did the Peace Movement and the award-winning journalists and documentary makers that the media would like you to believe are the "best and brightest" authorities on the subject. The story you have about the Tonkin Gulf incident that President Johnson used to get Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 (American escalation) is a perfect example of both.
In the first place there were two incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin involving two American ships. T Maddox was indeed fired upon by NVA forces. There is no dispute about that. The funny business everyone talks about was the second incident when a radar man aboard the Turner Joy misread a blip which set of a barrage of firing at enemy targets that didn't exist. Johnson got the news that two of our warships had been fired on and took this news to Congress as a justification for escalating our direct military involvement in the war.
The lie the peace movement tells is that it was the United States that escalated THE WAR. That was done by the North Vietnamese who were infiltrating solders into the South by the tens of thousands and murdering civilians who refused to cooperate with them by the thousands. By the time the Navy sorted out what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin the die had already been cast. The President could have and should have said the second incident was a mistake but the fact is, the first incident was all that was required as an act of war against us.
Americans don't go to war without an "incident" that can be called an act of war. When our leaders in the past have needed an excuse to go to war they have always used something that could be called a direct attack against us to do it - even if they had to make it up. That's what Wilson did with the Lusitania (reaching back almost three years) and that's what Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to do with the Penae (a merchant marine ship that was attacked by the Japanese in 1940). Incidents are never the real reasons for war, just the excuses.
The need for direct American military involvement in Vietnam to forestall a collapse of the disorganized Army of South Vietnam is why we escalated our commitment (as opposed to escalating the war) to preserving the existence of South Vietnam. Less than three years into that struggle, Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America" was saying that w had already been defeated, the war was all our fault and if we pulled out the killing would come to an end.
You know how that turned out -- And Hanoi Jane had a hell of a lot to do with it. --Jasper