Loon - Jack McLean [34]
The actual attacks were never proven. Most historians believe they never took place. In fact, the Maddox had been engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers—in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese Navy. The attacks were part of a deliberate campaign of increasing military pressure on the North.
But there were no gunboats. There was nothing there but black water and American firepower. Later the following year, it is said that Johnson admitted, “For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there.”
Most do agree, however, that had it not been the Gulf of Tonkin incident, it would certainly have been something else. The United States was eager to draw the line against Communism and decided that Vietnam was the place to do it. Johnson had, in fact, drafted the resolution several months prior to the alleged attack on the Maddox. He had been waiting only for an event to trigger it.
As United States Marines, we cared little about politics or ideology. The actual cause was of little concern. Our commander in chief was sending us into harm’s way for whatever reasons he saw fit. That was good enough for us. The less confusing the mission, the more focused our performance. “Semper Fi, do or die” was our mantra. We were going to go get us some gooks.
The “line” that Johnson thought he was drawing in Vietnam had been literally drawn fifteen years earlier. As a result of the Geneva Accords, the century-old French occupation of Vietnam ended in 1954. The country was partitioned at the 17th parallel of latitude. South Vietnam became the Republic of Vietnam and North Vietnam became the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In the post-World War II world of realpolitik, not unlike partitioned Korea a decade before, the North immediately cozied up to the Chinese and the USSR. The South allied with the United States.
Ho Chi Minh, the premier of the North and the driving force behind the expulsion of the French a decade earlier, and his top aide, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military genius responsible for the humiliating annihilation of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, did not want Vietnam divided. Although the Geneva Accords had called for reunifying elections in 1956, an escalating dispute between South Vietnamese premier Ngo Dinh Diem and Ho Chi Minh allowed the date to pass. Ho Chi Minh had begun to execute his own plan for reunification that did not involve discussions with South Vietnam, the United States, or anyone else.
The American buildup in Vietnam began with several thousand military advisers that were sent in the early 1960s during the administration of President John F. Kennedy. The first major escalation took place in 1965 when a major force of marines made an amphibious landing just south of Da Nang on the northern coast of South Vietnam. By 1967, in an effort to interdict the flow of NVA troops from the North, major elements of the marines moved to positions along the 17th parallel, just south of the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam. One such position was a barren outpost called Con Thien. As the northernmost outpost in South Vietnam, Con Thien was in easy range of North Vietnamese artillery and troops.
Several months later, the defense of this small hamlet would become my first assignment in Vietnam.
During the six weeks prior to my arrival in country in the fall of 1967, North Vietnamese army gunners conducted one of the most intense artillery barrages in history, raining as many as nine hundred rounds of big artillery and mortar shells a day onto Con Thien—not a very big piece of real estate. The U.S. response included at least five thousand artillery shells and one thousand tons of bombs dropped daily from B-52S. The siege ended as the monsoons began and the North Vietnamese reportedly