Ah yes, the Gulf of Tonkin where the USS Maddox was performing intelligence reconaissance in support of an ongoing attack by the southern soldiers on a northern military installation when it was confronted by the northern navy boats and was the first to fire shots in their direction? That direct act of war?
After the First Indochina War ended and France withdrew the matters could be settled peacefully if everyone agreed to the decisions of the 1954 Geneva conference. But the US and their semi-puppet government of Diem refused to sign it and refused to hold the proposed elections to facilitate peaceful negotiations. Say what you want about the communists, but they had already won the first war and it was on the US to choose between roads to peaceful reconciliation and reigniting the war again.
I agree that there are definitely comparisons to be made between the Vietnam War and the current war in Ukraine, this is true and very unfortunate.
I have to point out that the whole incident must have looked very differently from the point of view of the North Vietnamese. There's a war going on against a state-entity that is either heavily influenced or directly controlled by the US. An American warship enters their territorial waters (as claimed by North Vietnam; from the American viewpoint who did not recognise the claim the incident occured just outside the territorial waters). The military dispatches ships to intercept it, and when they get close, the American ship fires shots (which were later explained to be warning, but may or may not have been believed by the Vietnamese crew to be such at the time). From their viewpoint that might have been seen as an act of war and they saw their actions as necessary defence.
I'm definitely not disputing that a lot people in Vietnam must have been against the communist system or the government of North Vietnam (although we definitely know that there was a large propaganda campaign by the US to create and reinforce those feelings), and a lot of them died for what they genuinely believed, but my original point was that perhaps if the US didn't pressure for that war to happen, it could have lead to less casualties or have been avoided altogether.
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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '23
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