Vietnam Hoaxes
Wednesday January 16, 2008
The National Security Agency recently declassified a 500-page report on the Vietnam War. The report listed a number of instances where the communist North Vietnamese were able to fake radio messages to the U.S. military telling them to bomb locations that held their own U.S. troops. Also in the report is information about the controversial Gulf of Tonkin Incident. In 1964, President Johnson used the supposed North Vietnamese attack on two U.S. destroyers, called the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, to escalate U.S. involvement in the war. This report states that the attack was not only unlikely, it did not happen.
Comments
As far as I am aware The Gulf of Tonkin Incident has been regared as a hoax for about 30 years. Apparently there was a mistake in the original NSA intelligence. I am pleased to see reference to that hoax turning up in your Newsletter.
Is the report available online somewhere??
–Tory
I remember that summer as if it were yesterday, sunning by the pool when a friend stopped in and said “enjoy it now! Next year you’ll be in VietNam, they just bombed our ships”. I did serve my time and spent eleven months in Nam. Some years later, our local PBS channel had a documentary on Viet-Nam by Stanley Karnow (believe it was the early 70’s). Karnow was apparently a reporter who was in Nam for years. He said emphatically the log books of the ships on the Gulf had no mention of being attacked. As I’d lost many friends there and almost my own life, I’ve been numb ever since and very untrusting of government and politicians. A war over nothing. The flip side is should we have pulled out and allowed millions to be persecuted, tortured and killed? After over 40 years of puzzling this, my shallow mind has yet to glean an answer and similarities to the Iraq syndrome haunt me daily.
Where were the calls to impeach the President for lying about the intelligence that led to an escalation of the war? Hmm, interesting.
I don’t understand where this information is coming from, but it is incorrect. My father served on the USS Edson as a fire control technician and he was involved in the Gulf of Tonkan incident. From his account the official report is incorrect, but only on details. For instance, the attack occured inside Vietnam waters and not in international waters and that they were ordered not to log the incident. But it indeed did happen.
It happened. We were there. I was a radar operator with on-time knowledge and communications.
John L., are you the John L. who went to the University of Miami in the late ’50s? I have even checked the names on the wall to make sure you didn’t perish in Vietnam.
Kay