#USInvaders were guided by the #DominoTheory - if Vietnam fell to communism, so would Laos, Cambodia & all of southeast Asia. The Gulf of #Tonkin changed things a lot.

According to the USA, Vietnamese patrol boats attacked the USS Maddox moored in the Gulf. Immediately, a resolution was passed to officially engage in war. President LB Johnson, the ‘heart of the war,’ sent 500,000 US troops to South Vietnam in 1965 to fight against North Vietnam in the north and the Viet Cong in the south. He called it Operation Rolling Thunder. The campaign would rain 864,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam over the next three-and-a-half years, killing 52,000 North Vietnamese.

In the 2003 #documentary - #TheFogOfWar - the #USgovernment admitted that they had fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

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