It was 1966 and America was embroiled in the war in Vietnam. Fred Gregory was a helicopter pilot, and he now hovered about seventy-five feet above the jungles of South Vietnam. Below him burned the wreckage of a small reconnaissance plane, its pilot dead and its one passenger, a local scout, waiting desperately for rescue. Bullets were flying everywhere, and all around him American planes strafed the ground with cover fire.
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Two years earlier, North Vietnamese gunboats had attacked U.S. destroyers patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, off Vietnam.* President Johnson, having taken over as President after John Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, immediately responded with the first American bombing strikes on North Vietnam, proclaiming that "aggression by terror against the peaceful villages of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America. The determination of all Americans to carry out our full commitment to the people and to the government of South Vietnam will be redoubled by this outrage."
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Shortly thereafter, Congress overwhelmingly passed what became known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This law authorized the President "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression." It also gave Johnson the power "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom."
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The complexities and failures of the Vietnam War can hardly be analyzed here. What can be said is that few Americans at the time questioned the need for this military action. Like Berlin, it merely seemed another front in the war with communism, tyranny, and Soviet power.
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Unlike Berlin, however, the war that President Johnson and Congress had so quickly decided to join was much more tangled. While Vietnam was partly an internal civil war between capitalist and communist factions, it was
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 | | * In later years it was learned that, while one gunboat attack did occur, a so-called second more serious attack almost certainly did not happen, even though this second attack was used by the Johnson Administration to justify the bombings and Tonkin Gulf resolution. Herring, 133137; Karnow, 365373; Moss, 156165.
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