Here is an anecdote about the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" of 1964. I had a childhood friend named Bob Revenue who enlisted in the marines in 1963 and was a radioman with the 1st Marine Division floating around Tonkin on the night in question. In 1970 he related his side of the story. He was on radio watch the night the shooting happened. His duty was to monitor the radio frequencies between the command networks ane do the things that radiomen do. When he went on watch that night at midnight he said that the network was dead. No radio traffic, no noise, no nothing. In all his time at sea with that fleet (his division was deverted to Da Nang shortly afterword) there had never been a time when the network shut down. The attack took place around three of four in the morning if memory serves me but Bob swore that in the six hours he was on duty from 00:00am to 06:00am there was nothing but static. Of course you can speculate that when the fleet went into "action" the command switched over to krypto secure communication of whatever but there was no abrupt stop of radio traffic because there was NO radio traffic that night. Bob said that none of the officer's seemed surprised when word was passed the division was going to go in country and land at Da Nang.

When Bob returned to the states in 1965 he was interviewed by the local rag (Journal-World in Lawrence, KS) about his experiences overseas. Bob being the sort of person he was did not know how to lie and could not exist in a room with bull shit, so he told the reporter just what he thought of what was going on in Viet Nam. One of the local republicans cut the article out and mailed it to his C.O. at Camp Pendleton. When Bob reported back to base after his leave they waved the article at him and had him sent back to I Corp in Viet Nam. Mind you being a radioman in an infantry platoon had a very short life span. Bob survived but he passed away a few years ago from a health problem that was unrelated to his service over there.

As for me, I was in the USMC from 1966 to 1970, on the day that man first landed on the moon (07/28/69) I was with the 3rd Marine Division just outside of Da Nang. I don't think there is a person breathing air who lived throught the sixties that doesn't feel that part of their life was stolen from them and the course of history was forced down a bad road from which it hasn't recovered. All the pain and suffering the gready bastards have forced on humanity. It continues today. Good article!