The Vietnam War could have been called a comedy of errors if the consequences weren’t so deadly and tragic. In 1951, while war was raging in Korea, the United States began signing defense pacts with nations in the Pacific, intending to create alliances that would contain the spread of Communism. As the Korean War was winding down, America joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, pledging to defend several nations in the region from Communist aggression. One of those nations was South Vietnam.

Before the Vietnam War, most Americans would have been hard pressed to locate Vietnam on a map. South Vietnamese President Diệm’s regime was extremely unpopular, and war broke out between Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam around the end of the 1950s. Kennedy’s administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential directive withdrawing 1,000 American personnel, and shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed course, instead opting to expand American assistance to South Vietnam.

In 1964, the USS Maddox was an intelligence-gathering naval ship stationed off the coast of North Vietnam for the purpose of gathering information about the ongoing conflict between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The borders between the two sides were in dispute, and the United States was less up to date on changes in these borders than the two belligerents. In the process, the USS Maddox accidentally crossed over into North Vietnamese shores, and when the ship was sighted by North Vietnamese naval units, they attacked the Maddox on August 2, 1964.

Though no Americans were hurt, naval crews were on heightened alert as the Maddox retreated to South Vietnam, where it was met by the USS Turner Joy. Two days later, the Maddox and Turner Joy, both with crews already on edge as a result of the events of August 2, were certain they were being followed by hostile North Vietnamese boats, and both fired at targets popping up on their radar. The fighting on August 2, can be verified through a variety of sources and an accounting of materials expended. However, the mystery of the Gulf of Tonkin begins with what the Maddox’s Captain John J. Herrick believed was a second attack that spanned August 4 and into the following morning.

In response, Johnson had the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution drafted, which gave the right of military preparedness to the President without Congressional approval. The resolution passed shortly thereafter, giving the President the authority to raise military units in Vietnam and engage in warfare as needed without any consent from Congress. Shortly thereafter, President Johnson approved air strikes against the North Vietnamese, and Congress approved military action with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

It would be years before the government revealed that the second encounter was no encounter at all. The government never figured out what the Maddox and Turner Joy were firing at the night of August 4, but there was no indication that it involved the North Vietnamese. Once upon a time, Johnson had claimed, “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” By the end of the year, however, over 16,000 Americans were stationed in South Vietnam, and over 55 years later, whether the country entered the war on a lie or merely based on poor intelligence and faulty decision-making remains murky.