Tonkin

Of all the lies they told us, Tonkin was the first,

  That night, a war was started with an errant burst.

Who knew that night in August would send us off to war,

  That night, the music died, and we heard the cannons roar.

In the Tonkin Gulf, there’s no light to cut the gloom,

  Just a watching eye from within the radar room.

Static on the radio, swells sloshing to and fro,

   Liberty in Tokyo was not so long ago.

A lonely watch makes a sailor’s nerves go tight,

  Blips upon a screen can cause an awful fright.

They saw the ghosts approaching, with their guns ablaze,

  Some saw torpedoes churning through the ocean waves.

From the decks of Maddox and the Turner Joy,      

   They fired at the shadows, determined to destroy.

Through the night, they fired about 300 rounds,

  Though they claimed some hits, no debris was found.

Both ships fired wildly, the Maddox took a hit,

  Back in Washington, Lyndon had a fit.

He asked the US Congress if they would authorize,

   The use of deadly force, for MacNamara’s lies.

 We said that we were winning as we made the thunder roll.

  But soon, the body bags would reveal an awful toll.

And somehow it didn’t matter just how hard we fought,

  The blood and the sorrow seemed to be for naught.

It seems to me that God-damn war was cursed,

  Of all the lies they told us, Tonkin was the worst.

LDT March 11, ‘26

NOTE: The infamous Tonkin Gulf Incident was the basis for our involvement in the Vietnam War. There were actually two incidents. On the night of 2 August, 1964, three North Vietnamese patrol boats mistook the destroyer Maddox for a South Vietnamese vessel infiltrating troops into the North. They attacked the Maddox. She wasn’t harmed and drove off the attackers. Not wanting to go to war with the US, the North Vietnamese quickly apologized for the incident. Unfortunately, that was not the end.

            Two nights later, the Maddox was joined by the C. Turner Joy in the same waters. Mistaken signal intelligence and radar blips led both ships to fire on imaginary targets.  The Joy hit the Maddox, causing no harm. The ships reported they sank the enemy boats.

Though there was no evidence that the second attack ever happened, President Johnson used this non-event to get Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. By March 1965, we were landing ground troops in the quagmire known as Vietnam. 

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