Geneva and Two Vietnams: Diệm, the Insurgency and the Advisers, 1954–1963

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles welcome South Vietnam’s President Ngô Đình Diệm to Washington on 8 May 1957, at the height of American confidence in the “miracle man” of Southeast Asia. Photo: Department of Defense, NARA ARC 542189, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Vietnam War · Chapter 2 of 9

Geneva and Two Vietnams

For nine years after Geneva the United States tried to build a non-communist nation in the southern half of Vietnam around one man, Ngô Đình Diệm. By November 1963 an insurgency directed from Hanoi controlled much of the countryside, 16,000 American advisers were in the country, and Diệm was dead, killed by his own generals with Washington’s foreknowledge.

July 1954 – November 1963Geneva · Haiphong · Saigon · Huế · Ấp Bắc · Fort Bragg~27 min read

The Geneva Accords of July 1954 were meant to end a war, not to create two countries. The line they drew across Vietnam near the 17th parallel was described in the agreement as a provisional military demarcation line that should not be interpreted as a political or territorial boundary, and the conference’s final declaration looked to elections in July 1956 to reunify the country. The elections were never held. The line became a frontier, and on either side of it rose a state that claimed to be the true Vietnam: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North under Ho Chi Minh, and in the South the State of Vietnam, which in October 1955 became the Republic of Vietnam under Ngô Đình Diệm.

This chapter covers the nine years in which the United States took France’s place in the South. It is a story of real achievements and fatal weaknesses: a government that survived when almost no one expected it to, an exodus of some 800,000 to 1,000,000 northerners, the building of an army and a state, and then an insurgency that Hanoi decided in 1959 to wage in earnest, a regime that narrowed into a family, a war that American advisers increasingly fought alongside their Vietnamese counterparts, and a crisis in 1963 that ended with a coup Washington encouraged. It closes with the death of John F. Kennedy three weeks after Diệm’s.

A note on evidence. Much of the American side of this story is documented in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States and in the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s own internal history (1967–69). Vietnamese records, especially the party archives in Hanoi, have opened only partially. On two subjects historians remain sharply divided: whether Diệm was a viable leader whose overthrow was a catastrophic American error, and whether Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam had he lived. The chapter gives both sides.

Geneva and the 17th Parallel

The agreements signed at Geneva on 20–21 July 1954 were military agreements between the French and Viet Minh commands, one each for Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. For Vietnam they set a cease-fire, a provisional demarcation line along the Bến Hải River near the 17th parallel with a demilitarized zone on either side, and the regrouping of forces: Viet Minh units to the North, French Union forces to the South, within 300 days. During those 300 days civilians could choose to move from one zone to the other. An International Control Commission of India, Canada and Poland was to supervise. A final declaration of the conference called for general elections in July 1956, with consultations between the two zones to begin in July 1955. Nobody signed the final declaration.

Two delegations refused to associate themselves with it. The State of Vietnam, whose prime minister since 7 July was Ngô Đình Diệm, protested against the partition of the country. The United States, represented by Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, issued its own declaration that it would refrain from the threat or use of force to disturb the agreements, and that it would view any renewal of aggression in violation of them with grave concern. Washington had decided to support a non-communist South. On 8 September 1954, at Manila, the United States, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand signed the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (SEATO). A protocol extended its protection to Cambodia, Laos and “the free territory under the jurisdiction of the State of Vietnam.” That protocol would be cited ten years later in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (Chapter 3).

Passage to Freedom: the Great Migration

The 300-day free-movement provision produced one of the largest population movements of the early Cold War. Between August 1954 and May 1955 roughly 800,000 to 1,000,000 people left the North for the South, about three-quarters of them Catholics by most estimates. Whole parishes moved with their priests, especially from the dioceses of Phát Diệm and Bùi Chu in the Red River delta, where Catholic militias had fought the Viet Minh. The French navy and air force carried many. The U.S. Navy, in Operation Passage to Freedom, carried about 310,000 people south from Haiphong in transports and tank landing ships, with a reception and medical effort at both ends. In the other direction, Viet Minh soldiers, cadres and their families, roughly 90,000 people by the usual estimates, went north; thousands of southern cadres stayed behind, under orders, with their weapons hidden.

Why so many left is a matter of emphasis rather than dispute. Many had real reasons to fear the new regime: Catholics who had sided with the French, officials and soldiers of the State of Vietnam, landlords and merchants. American and South Vietnamese agencies also encouraged the exodus. The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission under Col. Edward Lansdale ran a propaganda campaign in the North, and the U.S. Information Agency produced posters like the one above. Lt. Tom Dooley, a Navy doctor at the Haiphong refugee camps, became famous in America with a 1956 book, Deliver Us from Evil, whose atrocity stories later writers have found exaggerated or unsupported. The migrants, for their part, became one of the strongest bases of support for Diệm, himself a Catholic, and northern Catholics were over-represented in his army and administration.

Ngô Đình Diệm

Ngô Đình Diệm was born in 1901 into a Catholic mandarin family that had served the Nguyễn court at Huế. He had been a provincial governor and, briefly in 1933, interior minister under Bảo Đại, resigning when the French refused to give his ministry real powers. He was anti-French and anti-communist in equal measure: the Viet Minh had killed his elder brother Ngô Đình Khôi in 1945, and when Ho Chi Minh offered him a post in his government, Diệm refused. He spent the early 1950s abroad, much of it in the United States, where he lived in Maryknoll seminaries in New Jersey and New York and met Catholic and political leaders, among them Senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy and Cardinal Francis Spellman. Bảo Đại appointed him prime minister in June 1954.

Few in Saigon expected him to last. The army chief of staff was disloyal, the police of Saigon were in the hands of the Bình Xuyên, a criminal organization that ran the city’s gambling and opium, and two religious sects, the Cao Đài and the Hòa Hảo, had private armies and territories of their own. In April 1955 President Eisenhower’s special representative, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, recommended that Diệm be replaced. Before the decision could be carried out, Diệm’s troops defeated the Bình Xuyên in street fighting in Saigon (April–May 1955) and then broke the sects. Washington, impressed, gave him its full support. On 23 October 1955 a referendum deposed Bảo Đại as head of state in Diệm’s favour with a reported 98.2 percent of the vote, a figure that most historians judge to have been manufactured; three days later Diệm proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president.

His regime was built around his family. His brother Ngô Đình Nhu ran the Cần Lao, a secret party that organized loyalists in the army and administration, and the security services; Nhu’s wife, known to the world as Madame Nhu, acted as the regime’s first lady and spokeswoman; another brother, Ngô Đình Cẩn, ruled central Vietnam from Huế; the eldest, Ngô Đình Thục, was archbishop of Huế. Diệm was personally austere and honest, hard-working and stubborn, and convinced that Vietnam needed a strong, moral, authoritarian government rather than Western democracy. In May 1957 he visited the United States, addressed a joint session of Congress and was welcomed at the airport by Eisenhower himself; American magazines called him the miracle man of Southeast Asia.

1956: the Elections That Were Not Held

Diệm refused to hold the consultations with the North that the Geneva final declaration had called for in July 1955, and the elections of July 1956 did not take place. His argument was that his government had not signed the agreements and was not bound by them, and that free elections were impossible in a North governed by a communist party. The United States supported him. Hanoi protested, and so did the Soviet Union and China, but none of them pressed the matter far; Moscow in 1957 even proposed admitting both Vietnams to the United Nations.

This is one of the war’s enduring arguments. Critics of American policy have stressed that the elections were the political heart of the Geneva settlement, that Ho Chi Minh would very probably have won them, and that by blocking them the United States and Diệm made a return to war likely. In his memoir Mandate for Change (1963) Eisenhower wrote that the experts he consulted believed that, had elections been held at the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of Vietnamese would have voted for Ho rather than for Bảo Đại; the remark is often quoted, though it referred to 1954 and to Bảo Đại, not to 1956 and Diệm. Defenders of Diệm’s decision answer that no election in the North could have been free, that the Geneva declaration was unsigned, and that half the population of the country lived under a government that had not agreed to it. Both points are true; the dispute is over which mattered more.

The North: Land Reform and Consolidation

In the North the Workers’ Party (as the communist party was then called) consolidated its rule. Its most ambitious and most violent programme was land reform, begun in the Viet Minh zones in 1953 and carried through the delta in 1954–56 with the help of Chinese advisers. Teams of cadres went from village to village classifying peasants and organizing “struggle sessions” against landlords, many of whom owned little land, and people’s tribunals that sentenced some to death. How many were executed is still disputed. The historian Edwin Moïse, the leading Western scholar of the subject, first estimated about 5,000 and later revised his figure to “perhaps on the rough order of 10,000,” while noting that no precise count is possible; claims made in the West during the war were far higher.

The party itself conceded that the campaign had gone badly wrong. In the autumn of 1956 it launched a “rectification of errors”: Trường Chinh resigned as general secretary, Ho Chi Minh publicly acknowledged mistakes, and thousands of prisoners were released. In November 1956 peasants rose in Quỳnh Lưu district of Nghệ An, Ho’s home province, and the army put down the uprising. The same year a short period of intellectual criticism, known by the names of the journals Nhân Văn and Giai Phẩm, was suppressed. By 1958 the North was a disciplined one-party state preparing to collectivize agriculture, and its leaders were turning their attention south.

The Turn to Armed Struggle, 1959–1960

In the South, Diệm’s government hunted the former Viet Minh who had stayed behind. A “denounce the communists” campaign from 1955 and, from May 1959, Law 10/59, which set up special military courts with powers to sentence to death anyone convicted of crimes against the state, devastated the party’s southern organization; party histories describe the late 1950s as the darkest years of the southern revolution. The campaign also struck at many non-communists and alienated villagers in areas where the Viet Minh had been popular. Diệm’s government replaced elected village councils with appointed officials, often outsiders and often northerners or Catholics, and resettled peasants in “agrovilles” that many resented.

Under pressure from southern cadres, the party’s Central Committee in January 1959 adopted Resolution 15, which authorized armed struggle alongside political struggle in the South. In May 1959 the army formed Group 559 to open an infiltration route through the mountains of Laos, the beginning of what Americans would call the Ho Chi Minh Trail; a sea route followed. Lê Duẩn, a southerner who had led the party in the South and argued for war, became first secretary in 1960. In January 1960 a series of “concerted uprisings” (Đồng Khởi) swept through Bến Tre province in the delta; one of their leaders, Nguyễn Thị Định, later became deputy commander of the southern insurgent army. In November 1960 a group of South Vietnamese paratroop officers tried and failed to overthrow Diệm.

On 20 December 1960 the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) was founded at a meeting in the jungle near the Cambodian border. It presented itself as a broad coalition of southerners against Diệm and American influence, and many of its members were not communists; it was, however, created and directed by the party in Hanoi, as Vietnamese sources have since confirmed. Its armed forces, formally the People’s Liberation Armed Forces, were called by Saigon and the Americans the Việt Cộng, a contraction of Việt Nam Cộng sản, “Vietnamese communist,” first used as a term of abuse. This series uses “Viet Cong,” the standard English term, for the southern insurgent forces, and PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam) for the North Vietnamese army.

The first Americans had already died. On 8 July 1959 guerrillas fired into a building at Biên Hòa, north of Saigon, where American advisers were watching a film, killing Maj. Dale R. Buis and M/Sgt. Chester M. Ovnand, for many years described as the first American deaths of the war. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial now begins earlier: the Department of Defense set 1 November 1955, the founding date of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, Vietnam, as the start of eligibility, and the earliest death on the Wall is that of Air Force T/Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr., killed by another airman on 8 June 1956.

Kennedy, Laos and Fort Bragg

John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961 with Southeast Asia already in crisis, but the first crisis was in Laos, where communist Pathet Lao forces backed by North Vietnam and the Soviet Union threatened the royal government. Kennedy chose negotiation, which produced the Geneva agreement of 1962 neutralizing Laos; the agreement did nothing to stop North Vietnam using the Laotian panhandle for the Trail. In Vietnam he chose to do more. In May 1961 he sent Vice President Lyndon Johnson to Saigon, and in October Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, who recommended sending about 8,000 American troops, presented as a flood-relief force. Kennedy declined to send combat units but approved a large increase in advisers, helicopters, aircraft and equipment.

Kennedy was fascinated by counterinsurgency, and he found its American home at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Army’s Psychological Warfare Center had been established there in 1952, with the 10th Special Forces Group, and became the Special Warfare Center in 1956. On 12 October 1961 the president visited Bragg. At McKellar’s Pond he watched a Special Warfare demonstration organized by the center’s commander, Brig. Gen. William P. Yarborough, and endorsed the green beret that Special Forces soldiers had worn unofficially; the Army authorized it as the Special Forces headdress. After Kennedy’s death the center was renamed the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center. The 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), activated at Fort Bragg in 1961, later became the Special Forces’ main command in Vietnam.

North Carolina’s part was not only Fort Bragg’s. From Pope Air Force Base, next door, the 464th Troop Carrier Wing sent C-123 transports to South Vietnam from December 1961 to the spring of 1963 in an airlift known as Mule Train, the first conventional U.S. Air Force unit in action in Vietnam. In 1963 Maj. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, a South Carolinian who would command in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, held command at Fort Bragg. North Carolina’s wider story in the war is told in Chapter 9 and on the page Special Forces, Fort Bragg and Vietnam.

MAAG, MACV and the Advisers

The numbers grew quickly. At the end of 1960 there were about 900 American military personnel in South Vietnam; at the end of 1961 about 3,200; at the end of 1962 about 11,300; at the end of 1963 about 16,300. In December 1961 two U.S. Army helicopter companies arrived in Saigon with their H-21 “Flying Banana” helicopters, and on 12 January 1962, in Operation Chopper, they carried South Vietnamese paratroopers into battle near Saigon, the first American helicopter assault of the war. On 8 February 1962 the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was established under Gen. Paul D. Harkins; the older MAAG continued under it until 1964.

The advisers were in a strange position. They were officially there to train and advise, and American rules allowed them to fire only in self-defence. In practice they flew helicopters and fighter-bombers with South Vietnamese markings and nominal Vietnamese crew members, went on operations with ARVN battalions and called in air strikes, and were shot at. In January 1962 the Air Force began Operation Ranch Hand, the spraying of herbicides to strip cover from roads and base perimeters and to destroy crops in Viet Cong areas; its later, massive expansion and its legacy of Agent Orange are the subject of Chapter 5 and Chapter 9.

Strategic Hamlets

The centrepiece of the counterinsurgency effort in 1962–63 was the Strategic Hamlet Program, directed by Ngô Đình Nhu with American money and advice and influenced by the British experience in Malaya, where Sir Robert Thompson, now heading a British advisory mission in Saigon, had helped resettle rural Chinese. The idea was to fortify villages with ditches, fences and militia, to register their people and to separate them from the guerrillas, so that the government could then win their loyalty with schools, wells and elected councils. By its own claims the government built several thousand hamlets in little more than a year.

The programme was rushed and often coercive. Peasants were made to build the defences themselves without pay and in some places were moved from their ancestral land; many hamlets existed mainly on paper, and the Viet Cong infiltrated or overran others. American officials such as Rufus Phillips of the U.S. Operations Mission, who toured the provinces, reported both successes and abuses. After Diệm’s fall the new government abandoned the programme, and Viet Cong forces destroyed or took over a large share of the hamlets in the following months.

Ấp Bắc, 2 January 1963

The battle that first showed Americans how the war was going was fought at the hamlet of Ấp Bắc, about 40 miles (65 km) southwest of Saigon in the Mekong delta, on 2 January 1963. Elements of the ARVN 7th Infantry Division, with Civil Guard units, a company of M113 armoured personnel carriers, a paratroop battalion and American helicopters, moved to destroy what intelligence said was a Viet Cong radio station guarded by a company. They found instead a few hundred guerrillas of the 261st Main Force and 514th Regional Battalions, dug into tree lines along irrigation dikes, who stood and fought.

The result, in the words of the Department of Defense’s Vietnam War Commemoration, was the first major South Vietnamese defeat after notable victories in late 1962. Five American helicopters were shot down. Three Americans were killed in action. The South Vietnamese lost 63 killed and about 100 wounded. The armoured personnel carriers advanced slowly and their commanders were reluctant to assault; the paratroopers were dropped on the wrong side of the position; and the Viet Cong slipped away during the night. Viet Cong losses are uncertain.

What happened afterwards mattered as much as the battle. Gen. Harkins called Ấp Bắc a South Vietnamese victory because the enemy had abandoned the field. Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, the senior adviser to the 7th Division, told American reporters in Saigon, among them David Halberstam of the New York Times and Neil Sheehan of United Press International, that it had been a defeat caused by poor South Vietnamese leadership. The gap between the official optimism of MACV and the embassy and what reporters and some advisers saw in the field, later called the credibility gap, opened here. Historians still disagree about the causes. The conventional view, following Vann and Sheehan, blames Diệm’s promotion of officers for political loyalty and his reluctance to accept casualties; revisionist historians, notably Mark Moyar, argue that American advisers planned the operation badly and that their reports to the press were self-serving.

The Buddhist Crisis, May–August 1963

The crisis that brought down Diệm began over flags. On 8 May 1963, the Buddha’s birthday (Vesak), Buddhists in Huế gathered at the radio station to protest a ban, enforced that week, on flying religious flags; only days before, Catholic flags had flown to celebrate the anniversary of Archbishop Thục’s ordination. Government forces fired into the crowd and threw grenades, and nine people were killed (some accounts say eight). The government blamed the Viet Cong. The Buddhist leaders, among them Thích Trí Quang in Huế, demanded freedom to fly their flag, legal equality with Catholics, an end to arrests, and compensation for the victims. Protests spread to Saigon.

On 11 June 1963, at a busy intersection in Saigon, an elderly monk, Thích Quảng Đức, sat down in the lotus position in the road, was doused with petrol by fellow monks and set himself alight. He remained motionless as he burned, while monks held back the crowd and a policeman prostrated himself before him. Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press photographed him, and the pictures were published around the world. This series does not reproduce them; they remain the property of the Associated Press. Other monks and nuns followed his example in the months that followed. Madame Nhu’s public mockery of the suicides, which she described in terms of a barbecue, horrified Americans.

On the night of 21 August 1963 Nhu’s Special Forces, which had been trained and paid for by the CIA to fight the Viet Cong, and the combat police raided Xá Lợi Pagoda in Saigon and pagodas across the country, arresting more than a thousand monks, nuns and students. The raids, carried out while the government was assuring Washington of its conciliation, turned the Kennedy administration against the Nhus. The new American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., arrived in Saigon the next day.

Cable 243

On Saturday, 24 August 1963, with the president and several senior officials away from Washington, officials led by Roger Hilsman, Averell Harriman and Michael Forrestal drafted a telegram to Lodge. Cleared by telephone, it went out that evening over the signature of Under Secretary of State George Ball. It instructed the ambassador to tell Diệm that the United States could not accept the situation and to tell the generals, if Diệm would not remove his brother, that Washington would give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown of the central government.

Excerpts from Telegram 243 from the Department of State to the Embassy in Vietnam, signed Ball; FRUS 1961–1963, vol. III, doc. 281.

The generals did not move in August; they were not sure of American intentions or of their own forces. Kennedy and his advisers argued through September about whether to press Diệm to reform or to encourage a coup. In a television interview with Walter Cronkite on 2 September Kennedy said, in substance, that the war was South Vietnam’s to win or lose, that Americans could help but could not win it for them, and that the Saigon government had got out of touch with its people. A mission by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Taylor reported on 2 October that the military campaign was making progress and that 1,000 American personnel could be withdrawn by the end of 1963; Kennedy approved the plan in National Security Action Memorandum 263 on 11 October. At the same time the United States suspended parts of its economic aid and cut off support for Nhu’s Special Forces, a signal the generals understood.

The Coup, 1–2 November 1963

On 1 November 1963, at about midday, the generals struck. The plotters were led by Gen. Dương Văn Minh (“Big Minh”), with Generals Trần Văn Đôn, Lê Văn Kim and Tôn Thất Đính, who commanded the troops around Saigon. The CIA officer Lucien Conein, an old friend of several of the generals, was with them at the Joint General Staff headquarters through the afternoon, in contact with the embassy, and gave them money from the CIA station for their expenses, about $42,000 in piastres by later accounts. Troops attacked the presidential guard; by evening Gia Long Palace was surrounded. Diệm telephoned Lodge, who told him that it was 4:30 a.m. in Washington and that the U.S. government could not have a view, and offered to help ensure his safety.

During the night Diệm and Nhu slipped out of the palace and took refuge in Chợ Lớn, the Chinese quarter. On the morning of 2 November they agreed to surrender and were picked up at the Catholic church of St. Francis Xavier in an M113 armoured personnel carrier. On the way to the Joint General Staff headquarters both men were shot and stabbed to death inside the vehicle. The killing is generally attributed to an officer of Minh’s staff acting on Minh’s orders; the generals at first announced a suicide. Kennedy, according to those who were with him when the news arrived, was shocked. Americans had known of the plot and had promised not to stand in its way; the documents show no American instruction to kill Diệm, and Kennedy and his advisers had expected that he would be given safe passage abroad.

After the Coup

The coup was greeted with celebration in Saigon; political prisoners were released and the Buddhist leaders were freed. It did not bring stability. The Military Revolutionary Council under Minh lasted less than three months before Gen. Nguyễn Khánh overthrew it on 30 January 1964, the first of a series of coups and counter-coups that kept Saigon in turmoil until Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Nguyễn Cao Kỳ took power in June 1965. The Viet Cong exploited the confusion, and in the countryside the strategic hamlets collapsed. In Hanoi, the party’s Ninth Plenum in December 1963 decided to step up the war in the South and to send more men and weapons, judging that the moment had come to defeat the Saigon government before the Americans could intervene in force. Three weeks after Diệm’s death, on 22 November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and Vietnam passed to Lyndon B. Johnson.

Would Kennedy Have Withdrawn?

The question has no answer that can be proved, but the arguments are worth knowing. One school, drawing on NSAM 263, on Kennedy’s refusal to send combat troops in 1961 and 1963, and on later recollections by aides such as Kenneth O’Donnell and by Senator Mike Mansfield that Kennedy had told them he would withdraw after the 1964 election, holds that he would not have fought a large ground war in Vietnam. The other school points out that the 1,000-man withdrawal was conditioned on military progress, that Kennedy said publicly and repeatedly that the United States would stay, that he had increased the commitment from about 900 to more than 16,000 men and approved a coup that deepened American responsibility for South Vietnam, and that the advisers who led Johnson into war in 1964–65, McNamara, Rusk, Bundy and Taylor, were Kennedy’s men. Both cases rest on real evidence; neither can be settled.

A second argument concerns Diệm himself. Historians in the tradition of Halberstam, Sheehan and Logevall see a regime that was failing, isolated and repressive, whose removal was understandable even if its manner was not. Revisionists such as Mark Moyar argue that Diệm was a capable nationalist leader whose government was winning the war in 1963, that American reporters and officials badly misjudged the Buddhist movement, and that the coup was the greatest American mistake of the war because it destroyed the South’s best chance of stability. The dispute shapes how the rest of the war is understood: as a war lost because South Vietnam could not be made viable, or a war made unwinnable by American decisions.

Why It Mattered

Between 1954 and 1963 the United States made South Vietnam its own project. It chose and backed Diệm, armed and trained his army, accepted his refusal to hold elections, sent thousands of advisers and hundreds of aircraft, lost its first men, and finally helped remove him. By the end of 1963 American credibility, in the language of the time, was committed to the survival of a government in Saigon that no longer had a leader, and Hanoi had decided to win the war before the Americans could stop it. In the summer of 1964, off the coast of North Vietnam, an American destroyer on an intelligence patrol was attacked by torpedo boats. What followed is the subject of Chapter 3.