Similar to Japan, Vietnam is a fairly long thin nation-state running primarily north to south for well over a thousand kilometers. In addition, it has thousands of many smaller islands along its coasts. In the islands of the Gulf of Tonkin exists a tremendous archipelago consisting of Karst mountains and caves of legend. The most famous bay amongst these isles is called Halong Bay.
I slept a night on a wooden junk in Halong Bay and certainly recommend that experience to everyone who has the opportunity to do so. The experience combines serenity and beauty like almost nowhere else on the planet.
It is sad to note, however, that the U.S. leadership used the Gulf of Tonkin in late summer 1964 as an excuse to make full-scale war on North Vietnam.
In the decades since that debacle, historians have proven through review of official U.S. government documentation and through interviews with participants in the Lyndon Johnson government that (1) the U.S. falsely claimed that its navy boats were in international waters when Vietnamese ships apparently shot on them one August night in 1964 and (2) the Gulf of Tonkin incident was simply the excuse the Johnson administration had been trying to find for months n order to significantly escalate the U.S.'s military activities in Southeast.
In summations, a Gulf of Tonkin Incident was used to write the U.S. President a blank check by the U.S. Congress. That 1964 Congress used a singular event as an excuse to provide a president cover in order to undertake whatever he wanted to make war in another part of the globe in the name of fighting communism.
Naturally the Gulf of Tonkin ploy worked so well during their own formative years of the 1960s that four decades later George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Neo-Con Clan in Washington D.C. used the same tricks to take Americans into other lengthy wars half-way around the planet in 2001 and 2003.
The scam used in Iraq, namely making an unfounded claim that Sadam Hussein was a threat to America and had major destructive weapons ready to use against America and the planet, was an even more disingenuous ploy (as it was closer to absolute fiction) than the Gulf of Tonkin incident was.
Nonetheless, the name Gulf of Tonkin has continued to have such a bad rap that currently all tours to the wondrous emerald and rocky archipelago northeast of Hanoi are labeled "Halong Bay" tours.
Despite the marketing name change, the Gulf of Tonkin remains a must see for Americans, who will be astounded that a U.S. navy boat so far north, i.e. so far from the DMZ and South Vietnam, and so close to the beautiful isles of north Vietnam could have landed America and the Vietnamese peoples into such a deathly struggle.
A few years later during that same catastrophic war, my uncle, Gerald Gardner, would be gunning a much larger ship for the U.S. Navy in the same Gulf of Tonkin.
One day, it was reported that tanks and a large convoy of Vietcong forces were coming over a hill in the near distance.
Alas, as often occurs in war, the information was incorrect. Instead the U.S. forces ended up destroying a heard of elephants.
My uncle always mourned the deaths of those elephants. (I am sad to say that during my entire trip to North Vietnam I found no elephants at all on either the coast or in the highlands. However, the Vietnamese themselves have been to blame-as they deforested the elephants homelands for decades.)
AGENT ORANGE AND OTHER MEMORIES IN HANDICRAFTS
On the way to-and-from the Halong Bay Isles, my mini-bus was filled-with-tourists from all points on the globe. We stopped at a Vietnamese handicraft center run by handicapped peoples of northern Vietnam.
Like all government run enterprises, it was a colorless affair. The whole structure was painted white--with no advertising signs outside it. The building reminded me more of a automobile garage from its layout than any sort of market I could recognize.
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