Susuto

Well the people involved in the ant-war movement were actually the ones on the right side because that war was based on lies too.

On 2 August the Maddox claimed it was attacked by three North Vietnamese P-4 patrol torpedo boats 28 miles (45 km) away from the North Vietnamese coast in international waters.[7] The Maddox claimed to have evaded a torpedo attack and opened fire with its five-inch (127 mm) guns, forcing the patrol craft away. U.S. aircraft launched from Ticonderoga then attacked the retiring P-4s, claiming one as sunk and one heavily damaged. The Maddox, suffering very minor damage from a single 14.5-millimeter machine gun bullet, retired to South Vietnamese waters where she was joined by the destroyer Turner Joy.

However, this account has come into sharp dispute with an official 2005 NSA declassified report[2] which stated on page 17:

“At 1500G, Captain Herrick ordered Ogier’s gun crews to open fire if the boats approached within ten thousand yards. At about 1505G, the Maddox fired three rounds to warn off the communist boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first.”[2]

Already before this was revealed, however, some had held that the actions of the Maddox (i.e., merely the presence of the Maddox in particular places and times) were provocative to the North Vietnamese because they coincided with the covert South Vietnamese raids. Since the Desoto patrols were conducted in order to gather just the sort of electronic emissions that the SOG 34A raids would provoke, it was a reasonable assumption that the two were “piggybacked.” The destroyer’s presence also may have been mistaken by the North Vietnamese as a sign that it was also involved directly in the raids.

Others, such as Admiral Sharp, maintained that U.S. actions did not provoke the 2 August fight. He claimed that DRV radar had tracked Maddox along the coast, thus being aware that the destroyer had not actually attacked North Vietnam. Yet they ordered their patrol boats to engage it anyway. He also noted that orders given to Maddox to stay eight miles (13 km) off the DRV coast put the ship in international waters, as North Vietnam claimed only a five-mile (8 km) nautical limit as its territory. In addition, many nations had previously carried out similar missions all over the world, and the USS John R. Craig had earlier conducted an intelligence-gathering mission in similar circumstances without incident.[8]