In American History, the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies were extremely turbulent and controversial times. Protest rights were being tested and occasionally suppressed, new moral and political values began to develop, and the Vietnam War dominated the twenty-year period. Vietnam invited many young activist people to begin a huge movement of anti-war protesting denouncing the war, the government, and even the soldiers who were picked against their will to fight. Reasons for American entry into the Vietnam War are controversial, and everyone has a different opinion on why we got into the conflict. Multiple reasons contributed to the entry in Vietnam from support of allies who were fighting their battles, to the fact that the American Government felt that they were responsible to stop the spread of communism led America to fight a war that would define an era.
In order to rally support for a war, often something has to happen to get the American people behind the government. In World War Two it was Pearl Harbor, and in Vietnam it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident. On August 2nd, The U.S.S Ticonderoga sank a North Vietnamese ship while on a patrol. Two days later, a U.S ship called the Maddox,
had assumed it was under attack, and began to display its firepower into the night for hours hitting nothing. An interview with a pilot of the Maddox said, "...There was nothing but dark sea, and American firepower." Years later the inc...