Why US involved directly in vietnam war?

Question:Why did United States become *directly* involved in the conflict in Vietnam in the 1960s?

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US first sent aid to South Vietnam, but why did US directly involved in the conflict?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Why did United States become *directly* involved in the conflict in Vietnam in the 1960s?

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US first sent aid to South Vietnam, but why did US directly involved in the conflict?

Technology never seems to advance quicker than in a time of war. I'm sure the prospect of a conflict thousands of miles from home soil left the American arms industries salivating. A testing ground for new conventional weapons, biological and chemical weapons and any spooky games of psychological warfare that clandestine agencies like the CIA and DIA might want to play. Then you have the projects that involve ones own troops. Battlefield testing of new equipment, new tactics, the augmentation of the common grunts abilities through designer combat drugs, the possibilities are endless. Not to mention the chance to give the majority of ones standing force actual combat experience. Those that survive and make it back are then a valuable resource for training the next generation of grunts. In my opinion such opportunities tend to favour, 'the long game'. Certain collated data may apply to the immediate situation, but the majority I believe would be applied to the next conflict, and so on, ad infinitum.

They didn't want communism to spread to other small asian countries, so they thought they would try and stamp it out there. Communism was basically what terrorism is today.

I guess the answer to your questions is "the Gulf of Tonkin affair." In 1964, two US Navy destroyers sailed in and out of North Vietnamese territorial waters in order to stage a border incident. "The Pentagon Papers," the Government documents records that Daniel Ellsberg made public, showed that the ships had been ordered to stage this affair to make it look like North Vietnam was the "bad guy."

North Vietnamese gunboats (their "navy") came out to investigate the radar returns and the US Navy attacked them with 5-inch radar-aimed naval guns. Then the USS Ticonderoga, an aircraft carrier that "happened" to be nearby sent planes to strafe the wreckage and the survivors. The next day President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Congress for a broad but vague mandate to wage war in Vietnam.

As for why the US govt would go to all the trouble of staging an elaborate border incident, the idea was to fight communism in some small faraway country in order to show the Soviet Union that we would fight them anywhere, just as Kennedy had said we would. According to the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg and others, created this plan with what they felt was the best of intentions; halt communism. What the Govt in general, and the US Army in specific did with the plan is where everything went awry.

The US thought that communism could dominate the world, but they were wrong, it never did. This was a war on communism and it was a total failure.

To anyone who thinks communism is terror: why do you hypocrites say that when the USA is currently trying to dominate the Middle East by terrorising it with war???

The US supported the South Vietnamese government. Our government was afraid that is South Vietnam became communist, all of Asia would become communist. Gary Dominicus