In our final topic of IGCSE History, the Grade 10 students have begun looking at Amercia’s conflict in Vietnam. The first question we’ve examined is the mystery of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which two U.S. Naval vessels were attacked–or maybe not–by Vietnamese ships. To this day it’s never been determined what actually happened on August 2, 1964 (though most historians tend to think that no such thing occurred).
Either way, it precipitated Amercia’s larger involvement in a hugely costly and, ultimately, unsuccessful Cold War episode. And it shaped how Amercia thinks of its wars today.