At first, people didn’t feel like getting involved because Vietnam is far away and nobody really felt communism was a threat. McCarthyism changed that. People started to see communists as the enemy (which is arguably accurate). Politicians came up with “the domino affect,” an idea that stated that once Vietnam falls to communism, all of Southeast Asia will follow suit, leading to Europe and, eventually, America. Americans still needed a final push, however, so politicians needed to demonstrate how NVA/VC troops were willing to kill Americans. Once the Gulf of Tonkin incident happened, everyone (any non-hippy) tipped to the government’s side of the scale and decided that a war in Vietnam was inevitable. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was likely a false flag attack, or in other words, it was staged. The US had already been sending special forces teams to train South Vietnamese fighters. These teams were known as MACV companies (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam).
