Turner Joy and the Night That Started a War
Near Bremerton, Washington
The destroyer tied to the pier at the Bremerton waterfront was commissioned right here, at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, on August third, nineteen fifty-nine. She was named USS Turner Joy, after Admiral Charles Turner Joy, who had led American forces at the Korean War armistice negotiations. She was a Forrest Sherman class destroyer, sleek and fast, built for the Cold War.
Five years after her commissioning, she was in the Gulf of Tonkin.
On August second, nineteen sixty-four, USS Maddox engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. It was a real engagement: torpedoes in the water, five-inch guns firing, aircraft overhead. Turner Joy raced to assist but arrived after the Vietnamese boats had withdrawn.
Two nights later, on August fourth, everything became less certain.
Turner Joy's radar picked up contacts at extreme range. The ship's crew reported sighting torpedo wakes. For two and a half hours, Turner Joy fired approximately two hundred twenty five-inch rounds at blips on a screen while aircraft circled overhead. No wreckage was found. No bodies surfaced. No Vietnamese vessel was confirmed sunk or damaged.
Captain John Herrick, the task force commander, sent a cable that night expressing serious doubt. He wrote that freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar operators may have accounted for many of the reports. He recommended complete evaluation before any further action.
The evaluation did not come. President Lyndon Johnson announced the attack to the nation. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August seventh, nineteen sixty-four, by a vote of four hundred sixteen to zero in the House and eighty-eight to two in the Senate. It authorized the president to conduct military operations in Southeast Asia without a formal declaration of war. It became the legal foundation for the entire American ground war in Vietnam.
A two-thousand-five declassified National Security Agency study concluded that the August fourth attack had not occurred. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who had recommended the retaliatory strikes, acknowledged in a two-thousand-three documentary that there was no attack that night.
Turner Joy was decommissioned in nineteen eighty-two. In nineteen ninety-two, she was opened to the public as a museum ship, here in Bremerton, the city where she was born. The ship also fired the final round of naval gunfire of the Vietnam War, at one second before the ceasefire took effect on January twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-three. She carries both distinctions: the shot that may have started the war, and the last shot before it ended.
