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Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by dragonwriter on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @06:52PM (#18668716)
> Still, those were (mostly?) advisors rather than front-line troops.

Initially, but that stopped being true well before Tonkin.

> Per Wikipedia, ground combat troops first came after Tonkin

Not sure which Wikipedia page you got that from but see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Assistance_Command,...

Which discusses, among other things, the 1964 MACV/MAAG-Vietnam reorg due to the scale of combat deployments straining the advisory-oriented command structure, and a similar issue prompting a naval command structure reorg in 1966.

(Those reports were under Johnson, but thet largely addressed strains produced by the ramp up under Kennedy.)

> Still, in no case is it reasonable to say that Truman started it.

Sure, Eisenhower or Kennedy are more reasonable.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @07:01PM (#18668767)
I was at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War, which said:

> By 1964 there were 23,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, but this escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. In response the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave Lyndon B. Johnson authorization to increase U.S. military presence, deploying ground combat units for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000.

"Ground combat units for the first time" was the phrase that, to me, said that the US was now there in a full war condition.