ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to describe how the United States (US) got itself progressively more involved in Vietnam. The US slowly disengaged itself from Vietnam; but the war itself continued and was in fact broadened to the whole of Indochina. By mid-1962, the US had military advisors throughout South Vietnam and with all major force units. From bases deep inside South Vietnam, unmarked US bombers with US crews flying under the cover name of “Operation Farmgate” were systematically endeavoring to eliminate enemy rear bases and infrastructure. The US felt that in counterinsurgency techniques it had found answers that had heretofore eluded the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese Communist leaders in Hanoi’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam and in the South’s Viet Cong or National Liberation Front were men of a mold and mind entirely different from that of the members or leaders of the Politburo in Moscow.
