On the morning of July 31, 1964, the US Navy destroyer MADDOX (DD-731) began a reconnaissance patrol, called a DESOTO patrol, along the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. The main goal was to gather information about the coastal defense forces.

It was expected that the North Vietnamese coastal defense forces would be quite active, so a lot could be learned about them, because a number of covert operations were being carried out against the North Vietnamese coast around this time. These operations, under OPLAN (Operations Plan) 34A, were carried out by moderate-sized vessels (some old American PT boats with the torpedo tubes removed, and some new Norwegian-built Nasty boats, about the size of a PT boat), based at Danang.

Around midnight on the night of July 30-31, OPLAN 34A raiders from Danang shelled two of North Vietnam's offshore islands, Hon Me and Hon Ngu (a.k.a. Hon Nieu).

On the afternoon of August 2, when the MADDOX was not far from Hon Me, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats came out from Hon Me and attacked the MADDOX. The attack was unsuccessful, though one bullet from a heavy machinegun on one of the torpedo boats did hit the destroyer. This is often referred to as the "first attack."

Warning: many books have the interval between the OPLAN 34A raid on Hon Me and the attack on the MADDOX much shorter than it actually was: two and a half days.

The MADDOX left the Gulf of Tonkin after this incident, but came back on August 3, accompanied by another destroyer, the TURNER JOY (DD-951).

There were more OPLAN 34A raids on the night of August 3-4, this time shelling two points on the North Vietnamese mainland. The destroyers did not participate; the raids were carried out by the boats from Danang.

Late on the afternoon of August 4, the two destroyers headed away from the North Vietnamese coast toward the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin. That night, they began picking up what appeared to be high-speed vessels on their radar. They believed they were being attacked, and opened fire. Most of the supposed attacking vessels, however, appeared only on the radar of the TURNER JOY, not the radar of the MADDOX. Some men on the destroyers decided later that what had appeared on the radar had just been ghost images; others think the radar images were genuine torpedo boats attacking them. This is often referred to as the "second attack."

The following afternoon, aircraft from two US aircraft carriers, the TICONDEROGA and the CONSTELLATION, carried out retaliatory airstrikes. The targets for the most part were coastal patrol vessels of the North Vietnamese Navy, but a major petroleum storage facility at the town of Vinh was also hit, and in fact the destruction of this facility was the most important accomplishment of the airstrikes.

On August 7, the US Congress passed, almost unanimously, the "Tonkin Gulf Resolution," giving President Johnson basically a blank check to use "all necessary measures" to deal with "aggression" in Vietnam. The Johnson administration had been wanting to get such a resolution from the Congress; the Tonkin Gulf incidents made a good excuse. It does not appear, however, that the incidents had been deliberately concocted in order to provide the excuse.