Tonkin Gulf Redux? DARK SIGNALS draft finished -- 68,000 words

I guess I should be bouncing up and down with literary joy. I have just completed a new, 68,000-word draft of my next book, DARK SIGNALS: A Navy Radio Operator in the Tonkin Gulf, 1964-1965. I can now send it to the publisher and take a couple of weeks off while I wait for feedback and the inevitable requests for changes and corrections.

It's funny (or maybe not so funny) how history repeats itself. While writing this book, I kept thinking: Well, this is old news. Not many people will even remember or care about what happened in the South China Sea and Tonkin Gulf in the mid-1960s, just when the Vietnam War was heating up.

Now, suddenly, there has been breaking news from those very waters. An unarmed American "ocean survey" ship, the USNS Impeccable, recently was surrounded and harrassed by several Chinese vessels in the South China Sea. And the Impeccable's crew had to open "fire" with fire hoses to try to keep the Chinese boats from colliding with them.

The Chinese charged that the U.S. ship was violating international laws with its "surveys."

Some disputed parts of the South China Sea and Tonkin Gulf have been repeatedly "surveyed" by U.S. naval ships since the late 1950s and early 1960s, initially sent there by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. The goal, in those long-ago days, was to try to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.

In 1964, U.S. surveillance operations along the North Vietnamese coast helped lead to some confrontations and miscalculations that caused the Vietnam War to flare up and drag on for many years. That was how I ended up in the South China Sea and Tonkin Gulf for almost a year aboard a destroyer.

The Soviet Union also operated some "ocean survey" ships in those waters, including the spy trawler Gidrofon. It often tried to get in the way of aircraft carriers launching bombing raids on North Vietnam. Sometimes, my ship had to get in the Gidrofon's way and keep it out of a carrier's way.

Will there be a new Tonkin Gulf crisis that will make my military memoir suddenly timely again--after 45 years? It's a scary thought.

-- Si Dunn