Sam Smith - Some of the media have been treating 1965 as the beginning of the Vietnam War, thus celebrating its supposed 50th anniversary. While combat troops were formally sent for the first time in 1965, there were already 23,000 American troops there, a figure that had been growing since 1961.
Admittedly, it is a bit confusing. After all it was in May 1964 that the crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Spar (on which I was serving as operations officer at the time) joined other military in receiving the Defense Service Medal for wartime service. In effect, the US government was finally admitting that that we had been in a war for three years.
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