Now 82, Newberry only remembers a little of the conversation-and he has forgotten the sailor’s name. This story was one that only Newberry and a handful of other biologists in the world could believe. What they thought were torpedoes, he insisted, were in fact living things. The engineer was convinced that the military had been mistaken about the attack. They seemed to have a will of their own-to come at the ship, then drift right under. The objects were the size of torpedoes, but they didn’t move like any torpedo the engineer had ever seen before. As Newberry tells it, the sonar engineer spoke of strange shapes picked up on the Turner Joy’s sonar displays during the supposed attack. “He was not supposed to be talking about this stuff, I’m sure,” says Newberry, a professor emeritus of marine biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz who recently recounted this conversation to me. But even today, it’s still not clear whether the Turner Joy and Maddox had actually been under fire. This encounter was pivotal in plunging the United States into the decade-long war that killed 58,000 Americans along with 2.5 million Vietnamese and Southeast Asians. Just two years prior, Turner Joy, along with USS Maddox, had reportedly been attacked by Vietnamese boats in a mysterious battle known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. ![]() ![]() The stranger turned out to be a Navy sonar engineer assigned to the destroyer USS Turner Joy. On a gray summer day in 1966, Todd Newberry was watching seabirds squabble above the kelp forests of California’s Monterey Bay, when a sailor struck up a conversation that changed his understanding of the Vietnam War.
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