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Now the third torpedo boat took up the attack. Skillfully, she pulled 5,000 yds. abeam of the destroyer so that evasion would be far more difficult. But this also brought the PT boat under the fire of two pairs of the Maddox's biggest guns. The Maddox fired—a direct hit. The enemy craft stopped dead in the water, helpless and aflame. Later she could not be found and was assumed to have sunk.
In the nearby South China Sea, the U.S. Aircraft Carrier Ticonderoga maintained continuous communication with the Maddox. She reported that four supersonic F-8 Crusader jets, already airborne at the time of the attack, were on the way. Moments later the jets streaked in, unleashed eight Zuni rockets at the two fleeing boats, scored two hits (despite the fact that the early model Zunis are designed for strafing fixed targets) and strafed the boats with their 20-mm. cannon. The two craft slowed but continued north. The jet pilots, certain that the attack had been repulsed, turned back to the Ticonderoga. At 3:29 p.m., the 21-minute battle—the first direct clash between U.S. and Communist armed vehicles since Korea—was over.
Swift Orders. About 4,000 miles away, near Wake Island, a U.S. Navy C-118 staff plane droned toward Honolulu. Aboard was Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp Jr., commander in chief of the U.S. forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC). "Oley" Sharp was returning to his headquarters near Pearl Harbor after touring the U.S. military missions in South Viet Nam and Thailand —the everlasting hot spots of his vast command (see box). It was over the C-118 radiotelephone that the word of the fight in Tonkin Gulf was relayed to Sharp.
The admiral wasted no time. Swiftly he sent orders to his CINCPAC headquarters: the Maddox will stay in the gulf—and a destroyer, the 2,850-ton Turner Joy, then cruising in the South China Sea, will join her at once.
"Here was a U.S. Navy ship attacked on the high seas," Oley Sharp explained later. "You can't accept any interference with our use of international waters. You must go back to the same place and say, 'Here's two of us this time, if you want to try anything.' " When he landed in Honolulu, newsmen were waiting for him. "Our ships are always going to go where they need to be," he said crisply. "If they shoot at us, we are going to shoot back."