i dont see why peple are saying that Tonkin was so narrow...
it was quite broad. they didnt want you to only talk about tonkin, otherwise the dates they gave would not have been 54-68. they wanted you to describe its significance in US increased intervention, but to analyse its significance it was important to first look at other elements of increase and their significance, and things like that...
My Structure:
Intro
Before 1960 - advisors, domino theory, SEATO, etc
Kennedy - increase advisors, wanted out, gave reasons for hsi increase (bay of pigs fiasco etc)
Tonkin - wrote about this in depth with hitoriography from 3 sources or sumthing
Plieku incident
Tet - described how it saw a decline in US intervention etc.
Thats basically it - if you structured it sumthing like that you should be fine.. dontworry if u think u rambled about other things, there was only one way to show how significant it was and that was by basically making a comparison toother events.