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Vietnam was a weird situation in general because there really wasn't a specific incident in the beginning, but just a gradual escalation of forces and then turned into a war.
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Gradual escalation until 1964, when this happened:
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The Gulf of Tonkin Incident prompted the first large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. It was a pair of attacks perpetrated by naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the Communist government of North Vietnam) against two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. The incident occurred on August 2 and 4, 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin.[1]
The outcome of the incident was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War, which lasted until 1975.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident