Underway with the carrier in late November 1965, "Berkeley" made a brief stop at Subic Bay in the Philippines before proceeding to the South China Sea for combat operations off Vietnam. Upon arrival on "Yankee Station" on 16 December, "Berkeley" joined Task Force (TF) 77 in support of Operation Rolling Thunder. This naval air campaign, begun the previous March, sought to cut the flow of munitions and supplies to the Viet Cong insurgents in the south by interdicting North Vietnam's logistics pipelines through Laos and across the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Assigned to the northern search-and-rescue (SAR) station in the Gulf of Tonkin, "Berkeley", in company with the cruiser "Topeka" and destroyer , patrolled the area through the end of January 1966.