the veterans were called the Freedom Company of the Philippines. To the Vietnamese, these Filipinos were friends as opposed to colonizers; their acts were related to humanitarianism and nation building as opposed to war.
This chapter examines how these groups of Filipinos came to arrive in South Vietnam as well as the work that they accomplished on behalf of the U.S. and Philippine governments. It begins with the premise that the U.S. war in Vietnam emerged out of complex intercolonial dynamics in Southeast Asia after 1945, and that U.S. militarism in Vietnam was as much about waging the cold war in the former French colony as it was an ongoing part of the decades-long U.S. colonial project in the Philippines. As French control in the region waned and the United States stepped in to assume the French role, U.S. officials made their support of “Asia for Asians” loud and clear, challenged by the surge of anticolonial nationalisms in the Third World. Philippine state leaders, determined to shape regional geopolitics, lent support to the United States and performed their part as America’s “show window of democracy.” It was exactly this interplay between empire and decolonization that created the pathways for Filipinos’ arrival in Vietnam in 1954. As “brothers,” “neighbors,” and “fellow Asians,” these Filipinos, U.S. and Philippine officials hoped, would mobilize the lessons of American democracy and impart them to the Vietnamese.
Similar to the Chinese and Korean soldiers who traversed the Pacific for military training during this same period, these Filipino doctors, nurses, and veterans traveled on routes shaped by overlapping colonial histories and the imperatives of the U.S. military. They emerged as agents of U.S. psychological warfare, tasked to gain the trust of the population by performing different kinds of intimacies, such as caring for the body and other convivial encounters. While psychological warfare went by a host of other terms in this period—special operations, covert action, civic action—it reflected the growing collaboration between the military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as they intervened in the processes of decolonization, by employing creative and deadly methods to suppress anticolonial movements and to redirect emergent state nationalisms toward the aims of the capitalist “free world.” CIA operatives under military cover in Vietnam experimented with different tactics to befriend and win the trust of the Vietnamese. The CIA operatives thought the “Asiatic-to-Asiatic” approach of Operation Brotherhood and Freedom Company was a winning formula.
By mobilizing Filipinos to win the affection and loyalty of the Vietnamese, the CIA reanimated U.S. colonialism in the Philippines for the purpose of demarcating the boundaries of “free Asia.” Adherents of such unconventional practices and doctrines insisted repeatedly that counterinsurgency signaled a new kind of war from the colonial wars of the past, one predicated on forging relations of intimacy between soldier and civilian, in which “the soldier [was] a brother of the people, as well as their protector,” and in which racism no longer functioned to justify the tactics of colonial violence. The use of Filipinos in Vietnam reinforced and belied these claims simultaneously.
Most scholarly accounts of U.S.-Philippine colonial politics end in 1946, but the incorporation of Filipinos into the U.S. empire and their racialization as U.S. colonial subjects continued well past this point. These processes continued to unfold through the humanitarian and militarized labor of Filipinos across the South China Sea. In South Vietnam, at the interstices of multiple and competing visions of postcolonial nation building, the Filipinos made their mark on the Vietnamese people through psychological warfare. Their presence and impact at once concealed the violence of U.S. empire and made America’s “Asia for Asians” seem possible.
COLONIAL INTIMACIES BETWEEN GENEVA AND BANDUNG
The French mistakenly thought it would be easy to crush the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, but they had underestimated the strength and determination of their colonized subjects. In the spring of 1954, the Viet Minh dealt a stunning blow to French forces in the siege of Dien Bien Phu. The battle marked the end of the war, and news of the French defeat traveled quickly across the globe, soon inspiring revolutionaries in Algiers to call forth their own revolt against the French. The black American activist Paul Robeson, fighting white supremacy from the seat of U.S. empire, was moved to pen an essay hailing Ho Chi Minh as the “Toussaint L’Overture of Indochina.” The Viet Minh’s victory signified the beginning of the end of empire. However, the revolutionary meaning of the Viet Minh’s victory evaporated rapidly.7
In the hopes of gaining advantage during negotiations, the Viet Minh had timed their victory perfectly to coincide with the Geneva Conference. The very day of victory, state leaders of the five major world powers (the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the United States, France, and Great Britain) gathered at Geneva, prepared to settle the terms of the Indochina War. The Euro-American allies were most concerned with how French colonialism’s end would redistribute global relations of power, instead of determining what an independent Vietnam should look like. In the end, the participants agreed to partition Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, regrouping French forces to the south and the Viet Minh to the north, and to ban further military buildup and military alliances on both sides. The accords stipulated the reunification of the country by general elections in 1956. All world powers signed the agreement except the United States, because U.S. plans to subvert the Geneva Accords and to maneuver greater influence in Vietnam were already under way.8
During the Geneva Conference and even long before, U.S. leaders worried about the political implications of their ongoing association with France over Indochinese matters. In a policy statement, one State Department official, Charlton Ogburn, warned plainly that supporting the French was no longer tenable. He believed that backing France militarily would ensure “the loss of all Vietnam and all of Indochina” to the communists, and “cause a serious decline of American prestige in the Far East, widespread resentment and despair among the Asians over our short-sighted and bitter-end support of the French.” Ogburn advised that the United States should seek a “common approach” with other Asian nations, which would pay dividends: “We [would] have put ourselves in the best possible light in non-Communist Asia, have given the Asians valuable experience in bearing responsibility and have prepared the basis for effective cooperation between the free Asian countries and ourselves in preventing the further expansion of Communism.” Simply put: a stand for Asian unity was a stand against communism and colonialism.9
In an attempt to distance the United States from the French and from Euro-imperialism generally, U.S. officials found support in the Philippines to attest to America’s exceptionalism. As early as 1946, Philippine Resident Commissioner Carlos P. Romulo had hailed the U.S. independence legislation for the Philippines as “the beginning of the end for imperialism,” saying that it “encouraged the dream of ultimate freedom among colonial peoples.” Romulo embraced his part as a postcolonial middling elite, glowing about American democracy just as often as he presumed to interpret the desires of the “Asian masses” for U.S. leaders. In 1950, as the Truman Administration began to aid the French in the Indochina War, Romulo told Secretary of State Acheson, “In the eyes of the great mass of the people of Indochina and Asia, the French army … is a hostile army, an enemy of Viet Nam independence.” The U.S. decision to support France in turn had resulted in “the virtual isolation of American policy from the sentiment of Asian countries.” He made it clear that the challenge for the United States was to unburden itself “of the suspicion of pro-imperialism.” He said, “I personally am convinced that this suspicion is unjustified, but how could it be otherwise in the untutored minds of Asia’s discontented masses?”10
Shortly after the Geneva Conference, the U.S. pursuit of forging a collective “Asian front” to signal its commitment to anti-imperialism and anticommunism materialized at the founding meeting of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in Manila, which occurred from September 5 to 8, 1954. Representatives from the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, France, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States gathered at the Manila Conference to proclaim their anticommunist solidarity and collective resolve to safeguard Southeast Asia. They were keen on protecting Vietnam and its bordering states of Laos and Cambodia
