Soldiering through Empire. Simeon Man

      Under different circumstances, the presence of Filipino workers in another country would have been unremarkable. Since the early twentieth century, Filipinos had engaged in cultures of transnational mobility, an effect and legacy of U.S. colonialism. In the first decade of the U.S. colonial period, the pensionado and nursing programs were established and brought Filipina/o students and nurses to the United States, opening new avenues for individual advancement and reproducing the gendered division of labor that were at the heart of the U.S. “civilizing” mission in the Philippines. Beginning in 1903, the U.S. Navy also recruited Filipinos, primarily as stewards and messboys. These patterns of labor migration intensified in the years after Philippine independence, as Filipina/os increasingly found work overseas and came to see themselves as participants in the export-driven economy of the postcolonial state. The doctors and nurses who traveled to Vietnam in 1954 were an integral part of this longstanding colonial diaspora.¹⁹ Instead of going to the imperial metropole, they found opportunities closer to home, in a country where the United States was working to secure a new nation.

      Lansdale, the U.S. intelligence officer who had spent the better part of a decade fomenting counterrevolution in the Philippines, was responsible for bringing the Filipinos to South Vietnam. Lansdale shunned conventional military tactics and opted to become close to the people and earn their trust. During the initial phase of EDCOR, Lansdale first met JCI Director Oscar Arellano who offered the services of his Manila Jaycees to collect basic medical supplies for Philippine Army soldiers to bring to the barrios. Lansdale believed the humanitarian work of the Jaycees could help soften the image of the army, which was a vital component to his EDCOR scheme. His psywar work in the Philippines, most notably his political manipulations that steered Secretary of National Defense Ramon Magsaysay into the presidency in 1953, impressed Secretary of State Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, the CIA director. Operation Brotherhood was a distant outcome of those experiences. In January 1954, John Dulles instructed Lansdale to go to Vietnam “to do what you did in the Philippines.” When Lansdale arrived in Saigon in June, Arellano was meeting with Vietnamese Jaycees to discuss ways to help with the refugee crisis. When Lansdale saw his old friend in Saigon, he thought it was “a touch of Philippine sunshine … [to the] gloomy Vietnamese scene.”²⁰