decolonizing Pacific. Soldiering, seen both as labor and as process, reveals the violence undergirding the project of U.S. liberation and the discursive complexities of U.S. imperial violence, all while allowing us to map the scale of the U.S. empire amidst the terrain of individual life.
Finally, soldiering extends the study of race in Asian American history and elucidates the workings of race within a globe-spanning empire. The exploits of the “all-Nisei” 100th Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team in World War II, created both for their manpower and for their symbolic value as reformed American citizens, have been well documented.31 These and other soldiers of color demonstrated the U.S. commitment to racial democracy; and indeed their utility expanded after World War II. As the United States ramped up its struggle against communism in the Korean War, the integration of African American troops became an ideological and military imperative.32 Such efforts have been framed largely within a narrative of cold war civil rights, in which U.S. foreign policy objectives compelled symbolic yet significant reforms.33 The Asian American “model minority,” scholars have shown, emerged during this same time as a figurative bridge between the racism of the past and the ideal of a postracial present. As the civil rights movement exploded, the image of the model minority helped to explain away racial grievances in terms of individual deficiency and cultural pathology within the black community; just as important, the model minority also evidenced the United States’s commitment to liberal inclusion for the decolonizing world.34
My aim here is to extend the study of Asian Americans and race within a transnational field, but to revise a core proposition: U.S. wars in Asia after 1945, I contend, did not simply form the backdrop for racial minorities to assert their claims to national belonging; rather, those wars were the very ground upon which racial liberalism emerged as a dominant force in U.S. politics. This book argues that race making and war making were deeply entangled, and they were crucial to the U.S. empire and the making of Asian American subjects.35 In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States mobilized Asian soldiers both for their potential to represent American democracy on the world stage and as particular assets for counterinsurgency. Indeed, the inclusion of Asians into the military proceeded apace of state efforts to eliminate racism in military culture. “We still have Americans who see ‘gooks’ and ‘flips’ and ‘wily Orientals,’” Edward Lansdale, the famed counterinsurgent and CIA operative, remarked in 1957, “but those who have come to know Koreans and Filipinos and Asians as friends have increased numbers tremendously.”36 Guided by the belief that a more inclusionary and less racist military would help legitimate and bring about the “free world,” U.S. officials transformed the culture and infrastructure of the military. The inclusion of Asians into the globalizing U.S. military empire, and their formation as “free Asians” therein, was a manifestation of this imperative.
Racial inclusion, however, did not produce an orderly free world, but its opposite: more violence, more insurgencies. Channeling Asians into the military indeed magnified the global communist menace, whether real or imagined, that such policies sought to contain in the first place. In 1948, when soldiers of the newly minted South Korean Army were called to subdue a peasant rebellion, some refused and turned on their officers. In the late 1960s, Asian American GIs, including Nakayama and Nagatani, came to disavow their role and became advocates of anti-imperialism. These instances of soldiers’ revolts were hints of another world on the verge of becoming. By the early 1970s, GIs stationed in Asia and the Pacific were building alliances with base workers and anti-imperialist activists that were short-lived yet remarkable in what they sought to achieve. During this time, some turned to culture to critically reimagine the possibilities for an East Asian modernity not yet arrived, an alternative future that was not predicated on militarized violence. In short, the labor of soldiers was never divorced from the imperial and anti-imperial politics taking shape around them. As these emergent political struggles coalesced around the Vietnam War, they revived memories of the multiple, convergent histories of colonialism in Asia and the Pacific not yet ended, the very conditions of possibility for the colonial present. Soldiering thus necessarily entailed its counterpractice of undoing the violence of empire and reckoning with an unfinished decolonization. The military, this book demonstrates, formed the crucible of imperial encounters and anticolonial resistance that made the decolonizing Pacific into a dynamic site of political struggles.
This is a work of history that attempts to reconstruct a past, however partial and incomplete, that has fallen in the cracks between sweeping histories of the cold war and specific national histories. It is based on archival research across the continental United States, Asia, and the Pacific, as well as oral history with the soldiers, workers, and activists whose lives are the heart of this story. In charting the rise of the decolonizing Pacific, I read across multiple archives to ask how seemingly disjointed histories were imbricated with each other.37 The U.S. National Archives where I conducted the bulk of the research is an endless trove of documentation about particular events, places, and institutions that were crucial to the post–World War II U.S. empire; the occupations of South Korea and Japan, the U.S. Army’s stationing in Hawai‘i, and the Vietnam War are each recorded extensively, and yet their connections are not immediately transparent. Thus, I approach the National Archives not merely as a repository of knowledge retrieval about these specific events in specific places, but as a site to apprehend how the government thought about—indeed obsessed about—the subjects who traversed these national and imperial boundaries. In sifting through the official documents, including military histories, records of memorandum, reports of “lessons learned,” and surveillance dossiers, I am interested in how state and military officials made sense of the unruly aftermaths of global decolonization, and how they sought to impose order upon a disorderly world, by engineering and controlling the movements of people. I am also interested in how soldiers, workers, and activists navigated through and negotiated these state efforts. At times, these negotiations are legible in the National Archives, registered in the anxieties and concerns of officials. But when official records could not provide answers, I turned to other archives and to oral history, not merely to fill gaps or silences or to put forth a more truthful account based on personal experience, but to ascertain how some of these subjects imagined and pursued another world that the official state archives could only give a hint of, to give shape to, as Lisa Lowe put it, the “‘what could have been.’”38
The book moves chronologically in six chapters. In the first two, I explain the U.S. efforts to promote and to fortify a vision of “Asia for Asians” through the military in the late 1940s and 1950s. Chapter 1 details the U.S. buildup of the armed forces of South Korea and other allied countries in Asia after World War II; chapter 2 traces the circuits of Filipino paramilitary workers and medics that were crucial to the counterinsurgency in South Vietnam in the 1950s. In both cases, U.S. officials justified these endeavors as part of a broader project of teaching former colonial subjects how to embody freedom and to embark on nation building, and in both cases, they carried unintended consequences. Rather than achieving an integrated “free” Asia, the efforts to create an “Asia for Asians” sowed the seeds of its own unraveling, deepening anticolonial nationalism throughout the region.
The next two chapters examine the escalation of the U.S. ground war in Vietnam in the 1960s from the vantage point of particular countries and territories that were in the throes of a thwarted decolonization. Chapter 3 uncovers the military mobilization and training practices in Hawai‘i around the time of its transition to statehood; chapter 4 turns to South Korea and the Philippines and the deployment of their citizens to the war during a period of nationalist upheaval and economic restructuring. As these countries and territory became further embroiled in the U.S. war, their citizens began to comprehend more fully the limits of their sovereignty. They made connections between the imperial violence in Vietnam and state repression at home, and came to articulate a deeper understanding of their own unfinished decolonization that took seriously the question of their governments’ complicity in the war.
The last two chapters delve into these emergent
