American Vietnam veterans as crucial actors of the Asian American movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their experiences of imminent death in the war, magnified by the military’s anti-Asian racism, led them to see the structural violence facing their communities in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and elsewhere as an intrinsic part of the violence of empire. This perception empowered Asian American veterans to play a unique part in the movement for Third World liberation. Chapter 6 explores the coalitions formed among American GIs and Okinawan, Japanese, and Filipino labor and anti-imperialist activists, at the locations where the intensified U.S. war in Southeast Asia was being waged. Sharing a differential yet entangled relationship to the U.S. military, these subjects forged momentary, fragile alliances that disrupted the war effort and challenged the Japanese and Philippine governments’ collusion with the U.S. empire. These movements, forged in the crucible of the decolonizing Pacific, provide a glimpse of another world that’s possible. It is ultimately this sense of evasive possibility of a world not yet arrived that is at the core of this book.
To make Asian and Asian American soldiers central to the history of the Vietnam War is not simply to recover the visibility of yet another racial group that has been written out of the war’s accounts. Instead, it is to demand that we reckon with the global connections that made their travels possible, and that made the war seem inevitable. The paths of these soldiers were layered upon the sediment of colonialism, race, and empire, laid down again and again across the twentieth century; the desires of these soldiers, individual and collective alike, carry the weight of these histories. These histories, in turn, have been elided by conventional accounts of the cold war and by our scholarly instinct to divide geography and time into discrete fixities.39 My conception of the decolonizing Pacific is an attempt to widen the analytical frame by engaging with the cold war’s forgotten histories and imperial roots. And it is admittedly partial. Rather than seeking comprehensive coverage of the places and people who made the decolonizing Pacific, the book has a different, perhaps more modest, goal: to present a history of Asian Americans and the military in which belonging in the nation was neither a sole determining force nor the end goal. In what follows, I tell a story of Asian Americans soldiering through the U.S. empire after World War II, a history of imperial conscription and the new forms of political community and critical imagining—beyond the boundaries of race and nation—that became possible as a result.
ONE
Securing Asia for Asians
MAKING THE U.S. TRANSNATIONAL SECURITY STATE
IT WAS FALL OF 1952, and Hsuan Wei was twenty-four years old when he entered the United States for the first time, determined to change his life one way or another. Wei was a first lieutenant of the Chinese Nationalist Marine Corps and had been given the opportunity to go to the United States to further his military training. The benefits of pursuing it far outweighed the uncertainty he may have felt about leaving home. In September, with few belongings, he arrived at the U.S. Marine Corps School in Quantico, Virginia. On the other side of the Pacific, the Korean War raged unabated, and tensions between the Republic of China and the Communist mainland increased to the threat of impending war. While global events were driving factors behind Wei’s sojourn, they figured mostly in the back of his mind. As far as he was concerned, he was simply seizing an opportunity to advance his military education and career.1
Wei’s transpacific journey hinted at an ordinary life soldiering through empire in the age of decolonization, a far more common story than historians have acknowledged. Wei, in fact, was one of an estimated 141,250 foreign nationals who made their way to the United States for military training in the 1950s. These visitors hailed from all over, from Taiwan, South Korea, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Iran, Indonesia, and many other countries, each undergoing the turbulent processes of nation building after colonial rule. Though they came from different parts of the world, these subjects shared striking similarities. Socioeconomically, they were not disenfranchised people desperate for work but were aspiring individuals who sought to elevate their positions in their national armed forces and, for some, in their governments. Many had served in colonial and imperial armies before their countries’ liberation from colonial rule, and chose to continue a career they knew garnered respect. One Korean soldier, Yi Chiŏp, recalled his time serving in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II: “I worked within the system to gain as much education and training as possible.” This decision tainted him as a “collaborator” among other Koreans, but it allowed him to climb the ranks of the new Korean Constabulary after the war.2
The U.S. militarization that accelerated after World War II was the root of their transpacific journeys and military training. After the war, the United States confronted local insurgencies throughout the former Japanese empire, waged by ordinary people who refused the terms of the American liberation. Cross sections of the population including industrial workers, military base workers, peasants, labor organizers, and students in Korea, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and elsewhere redoubled their efforts for national self-determination. They rekindled longstanding anti-Japanese sentiments and directed them at the United States. U.S. officials felt alarmed, convinced of a global communist movement afoot in Asia. The U.S. state responded by laying the groundwork to fortify indigenous forces, to assist “free nations” to defend themselves from “communists.” In 1949, these efforts cohered in the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP), the first major U.S. military aid initiative that would funnel billions of U.S. dollars to train and equip the national armed forces of allied states over the next decade and beyond.
The making of this transnational security-state apparatus in Asia created massive disruptions on the ground and led to the proliferation of Asian soldiers across the Pacific. To be sure, Asian colonial conscripts had circulated in this region for some time, most recently during World War II when Koreans had been mobilized to far-flung places of the Japanese empire to serve in the imperial army and to labor in factories and mines.3 In one sense, this chapter traces the lives of these martial subjects as they transitioned from the Japanese colonial empire to the U.S. liberal empire. In the context of the protracted global struggle against communism, particular Asians who were newly liberated from colonial rule became the functionaries of the United States’s burgeoning transnational security state in Asia.
This chapter explains how overriding U.S. concerns about global decolonization led to the growing presence of Asian soldiers in the Pacific, and how they in turn provided the endless justifications for the U.S. empire. American military advisers spoke often of these Asian soldiers as “assets,” prized as manpower and for their knowledge of the local terrain. During the heaviest fighting of the Korean War, their use as “buffer” troops purportedly saved “hundreds of thousands” of American lives.4 U.S. state officials reasoned that they were not merely colonial mercenaries mobilized to do the gritty work of the U.S. military but were “free Asians,” democratized subjects who could demonstrate the promise of U.S. liberal democracy to the rest of decolonizing Asia. Conscripted to build Japan’s East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere just a short time before, these subjects emerged as the vanguard of a new pan-Asianism—an “Asia for Asians”—that the United States pursued deliberately against charges of global white supremacy and imperialism. The militarization of Asia against communism and the liberation of Asians from colonialism, the twinned vexing projects of the United States in Asia after World War II, became embodied by these Asian soldiers.
While U.S. officials touted these soldiers as free Asians, they were also citizen-subjects with individual and collective aspirations and grievances that posed challenges for the U.S. state. At a time when these officials grew increasingly concerned about communism at home and abroad, they invariably cast these subjects as “subversives.” The inclusion of free Asians into the U.S. transnational security state, this chapter contends, facilitated movements, encounters, and fleeting alliances among Asian peoples across the U.S. empire that magnified the very problem of subversion it aimed to contain. Not least, it brought people like Hsuan Wei into the United States over the course of the 1950s. The chapter ends by exploring
