Soldiering through Empire. Simeon Man

the speech lent every indication that Yi was “an active agent of the Communist-controlled North Korean regime,” and they became obsessed with his political past. As a telegram revealed, in 1919 Yi had taken part in the Korean underground independence movement in Shanghai, which led to his arrest and imprisonment for four years by Japanese authorities. Upon his release he founded the Korean Revolutionary Party and gained membership in the Korean Nationalist Association, a group “which had connections with the Chinese Communist Party.” Like many others, Yi sensed an opportunity when the United States declared war on Japan; he enlisted in the U.S. Army, served in the India and China theaters, and acquired citizenship through his military service. Earning his citizenship did little to sway his political convictions. Disillusioned by the U.S. military occupation in Korea after the war, Yi maintained associations with Korean leftists in the United States and continued to agitate for Korean independence, all while working as a Korean-language instructor in Seattle and occasionally living in Los Angeles.⁶⁴ Looking back at Yi’s thirty-plus years of “communist” activities, state officials wondered how such an outlaw ever managed to slip into the military, much less to obtain citizenship. In 1950, the State Department recommended that Yi’s naturalization be deemed “fraudently [sic] obtained” and permanently revoked.⁶⁵

      The apparent ease by which Yi Sa Min led his dual lives as a domesticated U.S. citizen and a foreign agent confounded state officials beyond anything else. In ensuing years, it was precisely the indecipherability of these slippery categories that fueled the anticommunist persecution of Asian residents in the United States, resulting in the deportation of Filipino labor activists and the forced confessions of tens of thousands of “illegal” Chinese residents.⁶⁶ But Yi’s expulsion also took place in the context of pressing geopolitical events, which renewed the question about the utility of Asians in the military. In the fall of 1949, the Chinese civil war between Communist and Nationalist forces came to a decisive end with the former declaring victory. The “loss” of China to communism stoked fears among some U.S. officials about the region’s stability, especially if China should export its revolution to Southeast Asia and Korea. The imminence of Japan’s economic collapse in 1949 compounded this scenario.⁶⁷ The specter of a sweeping revolution in Asia and the loss of Japan as a regional surrogate demanded a new U.S. strategy, one that would secure the region through communist containment and economic integration.

      This strategy was provided by the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, approved by Congress on October 6, 1949. The act consolidated all U.S. foreign military aid projects up to that time under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP), appropriating $1.5 billion in aid for the first year; and in August 1950, with the Korean War in full swing, President Truman requested an additional $4 billion. Beyond the scope and price tag, MDAP’s more enduring significance rested on its conception of Pacific security. MDAP created essentially a “hub-and-spokes” security system in Asia, in which bilateral treaties between the United States and particular nation-states provided the basis for the security of the entire region. MDAP furnished new and old allied states with military equipment, economic aid, training, and technical assistance, granted with the firm assurance that an attack on one country was an attack on the United States and the “free world,” and would be met with swift retaliation.⁶⁸

      From the beginning, this transnational security state in Asia drew on a language of “self-help” and “mutual aid” to underscore its legitimacy as a decidedly anticolonial arrangement. MDAP granted aid to those who requested it, to give “free nations which intend to remain free” the tools to defend themselves from communism.⁶⁹ On the ground, this discourse of helping Asians help themselves translated into the growing presence of U.S. military advisers that assisted with the buildup and training of national armed forces, a process that was under way in countries such as the Philippines and South Korea. In the fall of 1948, the first six Korean Constabulary officers arrived in the United States to receive training in U.S. military service schools, as part of a new training program initiated by the U.S. Military Advisory Group to the Republic of Korea (KMAG). This initial cohort was the precursor to the tens of thousands more from South Korea and other countries in Asia who did the same over the course of the 1950s through MDAP. After their training, these trainees were expected to return to their home countries, having acquired “first-hand knowledge of how Americans do things,” and to help develop and modernize their own militaries.⁷⁰

      In the name of promoting freedom, MDAP thus set the foundation for the United States to extend its military empire in Asia. It was a process that led to the transit and circulation of “free” Asian soldiers across the Pacific, and their arrival in the United States occurred at the precise moment when U.S. officials faced growing concerns about the presence of “subversives” in the military. Their racialized presence reproduced and magnified the threat of communist subversion even as they were hailed as the solution to curbing its global spread.

      STIMULATING A “GENUINE WILL TO FIGHT”

      In September 1951, through MDAP, the first group of 263 Koreans arrived in the United States. A majority of them enrolled in a special twenty-week course at the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. The official records of G-2 identified each individual by first and last name, a headshot photograph, and scant biographical information. The file on Kang Chun Gill, for example, revealed that he was born on October 15, 1928, married with no children, and an educated man, having attended primary and secondary schools in Japan as well as two years each at Hanguk University in Seoul and Taegu Normal College. Kang was “fluent” in Japanese and “fair” in spoken English, but better in reading, writing, and translating. His religion was “Protestant,” his politics, “none,” and he occupied the rank of a second lieutenant. We know little else of Kang’s life, or the lives of the other 262 trainees, for that matter.⁷¹

      While G-2 divulged little, the historical record reveals that these individuals were the product of long and contentious debates among U.S. officials about the benefits of utilizing Asian soldiers. The debates began shortly after the Korean War started in June 1950. U.S. leaders knew already that the Korean War was the beginning of a much longer and wider war to secure the Asian periphery and link its economies to Japan, which in due time would embroil the United States in Vietnam. The seemingly boundless scope and geography of the war in Korea demanded flexibility and vigilance on the part of Americans. Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall told the Senate Armed Services Committee in January 1951, “We are confronted with a world situation of such gravity and such unpredictability that we must be prepared for effective action, whether the challenge comes with the speed of sound or is delayed for a lifetime.”⁷²

      Marshall’s statement echoed a broader concern among U.S. officials about the overstretched U.S. military and its state of combat readiness. With less than seven hundred thousand servicemen scattered around the globe, the prospects of waging a full-scale and effective war in Korea seemed a logistical impossibility.⁷³ Only days after the war began, the Senate Armed Services Committee initiated hearings on a bill to create a system of universal conscription to boost U.S. military manpower. As reports came in from the front lines about the ineffectiveness of South Korean soldiers, many who apparently had fled their posts and ceased to fight, the need to build up the U.S. Army grew acute.⁷⁴ “The balance of manpower is against us,” the chairman of the Armed Services Committee Lyndon Johnson remarked during the hearings in January 1951, as the induction rate reached an all-time peak of eighty thousand a month. “The grim fact is that the United States is now engaged in a struggle for survival…. Unpleasant though the choices may be, we face the decision of asking temporary sacrifice from some of our citizens now, or of inviting the permanent extinction of freedom for all of our citizens.”⁷⁵

      In June 1951, the Universal Military Training and Service Act passed and addressed the concern by lowering the draft age from nineteen to eighteen and extending the active-duty service commitment from twenty-one to twenty-four months, in total more than doubling the draft numbers between 1950 and 1951. The act also established the National Security Training Commission, which immediately took up the task of outlining a long-term U.S. military policy. “This solemn and far-reaching action of Congress and the President,” the commission stated in its first report to Congress, “reflects a realization, even in the heat and tension of the present crisis,