NSC 108 thus concluded the “most effective utilization of foreign manpower” rested on the development of the “armed forces of free nations,” a process already under way through the MDAP. Specifically, this entailed a practice that the Department of Defense (DOD) termed “mirror imaging,” in which U.S. training and doctrine, force structure, and supplies and equipment were exported and imposed on the organization of allied forces. Mirror imaging essentially was “modernization” theory applied through the military, in the sense that it approached the military as a vehicle for transforming “backward” countries into thriving nations oriented toward capitalism.89 Lt. Gen. James Van Fleet, Commander of the Eighth Army who was credited with turning around the lackluster Korean army during the war, understood his role within this framework. In the spring of 1951, he arrived in Korea and found the ROK Army in a shambled state but also saw Koreans “anxious to fight for their freedom.” The “Orientals apply themselves intensely,” he commended, “tell them something once, and they have it,” but all their individual motivation was squandered without the “competent leadership” of Syngman Rhee. In the end it was the leader of the republic, not the leader of the Eighth Army, who could command their allegiance. Once Rhee realized this fact and acted on it, the men of the ROK Army “suddenly were transformed into soldiers.”90
In the end the processes of turning “boys” into soldiers and transforming a colony into a modern nation were one and the same. Both depended on the ability of Asians to defend themselves from communism, the threat to their newfound freedom. Van Fleet was convinced that “Asia can and should be saved by Asians,” and it could be done precisely by teaching Asians how to embody martial citizenship through the mirror imaging of their national armed forces. Doing so would save American manpower and dollars as well as “strip the Communists of their powerful argument that ours is no real war for freedom but only a white man’s ‘imperialist’ war to put Asia in chains.”91 MDAP was, in this sense, an imperial projection of anticolonial self-determination. It produced foot soldiers for the U.S. empire and provided an arsenal for the propaganda war with the Soviet Union.
In 1950, the DOD began to select and send foreign military trainees to U.S. service schools through MDAP, the cream of the crop of allied forces who would take the lead in America’s “real war for freedom.” In the first year, MDAP brought students from 14 countries, with each country committing between 22 and 627 students. Initially, most of the students came from so-called “Title I” countries, the nine European countries receiving the biggest portion of MDAP grants owing to their proximity to the “Iron Curtain.” But by 1959, of the more than 140,000 foreign nationals who passed through the United States, 58,203 came from Asia. South Korea and Taiwan sent 14,445 and 15,552 students, respectively, the highest numbers among the total 54 countries. U.S. officials saw these students as military assets. In 1962, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reflected on the long-term benefits of MDAP: “In all probability the greater return on any portion of our military assistance investment—dollar for dollar—comes from the training of selected officers and key specialists in U.S. schools and installations.”92
U.S. military officials saw these foreign trainees in instrumentalist ways and assessed their value through a cost-benefit analysis. As one KMAG officer put it, MDAP training program amounted to “a package plan to provide maximum instruction at the least possible expense in the least possible time.”93 But aside from serving purely military purposes, these trainees also embodied a story of progress that affirmed the modernizing potential of Asian soldiers and, in turn, the military’s potential as a vehicle of modernization in Asia. Toward this end, in 1951, the State Department and the DOD collaborated on a series of projects highlighting the MDAP trainees as conduits of democracy. Aimed at audiences abroad, they developed “hometown type stories” presumably about the trainees’ immersion in the local communities and produced a motion picture titled Forces of Freedom.94 By the decade’s end, their efforts would maximize the “collateral benefits” of training these foreign students, and hone their potential as “a multi-purpose cold war weapon” that served “political, economic, and social, as well as military” purposes.95 Their efforts cohered in a cultural industry for the military.
Molding these trainees for U.S. cultural diplomacy was a two-way process that involved shaping their experiences in the United States as well. The DOD aimed to do this by producing a “guidebook” to acquaint the trainees with various aspects of American culture and society. The 1959 guidebook began with the preface: “We welcome you to the United States and we welcome the opportunity to share with you not only our professional military skills, but our hospitality and our way of life.” What followed was a fifty-five–page distillation of the “American way of life,” covering topics such as military customs, standard of living, diet, etiquette, and “the American Character” marked by freedoms of the press and religion, and by the “enterprising individual.” The guidebook worked to preempt the visitors from forming their own negative understanding of U.S. “social problems.” It explained that “prejudice against minority groups is a problem in the United States just as it may be in your own country. Although you have probably read or heard of incidents of discrimination against Negroes in certain sections of the United States, bear in mind that discrimination is not confined to Negro Americans. Wherever a minority racial, cultural, or religious group exists, it may be the object of discriminatory practice.” The guidebook suggested “prejudice” was a universal phenomenon owing to “group” differences rather than an inherent defect of American society.96
The DOD guidebook’s sanitized narrative of American life further translated into concrete experience for the trainees through social programs. The Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, for example, started an Allied Officer Sponsor Program in 1959 to “promote [the] cultural and social integration of Allied students” by pairing them with an American officer who would “act as personal friends” and guide them through their time at the college.97 A “Hospitality Program” at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center attempted the same by encouraging local navy families to invite students into their homes “for visiting and informal dining.” These programs, no matter their origins, characterized the task at hand as a “unique opportunity” to promote one-on-one relations, “to help acquaint these men with America and Americans [and] plan[t] the seeds of real friendship and understanding.”98 A New York Times editor confirmed these positive attributes of the training program by quoting the words of one Korean trainee in his letter to a friend back home: “Until I saw America and talked and associated with Americans I doubted if what I heard about America was true; I know that there can be, and we can have, the same freedom of religion, speech, and press in our own country and in this whole human world.”99
Efforts to shape the perceptions of the military trainees invariably cracked at the seams. No number of guidebooks or sponsorship programs could keep the trainees from witnessing the blunt realities of the American color line, or from pursuing desires beyond the military lives imagined for them. For example, Pak Chŏngin, a division commander who studied at Fort Benning, recalled seeing “the discrimination against Negroes in the Southern region,” which he found “terribly distasteful.”100 Given the value placed on these MDAP trainees as cultural diplomats, the inability of U.S. government and military officials to control their negative perceptions of life in the United States had the potential of backfiring irreparably. Although the historical record does not show these subjects returning to their home countries politicized by their experience abroad, it does reveal how they posed a problem of an entirely different kind, one that officials had not foreseen: their desertion and subversive mobility in the United States.
SEEKING ASYLUM IN THE TRANSNATIONAL SECURITY STATE
No individual did more to confound the MDAP training program in the 1950s than Hsuan Wei, the subject who opened this chapter and who came to symbolize the unintended and undesirable consequences of U.S. militarization. By orders of the U.S. Navy for military training in September 1952, Wei arrived in the United States, and from 1952 to 1954 he attended a total of three courses at the Marine