Colonial Intimacies and Counterinsurgency
THE PHILIPPINES, SOUTH VIETNAM, AND THE UNITED STATES
SHORTLY AFTER THE UNITED STATES proclaimed Philippine independence in 1946, the liberating empire confronted a problem that threatened to unravel the legitimacy of its fifty-year-old colonial experiment. The Huks, an independent guerrilla army that fought alongside American troops during World War II, started to rally its forces after the war. The Huks galvanized peasants in Central Luzon and stirred rebellion against a peonage system that government officials and corrupt landlords maintained. While U.S. state officials hailed the Philippines as its “showcase of democracy” to Europe and the decolonizing world, the Huk rebellion demonstrated that the colony had subversive influences emerging in its midst. Secretary of State Dean Acheson warned, “Victory of the Communist-led and dominated Huks would place us in a highly embarrassing position vis-à-vis the British, French and Dutch whom we have been persuading to recognize the realities and legitimacy of Asiatic nationalism and self-determination.”1
Much like what took place in Korea after World War II, the radicalization of the peasantry in the postwar Philippines signaled a collective refusal among the landless class to return to the colonial order. Efforts to suppress the Huks by resorting to terror tactics invariably failed, similar to events that transpired in South Korea under the U.S. occupation. JUSMAG, the U.S. Military Advisory Group in the Philippines, decided to pursue a different approach. In December 1950, JUSMAG aided the Philippine government to launch the Economic Development Corps (EDCOR), a rehabilitation program aimed to incentivize surrender among the Huks that was carried on by the Philippine Army. EDCOR adopted the popular communist slogan “land for the landless,” and proceeded to give former Huks and retired soldiers government lands. Between 1950 and 1955, EDCOR continued offering people “a new chance in life” by constructing four large-scale farm communities, including a vocational rehabilitation center, and relocating an entire barrio to “a more favorable area” beyond communist influence. In this five-year period, the Philippine Army reported that approximately nine thousand Huks out of an estimated rank of twenty-five thousand had surrendered. It seemed that EDCOR provided an effective solution to the subversive threats and potential radicalization in the Philippines.2
EDCOR was the brainchild of Edward Lansdale and Charles Bohannan, two American military men who had served in the Philippines during World War II. An advertising executive and an anthropologist-in-training before their military careers, respectively, Lansdale and Bohannan were aware that engineering social relations required appealing to the masses in creative ways. With their expert knowledge, they developed a unique entity through EDCOR and transformed the Philippine Army. “I have seen many armies,” one foreign correspondent wrote, “but this one beats them all. This is an army with a social conscience.”3 The program marked the first attempt by the Philippine Army to conduct “civic activities,” demonstrable actions that conveyed the meaning of democracy in ways that print propaganda did not. There was more to EDCOR’s success, however. Lansdale later explained it succeeded because despite being a “U.S. plan, the Filipinos were led into thinking of it and developing it for themselves.” EDCOR was a “foreign idea [that] became thoroughly nationalized—an important step” toward winning the support of the people.4
What Lansdale and Bohannan developed was a new approach to war and military conduct for the age of decolonization. In the early 1950s, military officials believed EDCOR was an exportable concept for countering guerrilla insurgencies. British officials flocked to Central Luzon to observe the EDCOR communities and drew up comparative lessons for their experiments of controlling the people in Malaya.5 When events in Vietnam demanded heightened U.S. involvement in 1954, Lansdale and Bohannan saw the opportunity. They were among the first Americans on scene. The pair brought the tactics and agents of their counterinsurgency experiment in the Philippines to Vietnam.
Scholars have drawn the connections between U.S. counterinsurgency in the Philippines and Vietnam, but we still know little about what this transference of military knowledge and practices entailed.6 The focus on Lansdale as a central figure obscures the role of lesser-known actors who played a key role. In 1954, months after the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, Filipino doctors and nurses arrived in Saigon to begin their humanitarian mission of bringing medical relief to the hundreds of thousands of refugees migrating from the communist north to the south after the national partition. Later that year, retired Filipino army officers, many who had taken part in EDCOR, arrived to provide social services to Vietnamese veterans, and to teach the “lessons” of the Huk campaign to Vietnamese Army soldiers. These groups went by innocuous names, suggesting no American affiliation: the doctors and nurses were called Operation Brotherhood, and the veterans were called the Freedom Company of the Philippines. To the Vietnamese, these Filipinos were friends as opposed to colonizers; their acts were related to humanitarianism and nation building as opposed to war.
This chapter examines how these groups of Filipinos came to arrive in South Vietnam as well as the work that they accomplished on behalf of the U.S. and Philippine governments. It begins with the premise that the U.S. war in Vietnam emerged out of complex intercolonial dynamics in Southeast Asia after 1945, and that U.S. militarism in Vietnam was as much about waging the cold war in the former French colony as it was an ongoing part of the decades-long U.S. colonial project in the Philippines. As French control in the region waned and the United States stepped in to assume the French role, U.S. officials made their support of “Asia for Asians” loud and clear, challenged by the surge of anticolonial nationalisms in the Third World. Philippine state leaders, determined to shape regional geopolitics, lent support to the United States and performed their part as America’s “show window of democracy.” It was exactly this interplay between empire and decolonization that created the pathways for Filipinos’ arrival in Vietnam in 1954. As “brothers,” “neighbors,” and “fellow Asians,” these Filipinos, U.S. and Philippine officials hoped, would mobilize the lessons of American democracy and impart them to the Vietnamese.
Similar to the Chinese and Korean soldiers who traversed the Pacific for military training during this same period, these Filipino doctors, nurses, and veterans traveled on routes shaped by overlapping colonial histories and the imperatives of the U.S. military. They emerged as agents of U.S. psychological warfare, tasked to gain the trust of the population by performing different kinds of intimacies, such as caring for the body and other convivial encounters. While psychological warfare went by a host of other terms in this period—special operations, covert action, civic action—it reflected the growing collaboration between the military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as they intervened in the processes of decolonization, by employing creative and deadly methods to suppress anticolonial movements and to redirect emergent state nationalisms toward the aims of the capitalist “free world.” CIA operatives under military cover in Vietnam experimented with different tactics to befriend and win the trust of the Vietnamese. The CIA operatives thought the “Asiatic-to-Asiatic” approach of Operation Brotherhood and Freedom Company was a winning formula.
By mobilizing Filipinos to win the affection and loyalty of the Vietnamese, the CIA reanimated U.S. colonialism in the Philippines for the purpose of demarcating the boundaries of “free Asia.” Adherents of such unconventional practices and doctrines insisted repeatedly that counterinsurgency signaled a new kind of war from the colonial wars of the past, one predicated on forging relations of intimacy between soldier and civilian, in which “the soldier [was] a brother of the people, as well as their protector,” and in which racism no longer functioned to justify the tactics of colonial violence. The use of Filipinos in Vietnam reinforced and belied these claims simultaneously.
Most scholarly accounts of U.S.-Philippine colonial politics end in 1946, but the incorporation of Filipinos into the U.S. empire and their racialization as U.S. colonial subjects continued well past this point. These processes continued to unfold through the humanitarian and militarized labor of Filipinos across the South China Sea. In South Vietnam, at the interstices of multiple and competing visions of postcolonial nation building, the Filipinos made their mark on the Vietnamese people through psychological warfare. Their presence