We will investigate these aspirations and their resulting efforts as they unfolded through one of the most influential liberation struggles of the post–World War II era: the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War, in this study, is not simply a battleground in the emerging cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union but, borrowing from geographer Derek Gregory, “an event in which multiple geographies coalesced and multiple histories condensed.”25 The Vietnam War was more than just a war between world powers, a contest between two ideological systems; rather, in this war, the legacies of multiple colonialisms converged and were fought over by the soldiers and workers on the ground. From the perspective of the decolonizing Pacific, we can see the Vietnam War as a globe-spanning moment, one that mobilized various decolonizing nations and territories, including South Korea, the Philippines, Okinawa, Guam, and Hawai‘i, among others. For these islands and nations in the midst of transition from formal colonial rule, the fates of their political projects were determined by the intensity of their involvement in the war. Across the two decades of the U.S. war in Vietnam, the dreams and aspirations of the colonized were mobilized, thwarted, and, in many cases, destroyed with those who perished in the fighting.26 The decolonizing Pacific, in short, is about the dreams of anticolonial liberation cut short and coopted into the U.S. imperial project, and the struggles to imagine a new humanity that came in its wake.
THE WORK OF SOLDIERING
The making of the decolonizing Pacific required particular kinds of workers, and the United States, over two and a half decades, mobilized tens of thousands of them from across Asia and the Pacific. These numbers include those who were enlisted into the armed forces of their own countries—the Filipino, South Korean, Taiwanese, and South Vietnamese soldiers who were tasked with arming and defending their countries and respective regions from communism. They also include draftees and reservists of the U.S. Army, which doubled in size after 1951 as the permanent war in Asia continued to grow. Others were mobilized in more ambiguous ways, including former guerrilla fighters who had fought in the imperial armies of Japan and the United States, and who then came to serve the CIA’s expanding efforts in unconventional warfare. All of these men and women were citizens of their respective countries who, by taking advantage of the work opportunities opened up by the military, emerged as participants in the U.S. empire.27
From the stories of these soldiers and workers we are able to see their lives as part of the broader notion of soldiering. I examine soldiering as an optic through which the racial and imperial politics of the decolonizing Pacific were forged and became contested. While soldiers and military workers are central to this story, I focus on the policies and representations that constituted them as imperial subjects, and the wider world they helped to shape. Here, “soldiers” refers to those individuals who participated in the conventional armed forces as well as a proliferating category of people whose labor and lives became entwined with the military. Thus, I approach soldiering not merely as military service or a rite of citizenship, but as a form of labor. Seeing soldiering as labor reveals the class basis of war and the fact those who are most likely to fight are most likely to be poor or from the working class.28 Indeed, few who enlisted in the armed forces or volunteered to fight in the Korean or Vietnam Wars did so out of sheer motivation against communism or for nationalism; instead, most were drawn by economic incentives or otherwise were conscripted into service. For Mike Nakayama and Nick Nagatani growing up in the neighborhoods of Crenshaw, soldiering offered the prospect of a better future.
Soldiering also signals particular kinds of labor that developed in tandem with an evolving U.S. militarism—a range of ideological and affective labors, like the work of befriending and forging intimacy with the population, that proved critical to U.S. counterinsurgency in Asia in this period. Such military power was always both violent and benevolent, and was intrinsically tied to the racialization of Asian soldiers as “free Asians.” The Filipinos who were deployed to South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s epitomized this category of free Asians; they became agents in the work of winning hearts and minds, who labored to embody a liberal democracy that the South Vietnamese would want to emulate. As “fellow” Asians, U.S. officials believed, these Filipinos could gain the trust of the Vietnamese and cast away their suspicions about American intentions as the United States sought to bring them under the control of the South Vietnamese government.
Highlighting these soldiers in post-1945 U.S. history offers a new vantage point in the study of U.S. empire. First and foremost, soldiering reveals the overlapping dynamics between the formation of postcolonial states in Asia and U.S. imperialism. As South Korea, the Philippines, and South Vietnam emerged as independent nations, they depended on U.S. military and economic aid to ensure their stability. These neocolonial dependencies inextricably bound their respective nation-building projects to U.S. foreign policy objectives, even if leaders of these countries invariably pursued goals that diverged from those of the United States.29 Soldiers were at the center of this entanglement. Through their various activities—as medics, engineers, technicians, instructors, and combatants—they functioned as intermediaries who, at every step, buttressed their nation and the U.S. empire.30 As postcolonial nations mobilized the soldiers’ desires through the promise of citizenship and national belonging, soldiers performed the tasks that sutured each nation to the vast needs of U.S. capitalism.
A focus on soldiering also disrupts the conventional divisions of U.S. history into “pre-” and “post-,” one that posits 1945 as a break from the colonial past and that heralded the “postwar” era in U.S. history. By studying the work of soldiers and military workers, many who participated in the Japanese and U.S. imperial armies during World War II, this book reveals world-making without any such break and showcases people whose labor and desires were merely channeled from one imperial project to another. The empire-building efforts of the United States after 1945 were not a departure from the colonial past but its recalibration. The skills performed by these various subjects reflect the enduring legacies of colonialism, whether from American nursing education in the Philippines or from U.S.-trained guerrilla units during World War II and the Korean War. As we shall see, soldiering amidst counterinsurgency reinvigorated the colonial discourses that lent meaning to the soldiers’ activities, transforming them from subjects of the U.S. and Japanese colonial empires into agents of colonial uplift. In the process, soldiering reworked race and colonial relations, enabling the United States to justify its war in Vietnam in the name of antiracism and anticolonialism. Soldiering, therefore, describes the social and cultural processes that made the 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