Racial inclusion, however, did not produce an orderly free world, but its opposite: more violence, more insurgencies. Channeling Asians into the military indeed magnified the global communist menace, whether real or imagined, that such policies sought to contain in the first place. In 1948, when soldiers of the newly minted South Korean Army were called to subdue a peasant rebellion, some refused and turned on their officers. In the late 1960s, Asian American GIs, including Nakayama and Nagatani, came to disavow their role and became advocates of anti-imperialism. These instances of soldiers’ revolts were hints of another world on the verge of becoming. By the early 1970s, GIs stationed in Asia and the Pacific were building alliances with base workers and anti-imperialist activists that were short-lived yet remarkable in what they sought to achieve. During this time, some turned to culture to critically reimagine the possibilities for an East Asian modernity not yet arrived, an alternative future that was not predicated on militarized violence. In short, the labor of soldiers was never divorced from the imperial and anti-imperial politics taking shape around them. As these emergent political struggles coalesced around the Vietnam War, they revived memories of the multiple, convergent histories of colonialism in Asia and the Pacific not yet ended, the very conditions of possibility for the colonial present. Soldiering thus necessarily entailed its counterpractice of undoing the violence of empire and reckoning with an unfinished decolonization. The military, this book demonstrates, formed the crucible of imperial encounters and anticolonial resistance that made the decolonizing Pacific into a dynamic site of political struggles.
This is a work of history that attempts to reconstruct a past, however partial and incomplete, that has fallen in the cracks between sweeping histories of the cold war and specific national histories. It is based on archival research across the continental United States, Asia, and the Pacific, as well as oral history with the soldiers, workers, and activists whose lives are the heart of this story. In charting the rise of the decolonizing Pacific, I read across multiple archives to ask how seemingly disjointed histories were imbricated with each other.37 The U.S. National Archives where I conducted the bulk of the research is an endless trove of documentation about particular events, places, and institutions that were crucial to the post–World War II U.S. empire; the occupations of South Korea and Japan, the U.S. Army’s stationing in Hawai‘i, and the Vietnam War are each recorded extensively, and yet their connections are not immediately transparent. Thus, I approach the National Archives not merely as a repository of knowledge retrieval about these specific events in specific places, but as a site to apprehend how the government thought about—indeed obsessed about—the subjects who traversed these national and imperial boundaries. In sifting through the official documents, including military histories, records of memorandum, reports of “lessons learned,” and surveillance dossiers, I am interested in how state and military officials made sense of the unruly aftermaths of global decolonization, and how they sought to impose order upon a disorderly world, by engineering and controlling the movements of people. I am also interested in how soldiers, workers, and activists navigated through and negotiated these state efforts. At times, these negotiations are legible in the National Archives, registered in the anxieties and concerns of officials. But when official records could not provide answers, I turned to other archives and to oral history, not merely to fill gaps or silences or to put forth a more truthful account based on personal experience, but to ascertain how some of these subjects imagined and pursued another world that the official state archives could only give a hint of, to give shape to, as Lisa Lowe put it, the “‘what could have been.’”38
The book moves chronologically in six chapters. In the first two, I explain the U.S. efforts to promote and to fortify a vision of “Asia for Asians” through the military in the late 1940s and 1950s. Chapter 1 details the U.S. buildup of the armed forces of South Korea and other allied countries in Asia after World War II; chapter 2 traces the circuits of Filipino paramilitary workers and medics that were crucial to the counterinsurgency in South Vietnam in the 1950s. In both cases, U.S. officials justified these endeavors as part of a broader project of teaching former colonial subjects how to embody freedom and to embark on nation building, and in both cases, they carried unintended consequences. Rather than achieving an integrated “free” Asia, the efforts to create an “Asia for Asians” sowed the seeds of its own unraveling, deepening anticolonial nationalism throughout the region.
The next two chapters examine the escalation of the U.S. ground war in Vietnam in the 1960s from the vantage point of particular countries and territories that were in the throes of a thwarted decolonization. Chapter 3 uncovers the military mobilization and training practices in Hawai‘i around the time of its transition to statehood; chapter 4 turns to South Korea and the Philippines and the deployment of their citizens to the war during a period of nationalist upheaval and economic restructuring. As these countries and territory became further embroiled in the U.S. war, their citizens began to comprehend more fully the limits of their sovereignty. They made connections between the imperial violence in Vietnam and state repression at home, and came to articulate a deeper understanding of their own unfinished decolonization that took seriously the question of their governments’ complicity in the war.
The last two chapters delve into these emergent radical movements in the closing years of the war. Chapter 5 centers Asian 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