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Introduction

“DO YOU WANT TO JOIN THE ARMY, or do you want to go to jail?” Nick Nagatani and Mike Nakayama had heard this line many times. The two teenagers grew up in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Crenshaw in the 1960s as the Vietnam War was pushing into the public consciousness. They were Sansei, born in the United States with Japanese grandparents. Their neighbors were nearly all black and Japanese American, and nearly all working class. Crenshaw reaped little of the state and federal resources that made cities desirable for capital investments; its streets, and the worldviews of its residents, were shaped by organized neglect. Nagatani and Nakayama remembered the time as one of widespread disaffection. The teenage boys around them joined gangs, got into fights, and took drugs. And again and again, these young men were arrested, brought before a judge for their petty crimes, and asked the question: “army or jail?” To most it was an easy choice. To some it was an opportunity. Before ever having to answer the question before a judge, Nagatani and Nakayama weighed their options and made their decisions: they chose war. In 1967, the pair enlisted in the Marines and traveled halfway around the world to South Vietnam. They saw it as “one of the options for getting out,” a chance to make something of their lives.¹

This brutal quandary—prison or war—had confronted the previous generation of young men, too. In 1943, thousands of young Nisei men in concentration camps were offered the choice between joining the army or remaining imprisoned in their own country.² Fighting in the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team—the segregated Japanese American unit—many thought, would prove their loyalty to a nation that had deemed them untrustworthy because of their race. For some, the gamble seemed to pay off. As the United States figured out the logistics of occupying Japan in the months after the war, Nisei linguists earned the unofficial title of “ambassadors of the American army.”³ The military had offered them a route to secure their belonging in the nation and, in the process, to redeem American democracy. Those who refused the opportunity (which, by 1944, became a mandatory order) to join the army—the so-called “no-no boys” and draft resisters—remained vilified and relegated to prison.

Although Nagatani and Nakayama’s decision certainly differed from the one that Japanese internees faced during World War II, it was a difference in degree, not in kind. In the 1960s, Asians in the United States were no longer deemed a racial enemy of the state. But as Nagatani and Nakayama’s coming-of-age experiences attest, formal inclusion as citizens did not exempt them from the racism of American capitalism. If anything, one fueled the other. Like African Americans, Latinos, and indigenous peoples whose histories of theft and dispossession had made them surplus in the political economy, consigned to low-wage and informal sectors of the labor market, Asians were given a choice that was no choice at all: to serve the needs of the state or be criminalized or contained, or be killed. While many did choose to go to war, others—Muhammad Ali most famous among them—chose prison and reminded the world that the choice to kill or be killed was above all a call to action. This is a book about the choices people made under extraordinary circumstances, and how, in the process, they acquired a worldliness that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of a wider community, and how they imagined a world that was not built upon state violence. For Nakayama, seeing death all around him in Vietnam prompted him to see the life all around him: “You become more human; they [the Vietnamese] became more human to me.”⁴

The role of race in the decades after World War II was defined by paradox. During these years, the disavowal of formal, state-sanctioned racism occurred alongside a series of wars in which race was the unspoken subject. Starting in the late 1940s, racial liberalism took hold, a vision of government in which racial minorities would bear the rights of citizenship free from discrimination and extralegal violence; over the next two decades, civil rights legislation and immigration reform hastened the end of legal segregation and immigration exclusion.⁵ Liberals touted mixed-race neighborhoods like Crenshaw as a success story of postwar integration.⁶ Revisionist narratives of the United States as a “nation of nations” were ascendant in the political culture.⁷ Yet in this era, the U.S. government modernized the infrastructures of national security—the border patrol, the military, the criminal justice system—expanding its capacity to criminalize and make war on particular people at home and abroad. Seen through a prism of domestic civil rights progress, these dueling impulses of “inclusion” and “exclusion” seem contradictory, a failure on the part of the United States to live up to its promise of racial equality. It is only by taking a more expansive view that they make sense together.

I believe that the choice between prison and war did not only reflect the austerity of racialized life in the United States; rather it was a governing logic that emerged in the post–World War II age of decolonization around the globe. The bipolar divide between communism and liberal democracy that structured U.S. global politics after 1945 indeed produced new categories of differences that at first glance do not appear to be rooted in race. As the United States sought to uphold liberal democracy and defeat communism, Asians became cast as either “good” or “bad,” those whose lives were deemed worthy and productive under capitalism and those cast as its perpetual others. These “bad” Asians—the communists, political agitators, labor radicals, and “Viet Cong”—were monitored, jailed, tortured, or killed. Undergirding racial liberalism and its mandate of national inclusion, then, was an ongoing war against a new enemy, a communist menace that was also a racial menace, whose differentiation and expulsion from the national community was achieved in tandem through state violence.⁸

Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific centers the role of Asians in the making of U.S. global power after 1945. If “bad” Asians were the targets of seemingly endless war, the “good” ones served a similarly utilitarian purpose: they were channeled into the military. As the end of World War II marked the end of formal colonial rule in Asia, thousands of young, able-bodied men joined the armed forces of their newly independent nations. This occurred in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and other countries where American military advisers helped transform the fledgling armies into modern institutions for nation building. Men and women in these countries also found opportunities as civilian contractors and counterinsurgency agents for the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the 1950s and 1960s. This book follows the labor circuits of these Asian soldiers and military workers as they navigated an emergent Pacific world in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Like the Nisei soldiers of World War II, these were “good” Asians who represented American democracy for the age of decolonization. Although these individuals were motivated by their own personal desires, ranging from the search for economic security to the lure of travel, their desires and their labor were inextricably intertwined with the spread of U.S. empire.

The story of these Asian soldiers remains largely untold. In the 1950s, nearly one hundred thousand military personnel from South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Vietnam traveled to the United States for military training.⁹ A decade later, at the peak of the U.S. war in Vietnam, around six thousand Filipino soldiers and fifty thousand South Korean soldiers and marines were deployed to South Vietnam annually to assist the U.S. military. These men are mostly remembered within the confines of their own country’s military chronicle. As such, in almost all cases, they have been rendered either as minor actors in the history of postcolonial national development or, as in the case of South Koreans in Vietnam, as an exception to the dominant narrative of South Koreans as victims of communist aggression.¹⁰ Where they are acknowledged in U.S. history—notably the South Koreans and Filipinos who fought in Vietnam—they have been described, and just as quickly dismissed, as mercenaries of an otherwise American-centered war.¹¹ In short, nationalism has consigned these subjects to history’s silences. Yet when brought together within one analytical frame, these subjects tell us much about how citizens experienced their nation’s aspirations for development and modernity, and how these aspirations were integral to the making of the U.S. empire.

By writing Asian soldiers and military workers into the history of the United States’ post-1945 global ascendency, what can seem like a contradiction about the entanglements of race and empire becomes less confounding: the expansion of the United States’s capacity to criminalize and make war in the second half of the century has functioned through, not in spite of, its proclaimed commitment to racial equality and democracy. Racial liberalism was never just about the U.S. government’s mandate to incorporate racial minorities into the nation—a mandate that occasionally gets forestalled or derailed by the government’s dueling commitment to war. Instead, war was the terrain upon which racial liberalism unfolded and gained traction.¹² As the United States secured its global dominance after World War II, it relied both on a growing military apparatus and on assertions of its moral authority as an inclusive, even liberating, empire. Asians, I argue, were central to this imperial project. By “Asians” I mean both Asian Americans—those legally and culturally defined as U.S. citizens—and citizens of South Korea, the Philippines, and other countries and territories whose postcolonial trajectories were entwined with the United States. In the stories we tell, Asians and Asian Americans too often occupy separate parts of the narrative. Here, they emerge together as racialized subjects of the U.S. empire. Soldiering through empire, for Asians and Asian Americans, became one means by which they negotiated their relationship to the nation and, as we shall see, imagined and pursued other affinities in the age of decolonization.

THE DECOLONIZING PACIFIC

The Pacific world these Asian soldiers traversed was the product of overlapping histories of imperial expansion and rivalries. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European powers vied for dominance in the region, establishing commercial trade routes that enriched and expanded their respective empires. As the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, and British staked their territorial claims across Asia and the Pacific Ocean, islands and nations fell under their domains. By the late nineteenth century, other rising powers, notably the United States and Japan, had joined the imperial competition. The United States seized the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898; around the same time, Japan annexed Taiwan, Kwantung, and Korea, following its earlier annexation of Hokkaido (in 1869) and Okinawa (in 1879). The South Pacific Mandate after World War I expanded the Japanese empire into the former German possessions of the Marianas, Caroline Islands, and Marshall Islands. In time, Japan came to justify its expansionist policies in the name of pan-Asian unity, and as a means to counter Euro-American imperialism and the attendant rumblings of white racial supremacy. These imperial projects wrought devastation, fundamentally restructuring each dominated society along the racialized demarcations of the colonizer and colonized. At the same time, they prompted cultures of collaboration and resistance among the colonized as they sought to negotiate, and at times challenge directly, the terms of colonial rule.¹³

World War II marked a rupture in the spread of Western colonialism. Between 1941 and 1945, Japanese forces besieged the Euro-American empires in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands; unlikely alliances between the colonized and the colonizers were momentarily forged. The expansion of Japanese militarism intensified anticolonial resistance in Malaya, the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere. At the end of the war, as European powers sought to regain control of their colonies from the ruins of the shattered Japanese empire, they encountered emboldened nationalists for whom independence seemed at long last a reality. Anticolonial revolts across the next decade and beyond spelled the demise of Western colonialism in Asia; the Philippines, India, Malaya, Indonesia, Korea, and Vietnam all secured formal independence.¹⁴ Another world seemed on the horizon.

Decolonization, however, was disorderly and fraught with difficulty, for formal independence hardly ushered in sustainable democracies in a postimperial world. Instead, throwing off the colonizer’s yoke was merely the beginning of an ongoing political project to secure more substantive freedoms beyond the moment of independence.¹⁵ As the second half of the twentieth century went on, people who had spent much of their lives fighting the oppression of a single colonizer found themselves confronting a new and more complex imperial power. This was a murkier empire, one that projected an intention to spread freedom and liberate people from oppression, yet embraced some of the same repressive tactics of the Japanese empire.

The United States emerged from World War II as an undisputed world power, with a preponderance of military might and economic influence.¹⁶ The new U.S. empire did not seek hegemony merely through colonial possessions, as it had done in the nineteenth century, but instead through two seemingly less coercive means. The first was domination of the global economy, in which the government enacted policies to foster capitalism as the basis for an integrated “free world.” The second was militarization, a broad and evolving concept that included short occupations, the maintenance of bases, and the stationing of military advisory groups. Insofar as the military was needed to make the world safe for capitalism, the two went hand in hand. Asia and the Pacific became the site of this renewed onslaught. As country after country declared their independence, the United States rushed in to establish bilateral relations to keep them within the capitalist orbit. This “hub-and-spokes” system, in which each state was informally tied to all the others through their economic dependence on the United States and other core industrial nations, created a new map of empire.¹⁷ It would be wrong to suggest this new U.S. empire was any less territorial than the colonial empire of the past. In addition to maintaining informal influence over this network of states, the United States also continued to administer formal control over the Pacific Islands, including Guam, the Northern Marianas, the Marshall Islands, and Okinawa, as part of its expanding empire of bases for military deployment and weapons testing.¹⁸

FIGURE 1. Asia and the Pacific. (Map by William L. Nelson.)

The United States’s post-1945 empire essentially reanimated old colonial dynamics in the region. By the early 1950s, Japan, under American aegis, had revived its industrial capacity to produce export goods, part of a broader scheme by the United States to transform Japan into an engine of capitalist development in Asia.¹⁹ U.S. dominance in the region depended on securing Japan as a “subempire,” or a surrogate of U.S. power; and war became vital to this effort.²⁰ Since World War II, the United States has been at war continuously. The Korean War (1950–53) and the Vietnam War (1954–73) were instantiations of what historian Thomas McCormick called a “Rimlands War,” to secure the extractive economies of Northeast and Southeast Asia and to ensure Japan’s place as a proxy for U.S. control. They were the start of a permanent war in U.S. culture that set into motion a range of military and economic activities across the Pacific including offshore procurement, the building of infrastructure, the training of armed forces, and the mobilization of civilian workers. These wars, fought in the name of anticommunism, “liberated” these countries to make them functional within the global economy and accessible to free markets and free trade.

Throughout this book we’ll refer to these overlapping efforts as the “decolonizing Pacific,” a term that names the historical conjuncture when anticolonial movements in the United States, Asia, and the Pacific became intertwined with the U.S. militarization drive to secure the global capitalist economy. The decolonizing Pacific is not a fixed temporal or geographic construct but a methodology for explaining the convergent forces that animated the U.S. empire after 1945. At its core, it explains how decolonization was not antithetical to the spread of U.S. global power but intrinsic to it. Over the last half-century, the United States has been an increasingly vocal proponent of democracy and equality; yet this commitment has simultaneously worked to legitimate and obscure U.S. state violence. Here we will explore the ways that racial liberalism was materially enacted through the functional expansion of the U.S. military in Asia and the Pacific. Time and again, U.S. state officials declared their support of an “Asia for Asians”—the racialist language propagated by the Japanese empire during World War II—to pursue capitalist integration under the banner of anticolonialism and antiracism.

Here was a new racial order taking shape, in which the government’s disavowal of racism and nominal support for anticolonial sovereignty gave rise to new forms of state violence against insurgents, communists, and a growing group of people marked for permanent exclusion from the “free world.” The term “race war” is useful for explaining this emerging relationship of U.S. imperial governance in the post–World War II era, in which preexisting forms of racism and extant colonial relations were recalibrated to justify war in inclusionary terms.²¹ Black anticolonial thinkers such as Cedric Robinson and W.E.B. Du Bois were among the most incisive critics of the cold war as an ongoing imperial race war against the “darker peoples” of the colonial world.²² Even as race as a category of differentiation appears to recede in significance in the age of global decolonization, “war,” Du Bois reminded us in 1953, “tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.”²³ War, in other words, was central to reproducing U.S. race relations and making its attendant violence normal in the face of a rapidly changing post-1945 world.

At the same time, the U.S. militarization of Asia and the Pacific made other forms of decolonization—namely, the realization of freedom and self-determination beyond the nation-state form—a permanently suspended and incomplete project.²⁴ Thinking through the decolonizing Pacific thus also forces us to reckon with what’s left, of what remains from a truncated attempt at liberation. As militarization foreclosed particular forms of postcolonial sovereignty in the region, the dreams and aspirations of the formerly colonized did not end but were channeled elsewhere. The military became a vehicle that conveyed these desires. People were drawn to the military, enticed by the prospects of steady pay and economic mobility. Some saw joining the armed forces as a way to overcome the racial degradations of colonialism by embodying a martial masculinity. Still others, insistent that a different world was yet possible, renewed their insurgent calls for decolonization, connecting the fates of one place to another in a global project to unite what many were now calling the Third World. At times, these competing aspirations—of fighting the U.S. empire and finding a place within it—were surprisingly aligned.

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” 100^th Battalion and 442^nd 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 to revise a core proposition: U.S. wars in Asia after 1945, I contend, did not simply form the backdrop for racial minorities to assert their claims to national belonging; rather, those wars were the very ground upon which racial liberalism emerged as a dominant force in U.S. politics. This book argues that race making and war making were deeply entangled, and they were crucial to the U.S. empire and the making of Asian American subjects.³⁵ In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States mobilized Asian soldiers both for their potential to represent American democracy on the world stage and as particular assets for counterinsurgency. Indeed, the inclusion of Asians into the military proceeded apace of state efforts to eliminate racism in military culture. “We still have Americans who see ‘gooks’ and ‘flips’ and ‘wily Orientals,’” Edward Lansdale, the famed counterinsurgent and CIA operative, remarked in 1957, “but those who have come to know Koreans and Filipinos and Asians as friends have increased numbers tremendously.”³⁶ Guided by the belief that a more inclusionary and less racist military would help legitimate and bring about the “free world,” U.S. officials transformed the culture and infrastructure of the military. The inclusion of Asians into the globalizing U.S. military empire, and their formation as “free Asians” therein, was a manifestation of this imperative.

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 engaging with the cold war’s forgotten histories and imperial roots. And it is admittedly partial. Rather than seeking comprehensive coverage of the places and people who made the decolonizing Pacific, the book has a different, perhaps more modest, goal: to present a history of Asian Americans and the military in which belonging in the nation was neither a sole determining force nor the end goal. In what follows, I tell a story of Asian Americans soldiering through the U.S. empire after World War II, a history of imperial conscription and the new forms of political community and critical imagining—beyond the boundaries of race and nation—that became possible as a result.