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TWO

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 and impact at once concealed the violence of U.S. empire and made America’s “Asia for Asians” seem possible.

COLONIAL INTIMACIES BETWEEN GENEVA AND BANDUNG

The French mistakenly thought it would be easy to crush the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, but they had underestimated the strength and determination of their colonized subjects. In the spring of 1954, the Viet Minh dealt a stunning blow to French forces in the siege of Dien Bien Phu. The battle marked the end of the war, and news of the French defeat traveled quickly across the globe, soon inspiring revolutionaries in Algiers to call forth their own revolt against the French. The black American activist Paul Robeson, fighting white supremacy from the seat of U.S. empire, was moved to pen an essay hailing Ho Chi Minh as the “Toussaint L’Overture of Indochina.” The Viet Minh’s victory signified the beginning of the end of empire. However, the revolutionary meaning of the Viet Minh’s victory evaporated rapidly.⁷

In the hopes of gaining advantage during negotiations, the Viet Minh had timed their victory perfectly to coincide with the Geneva Conference. The very day of victory, state leaders of the five major world powers (the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the United States, France, and Great Britain) gathered at Geneva, prepared to settle the terms of the Indochina War. The Euro-American allies were most concerned with how French colonialism’s end would redistribute global relations of power, instead of determining what an independent Vietnam should look like. In the end, the participants agreed to partition Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, regrouping French forces to the south and the Viet Minh to the north, and to ban further military buildup and military alliances on both sides. The accords stipulated the reunification of the country by general elections in 1956. All world powers signed the agreement except the United States, because U.S. plans to subvert the Geneva Accords and to maneuver greater influence in Vietnam were already under way.⁸

During the Geneva Conference and even long before, U.S. leaders worried about the political implications of their ongoing association with France over Indochinese matters. In a policy statement, one State Department official, Charlton Ogburn, warned plainly that supporting the French was no longer tenable. He believed that backing France militarily would ensure “the loss of all Vietnam and all of Indochina” to the communists, and “cause a serious decline of American prestige in the Far East, widespread resentment and despair among the Asians over our short-sighted and bitter-end support of the French.” Ogburn advised that the United States should seek a “common approach” with other Asian nations, which would pay dividends: “We [would] have put ourselves in the best possible light in non-Communist Asia, have given the Asians valuable experience in bearing responsibility and have prepared the basis for effective cooperation between the free Asian countries and ourselves in preventing the further expansion of Communism.” Simply put: a stand for Asian unity was a stand against communism and colonialism.⁹

In an attempt to distance the United States from the French and from Euro-imperialism generally, U.S. officials found support in the Philippines to attest to America’s exceptionalism. As early as 1946, Philippine Resident Commissioner Carlos P. Romulo had hailed the U.S. independence legislation for the Philippines as “the beginning of the end for imperialism,” saying that it “encouraged the dream of ultimate freedom among colonial peoples.” Romulo embraced his part as a postcolonial middling elite, glowing about American democracy just as often as he presumed to interpret the desires of the “Asian masses” for U.S. leaders. In 1950, as the Truman Administration began to aid the French in the Indochina War, Romulo told Secretary of State Acheson, “In the eyes of the great mass of the people of Indochina and Asia, the French army … is a hostile army, an enemy of Viet Nam independence.” The U.S. decision to support France in turn had resulted in “the virtual isolation of American policy from the sentiment of Asian countries.” He made it clear that the challenge for the United States was to unburden itself “of the suspicion of pro-imperialism.” He said, “I personally am convinced that this suspicion is unjustified, but how could it be otherwise in the untutored minds of Asia’s discontented masses?”¹⁰

Shortly after the Geneva Conference, the U.S. pursuit of forging a collective “Asian front” to signal its commitment to anti-imperialism and anticommunism materialized at the founding meeting of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in Manila, which occurred from September 5 to 8, 1954. Representatives from the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, France, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States gathered at the Manila Conference to proclaim their anticommunist solidarity and collective resolve to safeguard Southeast Asia. They were keen on protecting Vietnam and its bordering states of Laos and Cambodia against the encroachments of Communist China and the Soviet Union. The conference resulted in the Manila Pact and articulated a broad, multinational responsibility to defend the region. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles emphasized that the Pact “is not directed against any people or any government,” but “is directed against an evil, the evil of aggression.” Lest the peoples of Southeast Asia suspect that the Manila Pact was a blueprint for some kind of neocolonial form of regional governance, the conference concluded with the signing of the Pacific Charter, which proclaimed the rights of peoples to self-determination, self-government, and independence.¹¹

In contrast to the Geneva Accords, the Manila Pact provided justification for U.S. military intervention in Indochina in the name of countering communism. The Manila Pact also accomplished much more. Although the conference included delegates of “white” colonial powers with longstanding interests in the region, its ideological force derived from the idea that Asians were determining their political destiny in a democratic and postcolonial setting. The core of the agreement embodied an Asian regionalism that reflected the U.S. commitment to anticolonial self-determination.

The conference also signaled an emerging role in regional affairs for Philippine leaders. The Philippine Vice President and Secretary of Foreign Affairs Carlos P. Garcia affirmed that the formation of SEATO signified “the first big step” in facilitating closer ties between the Philippines and its neighboring countries, which previously had been foreclosed by “centuries of colonialism.”¹² According to Garcia, “The measure of usefulness of the Asian participants to this conference will depend largely on the measure that we may win the confidence, the faith and the friendship of our neighbors and brothers of Southeast Asia.”¹³ The language of “friendship” and kinship that infused the conference proceedings solidified an imagined geography of “Southeast Asia,” one that subsumed ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other forms of difference to project the image of a united region.¹⁴ Philippine state leaders mobilized the language of kinship increasingly in the weeks and months after the Geneva Conference, particularly as they sought to formalize diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

The Junior Chamber of Commerce played an important part in this story. A civic organization founded during the U.S. Progressive Era, the Junior Chamber, or Jaycees, had transformed into a worldwide phenomenon with chapters in over fifty countries by the 1950s, represented by the international body Junior Chamber International (JCI). Organized around the tenets of “free enterprise” and “humanitarianism” that “transcends the sovereignty of nations,” JCI served as a quintessential organization to facilitate what one scholar called a “global imaginary of integration.”¹⁵ As the Philippine Congress engaged in unresolved debates over the question of extending diplomatic recognition to Vietnam, JCI was already mobilizing the Philippine public to action. In July 1954, the Manila chapter of the Jaycees voted to extend its support by providing medical aid and volunteers to help Vietnamese refugees who were migrating south of the seventeenth parallel. The Geneva Accords and its mandate of a three-hundred-day period of unrestricted travel across the two zones had resulted in a massive movement of refugees. Nearly nine hundred thousand people, mostly Catholic civilians from the northern region of Tonkin, took advantage of the opportunity to escape the Viet Minh and to seek better life chances in the south. In the summer of 1954, the Jaycees brought the first group of Filipino friends to South Vietnam to care for these refugees.

A year later, at the University of the Philippines convocation in July 1955, Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Raul Manglapus reaffirmed the stakes of recognizing the sovereignty of South Vietnam, and evoked the Filipinos already there. First, he alluded to the specter of communism: “Our policy of strengthening our freedom impels us to do all we can to strengthen freedom around us…. [I]t is our duty, independent of altruistic considerations, to seek the strengthening of free states around us for our own sake.” Then he underscored that defending the Philippines from communist aggression demanded vigilance in the region, and emphasized that Vietnam and the Philippines shared a unique, natural bond. He continued, “The Philippines is not just any other State from the point of view of South Vietnam” but the “nearest overseas neighbors,” and stated that the Vietnamese “have learned to look to us for guidance in their efforts at liberty.” To substantiate this point, Manglapus recalled the “volunteer Filipinos” who, at that very moment, “are showing the Vietnamese the capacity of Asians for self-reliance.” These Filipinos told a self-evident story: “We are not just any other country to the Vietnamese. We are a country of fellow Asians, friends, helpers and inspirers.”¹⁶

On July 15, 1955, President Ramon Magsaysay formally extended diplomatic recognition to South Vietnam. While metaphors of racial and colonial intimacy had worked decidedly in favor of it, they also fueled the opposition. One week after, Senator Claro M. Recto assailed his colleagues on the Senate floor. Vietnam, Recto argued, did not have the “attributes of sovereignty” because it was “ruled by France and [the] United States.” The Philippine commitment to SEATO, which the senator had opposed from the beginning, did not include obligations to extend diplomatic relations, contrary to the claim of Manglapus and others. With no justifiable basis, the Philippine recognition of South Vietnam amounted to nothing short of “interference” in the country’s “internal affairs.”¹⁷ In voicing his opposition, Recto laid bare the colonial dynamics at the heart of the so-called “friendship” between the two countries.

Recto articulated a different kind of colonial intimacy, based not on anticommunist alliances and capitalist integration but on an emergent anticolonialism that was fanning across the region. He was inspired by the Afro-Asian Conference that had concluded recently in Bandung, Indonesia, where the leaders of twenty-nine newly independent nations in Asia and Africa met to proclaim their anticolonial solidarities and refusal to compromise their independence by submitting to the bipolar world order. This anticolonial spirit suffused his speech. He further lambasted the newly appointed South Vietnamese Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem as “a puppet of Colonel Lansdale,” doing the bidding of the United States. Recto declared, “Diem, although anti-French, is helping [to] implant in South Vietnam another form of Western colonialism.” This form of colonialism might be “more profitable for the colonials … because of prospects of better standards of living, civil liberties and political rights, but for that very same reason more dangerous.” He didn’t believe the term “democracy” should fool anyone. He clarified, “Diem made his choice not between nationalism and colonialism but between two forms of colonialism.” A few days before Recto spoke these words, Diem had announced South Vietnam would not participate in the 1956 election to unify Vietnam, a move that Recto feared would embroil Southeast Asia in future war. “Must our boys die on foreign soil and must our cities and countrysides by [sic] laid waste again, just because it occurred to Diem and his American backers to boycott the 1956 plebiscite?”¹⁸ His words of caution proved prescient in time. But at the moment, he made his point clear: the recognition of South Vietnam had made the Philippines complicit in another U.S. colonial project in Asia.

In this sense, diplomatic recognition was little more than a formality, for all was already set. The Manila Pact had outlined the regional framework for U.S. circumvention of the Geneva Accords, and the Philippines was already implicated in any future U.S. military intervention in South Vietnam. The formalization of diplomatic relations between the Philippines and South Vietnam only further entrenched this complicity. Amidst these events, the tensions captured by Recto’s trenchant remarks lingered unresolved. To the senator and other dissidents in his party, the events surrounding Indochina in 1954–55 were momentous not for what they purported to represent, but for what they concealed: that colonialism was being carried out in the name of democracy, and this meant dire consequences for the Philippines and its citizens.

THE DEPLOYMENT OF CARE

On October 14, 1954, three months after the Geneva Accords, Operation Brotherhood dispatched its first medical mission to Saigon. Headed by Antonio E.R. Velasco, a doctor and the Jaycee president of Southern Mindanao, the team of seven doctors and three nurses arrived to a spectacular welcome at Tan Sun Nhut Air Base. They arrived by way of Air America, a CIA-owned and -funded civilian airline that flew covert military missions throughout Southeast Asia in the 1950s; however, the U.S. orchestration of the entire affair was hidden at the moment. To the Vietnamese government officials and Jaycees who greeted them on the tarmac, they were “volunteer” medics and unofficial representatives of the Philippine government, contracted for three months to help relieve the emergency of the refugee influx.

Under different circumstances, the presence of Filipino workers in another country would have been unremarkable. Since the early twentieth century, Filipinos had engaged in cultures of transnational mobility, an effect and legacy of U.S. colonialism. In the first decade of the U.S. colonial period, the pensionado and nursing programs were established and brought Filipina/o students and nurses to the United States, opening new avenues for individual advancement and reproducing the gendered division of labor that were at the heart of the U.S. “civilizing” mission in the Philippines. Beginning in 1903, the U.S. Navy also recruited Filipinos, primarily as stewards and messboys. These patterns of labor migration intensified in the years after Philippine independence, as Filipina/os increasingly found work overseas and came to see themselves as participants in the export-driven economy of the postcolonial state. The doctors and nurses who traveled to Vietnam in 1954 were an integral part of this longstanding colonial diaspora.¹⁹ Instead of going to the imperial metropole, they found opportunities closer to home, in a country where the United States was working to secure a new nation.

Lansdale, the U.S. intelligence officer who had spent the better part of a decade fomenting counterrevolution in the Philippines, was responsible for bringing the Filipinos to South Vietnam. Lansdale shunned conventional military tactics and opted to become close to the people and earn their trust. During the initial phase of EDCOR, Lansdale first met JCI Director Oscar Arellano who offered the services of his Manila Jaycees to collect basic medical supplies for Philippine Army soldiers to bring to the barrios. Lansdale believed the humanitarian work of the Jaycees could help soften the image of the army, which was a vital component to his EDCOR scheme. His psywar work in the Philippines, most notably his political manipulations that steered Secretary of National Defense Ramon Magsaysay into the presidency in 1953, impressed Secretary of State Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, the CIA director. Operation Brotherhood was a distant outcome of those experiences. In January 1954, John Dulles instructed Lansdale to go to Vietnam “to do what you did in the Philippines.” When Lansdale arrived in Saigon in June, Arellano was meeting with Vietnamese Jaycees to discuss ways to help with the refugee crisis. When Lansdale saw his old friend in Saigon, he thought it was “a touch of Philippine sunshine … [to the] gloomy Vietnamese scene.”²⁰