Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the major arguments of the book and explains the multiple legacies of the decolonizing Pacific since the 1970s. It describes the militarization of U.S. foreign policy and permanent war that continued in the 1980s and into the present, as well as the ways that the U.S. empire continues to legitimate itself in the name of freedom and opportunity, namely, through representations of multiculturalism in the all-volunteer force during the Gulf War. It also explores the ongoing struggles for democracy and indigenous sovereignty in Asia and the Pacific since the 1980s.

A World Becoming

This final chapter uncovers a little known aspect of antiwar activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the GI movement in Asia and the Pacific. President Richard Nixon’s call to “Vietnamize” the war in 1969 had the unintended consequence of deepening antiwar activism on and around U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines, where the U.S. air war was being conducted. The Pacific Counseling Service, a New Left organization founded in the Bay Area in 1968, played a critical role. At these locales, GIs and their organizers came to see the Vietnam War as a phase of a larger problem rooted in the overlapping histories of empire; they forged fragile political alliances with local baseworkers and anti-imperialist activists that deepened their antiwar politics and steered them toward the work of achieving an unfinished decolonization.

Working the Subempire

This chapter examines the Vietnam War through the lens of South Korea and the Philippines and their respective nation-building projects in the 1960s. It demonstrates how the two countries’ efforts to modernize their national economies dovetailed with and were dependent on their participation in the U.S. war. As the two governments mobilized their citizens for war, they generated discourses of gendered national belonging and racial intimacy with the Vietnamese that obscured their complicity with U.S. imperialism. The chapter further argues that the Vietnam War functioned as an engine of subempire for South Korea and the Philippines, that is, the relations of violence that were necessitated by the two countries’ incorporation into the capitalist world system. The chapter ends by examining the emergent counterpublics in South Korea and the Philippines that challenged their governments’ complicity in the war and their narrowed conception of citizenship and economic development.

Colonial Intimacies and Counterinsurgency

This chapter reconsiders the origins of the Vietnam War by foregrounding U.S.-Philippine colonial history. It discusses the U.S. counterinsurgency in South Vietnam in 1954–1956 that mobilized the intimacies of Filipino doctors, nurses, and veterans to help win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. Their military, affective, and ideological labor, I argue, was crucial to the U.S. effort to depict counterinsurgency as a benevolent enterprise, antithetical to a colonial race war. At the same time, these efforts could not contain the rising tide of anticolonial nationalism in the Philippines and South Vietnam that emerged by the end of the 1950s.

Introduction

The introduction begins with a question many racial minorities, whether directly or indirectly, faced in the 1960s: do you want to join the army or go to jail? The question, I contend, not only reflected the austerity of racialized life in the United States at the time but also broadly reflected a governing logic that emerged globally in the post-1945 age of decolonization. The introduction lays out the book’s central arguments by explaining three important concepts: the “decolonizing Pacific,” “soldiering,” and “race war.” It situates the book within Asian American history and U.S. history, and it suggests the need to broaden our conception and approach to these fields by engaging with global histories of empire and decolonization.

Fighting “Gooks”

This chapter examines the social experiences of Asian Americans who fought in the Vietnam War. Their collective experience of being racialized as “gooks,” alongside the burgeoning movements for Third World liberation in the United States, drove many Asian American veterans to understand the violence of the war as an intrinsic part of the state-sanctioned violence faced by Asian American and other racialized communities in the United States. Asian American veterans came home from the war and became active participants in the Asian American movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Race War in Paradise

This chapter examines the role of Hawai‘i during the Vietnam War, focusing on how discourses of racial liberalism that were cemented through statehood in 1959 became enacted through the military deployments of the 25th Infantry Division. It also discusses the army training practices in Hawai‘i that resulted in some of the war’s most violent campaigns, notably the My Lai massacre. The chapter argues that state violence and racial liberalism were not antithetical but entangled processes of the U.S. empire. The chapter ends by exploring how Hawai‘i’s activists highlighted this entanglement through their participation in the antiwar and emerging sovereignty movement in Hawai‘i.

Securing Asia for Asians

This chapter describes the U.S. buildup of the armed forces of allied nations in East Asia immediately following World War II, focusing in particular on South Korea. The United States justified militarization in the name of teaching Asians how to defend their newly acquired freedom from communism, and, more broadly, of building an Asia for Asians. The chapter argues that this effort carried unintended consequences, as the attempt to incorporate “free Asians” into the U.S. military empire simultaneously heightened the specter of subversive Asians within the military and in the United States in the 1950s.