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 442nd 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