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.
ONE
Securing Asia for Asians
MAKING THE U.S. TRANSNATIONAL SECURITY STATE
IT WAS FALL OF 1952, and Hsuan Wei was twenty-four years old when he entered the United States for the first time, determined to change his life one way or another. Wei was a first lieutenant of the Chinese Nationalist Marine Corps and had been given the opportunity to go to the United States to further his military training. The benefits of pursuing it far outweighed the uncertainty he may have felt about leaving home. In September, with few belongings, he arrived at the U.S. Marine Corps School in Quantico, Virginia. On the other side of the Pacific, the Korean War raged unabated, and tensions between the Republic of China and the Communist mainland increased to the threat of impending war. While global events were driving factors behind Wei’s sojourn, they figured mostly in the back of his mind. As far as he was concerned, he was simply seizing an opportunity to advance his military education and career.1
Wei’s transpacific journey hinted at an ordinary life soldiering through empire in the age of decolonization, a far more common story than historians have acknowledged. Wei, in fact, was one of an estimated 141,250 foreign nationals who made their way to the United States for military training in the 1950s. These visitors hailed from all over, from Taiwan, South Korea, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Iran, Indonesia, and many other countries, each undergoing the turbulent processes of nation building after colonial rule. Though they came from different parts of the world, these subjects shared striking similarities. Socioeconomically, they were not disenfranchised people desperate for work but were aspiring individuals who sought to elevate their positions in their national armed forces and, for some, in their governments. Many had served in colonial and imperial armies before their countries’ liberation from colonial rule, and chose to continue a career they knew garnered respect. One Korean soldier, Yi Chiŏp, recalled his time serving in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II: “I worked within the system to gain as much education and training as possible.” This decision tainted him as a “collaborator” among other Koreans, but it allowed him to climb the ranks of the new Korean Constabulary after the war.2
The U.S. militarization that accelerated after World War II was the root of their transpacific journeys and military training. After the war, the United States confronted local insurgencies throughout the former Japanese empire, waged by ordinary people who refused the terms of the American liberation. Cross sections of the population including industrial workers, military base workers, peasants, labor organizers, and students in Korea, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and elsewhere redoubled their efforts for national self-determination. They rekindled longstanding anti-Japanese sentiments and directed them at the United States. U.S. officials felt alarmed, convinced of a global communist movement afoot in Asia. The U.S. state responded by laying the groundwork to fortify indigenous forces, to assist “free nations” to defend themselves from “communists.” In 1949, these efforts cohered in the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP), the first major U.S. military aid initiative that would funnel billions of U.S. dollars to train and equip the national armed forces of allied states over the next decade and beyond.
The making of this transnational security-state apparatus in Asia created massive disruptions on the ground and led to the proliferation of Asian soldiers across the Pacific. To be sure, Asian colonial conscripts had circulated in this region for some time, most recently during World War II when Koreans had been mobilized to far-flung places of the Japanese empire to serve in the imperial army and to labor in factories and mines.3 In one sense, this chapter traces the lives of these martial subjects as they transitioned from the Japanese colonial empire to the U.S. liberal empire. In the context of the protracted global struggle against communism, particular Asians who were newly liberated from colonial rule became the functionaries of the United States’s burgeoning transnational security state in Asia.
This chapter explains how overriding U.S. concerns about global decolonization led to the growing presence of Asian soldiers in the Pacific, and how they in turn provided the endless justifications for the U.S. empire. American military advisers spoke often of these Asian soldiers as “assets,” prized as manpower and for their knowledge of the local terrain. During the heaviest fighting of the Korean War, their use as “buffer” troops purportedly saved “hundreds of thousands” of American lives.4 U.S. state officials reasoned that they were not merely colonial mercenaries mobilized to do the gritty work of the U.S. military but were “free Asians,” democratized subjects who could demonstrate the promise of U.S. liberal democracy to the rest of decolonizing Asia. Conscripted to build Japan’s East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere just a short time before, these subjects emerged as the vanguard of a new pan-Asianism—an “Asia for Asians”—that the United States pursued deliberately against charges of global white supremacy and imperialism. The militarization of Asia against communism and the liberation of Asians from colonialism, the twinned vexing projects of the United States in Asia after World War II, became embodied by these Asian soldiers.
While U.S. officials touted these soldiers as free Asians, they were also citizen-subjects with individual and collective aspirations and grievances that posed challenges for the U.S. state. At a time when these officials grew increasingly concerned about communism at home and abroad, they invariably cast these subjects as “subversives.” The inclusion of free Asians into the U.S. transnational security state, this chapter contends, facilitated movements, encounters, and fleeting alliances among Asian peoples across the U.S. empire that magnified the very problem of subversion it aimed to contain. Not least, it brought people like Hsuan Wei into the United States over the course of the 1950s. The chapter ends by exploring how the projects to militarize and liberate Asia devolved into a national security problem at home, involving “immigrants,” deserters, and asylum seekers. In the end, policing against subversive Asians, in the United States and across the Pacific, proved pivotal to preserving the security of the U.S. empire and the promise of “Asia for Asians” in the post–World War II era. The problem of subversion that came to confound U.S. state officials was a byproduct of the making of the transnational security state, an unintended consequence that became indispensable to its functions.
THE “RED” MENACE AFTER LIBERATION
This story begins in Korea, a country far from the minds of most Americans when the Japanese empire fell, but one that would matter greatly in due time. In September 1945, when Lt. Gen. John Reed Hodge and his XXIV Corps occupied the southern half of the Korean Peninsula, the United States had yet to articulate a coherent plan for what to do with the former Japanese colony. To Koreans, August 15 marked the abrupt and long-awaited end to colonial rule. But it seemed there were dark signs, for their liberators had bigger schemes. Save for a short and violent U.S. naval expedition to open up the “Hermit Kingdom” in 1871, a little-known war that precipitated the signing of a treaty of “peace, amity, commerce, and navigation” in 1882 and American expansion in the Pacific in the late nineteenth century, the United States had never taken direct interest in the peninsula.5 In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt had recognized Japan’s “special interest” in Korea after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, and after World War II Korea’s fate would appear to default to American interests in Japan yet again. In Japan, the goals of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s military occupation were clearer from the start: to effect a “complete” and “permanent” program of demilitarization and democratization, and to reform the enemy into “enlightened” subjects of democracy. Meanwhile, Hodge’s task in Korea was to disarm the Japanese and send them back to Japan.6
Hodge’s broader mission became clear soon enough, when his team encountered revolutionaries