Transpacific Indigenous Soldiering

Understanding how CHamoru, Māori, and Hmong soldiers were differentially positioned in relation to US empire during the Vietnam War helps elucidate the war’s settler imperial cartographies. As the United States’ westmost unincorporated territory, Guåhan served as the so-called “Tip of the Spear” of the US bombing offensive during the war. The US military first deployed B-52s to Andersen Air Force Base in April 1964.10 Over the next eight years, tons of bombs were unloaded at the naval station at Apra Harbor, stored at the naval magazine on the southern part of the island, and then driven north to Andersen Air Force Base to be loaded onto the B-52s headed for Vietnam.11 This military offensive culminated in the infamous “Christmas bombing” campaign of Operation Linebacker II during December 1972, which pressured North Vietnamese leaders to negotiate an end to the war.12

Increased militarization of Guåhan during the Vietnam War coincided with heightened enunciation of CHamoru politics. Fervent calls for greater CHamoru self-determination culminated in Ricardo J. Bordallo’s successful gubernatorial campaign in 1974 based on a platform of CHamoru rights.13 At the same time, more than six thousand CHamoru soldiers served in the US military during the Vietnam War: a staggering proportion of the island’s civilian population of less than forty thousand.14 Of these, seventy-seven Guamanians, most of CHamoru descent, died in Vietnam.15

Guåhan’s long and complex history of colonialism, militarism, and settler imperialism set the grounds for CHamoru soldiers’ disproportionately high enlistment rates during the Vietnam War. After more than two centuries of Spanish colonial rule, the United States took possession of Guåhan following the Spanish-American War of 1898. During World War II, Japanese imperial forces occupied the US territory of Guåhan for three years, terrorizing the CHamoru people until the US military returned to reclaim the island on July 21, 1944—a day alternatively commemorated as “Liberation Day” or derided as the start of the United States’ reoccupation.16 Following the Organic Act of 1950, Guåhan’s residents were granted US citizenship, rendering them eligible for the Vietnam War’s draft but denying them key constitutional rights, such as congressional representation or the ability to vote for president. No Status of Force Agreement regulates US forces in Guåhan.

According to Keith Camacho and Laurel A. Monnig, once CHamoru subjects became US citizens, many saw “enlistment as one way to reciprocate—to give chenchule’, a form of labor based on reciprocal relations—to ‘Uncle Sam’ for ‘liberating’ them from Japanese military occupation during World War II.”17 Some recognized that the US military’s stronghold on Guåhan’s post–World War II economy left them few alternatives to support their families.18 Others saw enlistment as an opportunity to revive precolonial “warrior” traditions, as epitomized by the legend of Gadano of Guåhan.19 Relatedly, military service was a means to assert masculine agency in defiance of emasculating representations of CHamoru people as incapable of self-rule. CHamoru attempts to affirm their equality with US military personnel occupying Guåhan, however, inadvertently aligned CHamoru soldiers with US settler imperialism in Vietnam. CHamoru soldiering merely put a liberal multicultural face to imperialist intervention.

Aotearoa, meanwhile, first entered the Vietnam War in 1964, when Prime Minister Keith Holyoake sent troops to Vietnam in honor of the Australia, New Zealand, and United States (ANZUS) Security Treaty of 1951.20 During the Cold War, all three countries were invested in countering the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, so when Australia decided to send troops to Vietnam to assist the United States, Aotearoa obligingly followed suit. In total, about 3,200 New Zealanders participated in the Vietnam War in both combat and noncombat positions.21 While Aotearoa did not keep official statistics regarding soldiers’ race and Indigeneity, it is estimated that Māori served disproportionately in the combat element of the force, making up about 35 percent when they were only 10 percent of Aotearoa’s population.22

Compared to Guåhan, Aotearoa’s role in the Vietnam War was muted: New Zealand forces served as a small subordinate element of 1st Australian Task Force and contributed primarily at the artillery battery and infantry company level.23 Aotearoa’s indirect relationship to the United States explains the relatively limited scope of Māori soldiering during the war. Unlike their CHamoru counterparts, the Māori were never directly colonized by the US military. Aotearoa, however, has suffered its own history of British settler colonialism and genocide, which influenced their mobilization as Indigenous soldiers during the Vietnam War. In 1769, James Cook’s visit to the archipelago initiated a large influx of British settlers. The British formally colonized Aotearoa in 1840 with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, which recognized British sovereignty in exchange for the Māori’s guaranteed possession of their land. Decades of armed territorial conflict ensued, however, as white settlers inevitably broke the treaty.24 Today, Māori make up only 16.5 percent of Aotearoa’s population.25

Analyzing Indigenous soldiering in Guåhan and Aotearoa in relation brings into focus the transpacific nature of the US war in Vietnam, which impacted not only the US territory of Guåhan but also the independent nation of Aotearoa. It also reveals important parallels regarding the meaning of Indigenous military service across white settler states. Like CHamoru soldiers, many Māori men who fought during the Vietnam War understood military service as part a longer warrior tradition. According to Linda Tuhiwai Smith, for Māori “that tradition is to be found in the often quoted saying of the chief Rewi Maniapoto, Ka whawhai tonu matou, ake tonu ake, ‘we will fight on for ever and ever.’”26 After colonization, military service was one way to preserve this glorified warrior tradition and assert a distinctly Māori form of masculinity. According to one Māori soldier who volunteered to fight during World War II, “[T]o die in the pursuit of the War God Tumatauenga was a sacred duty and a manly death.”27 More expansively, military service was understood as fulfilling communal and cultural responsibilities to whanau (family) and the larger iwi (tribe): to accrue personal as well as tribal mana through battle; to exact utu in the form of revenge; and to honor family members who had fought in previous wars.28 Furthermore, it was a way to assert equality with the Pākehā (white settlers), particularly in light of the previous imperial policy that had prohibited Māori from fighting in the so-called “white wars.”29 Ty Kāwika Tengan explains, “By proving that their courage and fighting capabilities were equal to, if not superior to, their white counterparts that they were serving with, indigenous men could repudiate the colonizers’ superiority and validate their own masculinities.”30 Lastly, as in Guåhan, settler colonialism undermined Māori men’s employment opportunities, so they often joined the military to feed their families and/or improve their socioeconomic status during the Vietnam War.31

A transpacific framework also facilitates the critical juxtaposing of Pacific Islander experiences of the Vietnam War with that of Indigenous groups in Southeast Asia. From 1961 to 1975, the CIA fought a “Secret War” in Laos as part of the so-called Vietnam War—a war that was deliberately concealed because the United States had officially signed a series of Geneva conventions agreeing to neutrality in the region. Starting in the 1950s, the CIA backed the right-wing Royal Lao government against the communist Pathet Lao. The resultant Laotian Civil War (1959–75) was exacerbated by Cold War intervention from both the United States and Soviet Union. As part of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos between 1964 and 1973, targeting the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an attempt to prevent the transfer of Vietnamese communist forces and supplies between North and South Vietnam. Laos remains the “most heavily bombed country per capita.”32

As part of the Secret War, the CIA recruited and trained an estimated thirty thousand Hmong as well as Mien and Khmu soldiers from the mountains of northern Laos, capitalizing on previous decades of French colonial intervention in the region.33 Under the leadership of General Vang Pao, this “Secret Army” fought the communist Pathet Lao and conducted intelligence operations along the North Vietnamese border for the United States. But they also fought on behalf of their own Indigenous interests, to “pursue a version of self-governance” and “live in peace in their homeland.”34 Overall, roughly thirty-five thousand Hmong, including child soldiers as young as ten-years-old, died in battle, while disease and starvation killed almost one-third of the Hmong civilians who were forced to flee their villages.35 After the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, the CIA withdrew from Laos, leaving Hmong soldiers and their families vulnerable to political persecution by the victorious Pathet Lao.

Emergent discourses of Hmong Indigeneity facilitate analyses of Hmong Indigenous soldiering during the Secret War.36 In contrast to CHamoru and Māori Indigeneity, both shaped by white settler colonialism, Hmong Indigeneity is instead defined by centuries of decolonial struggle against multiple imperial and colonial regimes: Imperial China, which displaced the Hmong to Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century; the Kingdom and later state of Laos, which marginalized the Hmong as ethnic minorities; French Indochina, which both oppressed and recruited the Hmong as Indigenous soldiers; imperial Japan, which invaded during World War II; and the United States, which mobilized Hmong soldiers against communism during the Cold War.37 While Hmong living under the Lao People’s Democratic Republic today have been hesitant to take up the category of Indigeneity (xon phao pheun muang) since it is not recognized by the government, Hmong ethnics in Thailand and Hmong diasporics in the United States have increasingly identified as Indigenous, inspired by the surge in Indigenous activism in the wake of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.38 The Congress of World Hmong People based in St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, insists on the right to Hmong self-determination and goes so far as to express desire for a “Hmong Indigenous Nation” in northern and central Laos.39

Understanding Hmong soldiers as Indigenous laborers in relation to CHamoru and Māori soldiers better illuminates the settler imperial cartographies of the Vietnam War. It also helps link Asian American studies with Indigenous studies, Southeast Asia with Oceania. Indeed, the CIA recruited the Hmong precisely because of their Indigenous status. Since they considered the Hmong “a tribe, not a nation,” CIA operatives believed they “could negotiate with Hmong leaders without incurring any formal diplomatic obligations,” therefore ostensibly honoring US neutrality agreements.40 Moreover, “[s]oldiering constituted a civilizing tool to ‘save’ [the allegedly not-yet-modern] Hmong from their lack of a nation or nationalist sentiment.”41 In sum, Hmong soldiering occupied a fraught political limbo in between CHamoru and Māori soldiering. Like CHamoru soldiers, Hmong soldiers labored directly for the US military, but unlike them, Hmong soldiers were not US citizens and therefore not eligible for veterans’ benefits, even after acquiring US citizenship. Meanwhile, like Māori soldiers, Hmong soldiers were not considered a part of the US military, but unlike the Māori, they answered directly to the CIA. As such, Hmong soldiers were rendered simultaneously alien soldiers and “American patriots” whose seemingly contradictory positionality had to be actively disavowed and redacted from US government archives.42 Since Laos is not a white settler state like the United States and New Zealand, Hmong narratives of soldiering in Laos are less concerned with the recuperation and negotiation of Indigenous masculinity compared to their CHamoru and Māori counterparts. However, once Hmong soldiers migrate to the United States and encountered its emasculating settler discourse, militarized masculinity becomes more salient.

Because CHamoru, Māori, and Hmong soldiers occupied such different roles during the Vietnam War, the histories have been largely segregated. Analyzing the three in relation via the analytic of Indigenous soldiering, however, facilitates the tracing of what Keith Camacho and Setsu Shigematsu term “militarized currents” across different struggles against settler imperialism.43 The remaining sections engage literature in order to elaborate the complex negotiations of Indigenous soldiering during the Trans-Pacific Vietnam War and its afterlives.

Chamoru Soldiering

CHamoru poet Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [guma’], the third book in his ongoing poetry series devoted to Guåhan’s history, memory, and politics, is transpacific in both form and content. Islands of verses are connected via sealike blank space and wave-resembling tilde; the image of a revived sakman, a traditional CHamoru outrigger canoe, navigates across the book’s stanzas, illuminating the US military’s multigenerational impact on CHamoru understandings of patriotism, manhood, and agency. Like many others of his generation, Perez’s grandfather joined the US military after World War II, paving the way for Perez’s father—granted citizenship in 1950 by the Organic Act—to be drafted during the Vietnam War. Perez’s father’s experience of soldiering during the Vietnam War in turn influences his response to an army recruiter who attempts to recruit Perez during high school.44 The two poems analyzed below trace how the transpacific legacies of World War II were reactivated during the Vietnam War, and later the War on Terror. Perez, as both author and narrator, inherits and reworks his grandfather’s and father’s stories of Indigenous soldiering, breaking the cycle of militarized masculinity via decolonial intervention.

In the book’s second poem, “ginen tidelands [latte stone park] [hagåtña, guåhan],” Perez depicts his father, to whom the poem is dedicated, as i haligi (a pillar) and i tasa (a capstone) of CHamoru strength and tradition.45 Seven sections, connected by tilde and consisting of three couplets of four words each, depict different aspects of CHamoru masculinity. Section 4, for example, features the militarized labor of Indigenous soldiering during the Vietnam War:

citizen : drafted

vietnam war—

the rifle

he kept—

his uniform

his fatigue46

Functioning as an anchor for the rest of the poem, positioned as it is at the poem’s center, this section emphasizes three key points. First, the Organic Act of 1950, which interpolated CHamoru subjects as US citizens, made CHamoru men eligible for the Vietnam War’s draft, even as they were inhibited from voting for the politicians responsible for that war. Second, the militarized legacies of the Vietnam War outlasted the war itself: rather than return or discard the rifle he was given after the war’s conclusion, Perez’s father “kept” it, with the unspoken expectation that he would pass it down to his son, continuing the intergenerational labor of Indigenous soldiering. Lastly, the third stanza draws on the etymology of “fatigues”—which during the 1770s signified “extra duties of a soldier” (hence “fatigue,” or tiredness)—to forward a decolonial critique of US militarism.47 By dropping the “s” in the last line to more explicitly position the US military uniform as a symbol of fatigue rather than patriotism, this stanza calls attention to the multiple centuries of colonization that CHamoru subjects have endured.48 In this way, the poem critiques the United States’ recruitment of Indigenous military labor to further settler imperialism, even as it refrains from demonizing the individual CHamoru soldiers who fought during the Vietnam War. In other words, rather than flatten CHamoru soldiers as agents of settler imperialism, the poem recuperates Indigenous soldiering—and importantly, resistance to such—into an alternative genealogy of CHamoru masculinity.

Indeed, the other stanzas of the poem define CHamoru masculinity not through militarization, but rather through traditional acts of carving limestone and braiding rope as well as domestic acts of husking coconut and cooking food. Overall, the poem reclaims CHamoru traditions as living practices that should be “removed from” the dead space of the “museum”—as the last section insists—and posits the father figure as key to this reclamation.49 This is not to discount the work of CHamoru mothers and grandmothers, but rather to insist that CHamoru fathers also play an essential role in the decolonial labor of preserving Indigenous land and life. Breaking the intergenerational cycle of Indigenous soldiering, CHamoru fathers can instead contribute to the cross-generational teaching of CHamoru traditions.

The depiction of Perez’s father’s relationship to the Vietnam War in “ginen tidelands [latte stone park] [hagåtña, guåhan]” foreshadows his response to the army recruiter who tries to recruit seventeen-year-old Perez in the poem “ginen ta(la)ya.” Whereas the former poem relies on sparse diction and sharp juxtapositions to provide a sketch of CHamoru masculinity, “ginen ta(la)ya” incorporates longer prose stanzas to illustrate the intergenerational inheritances associated with CHamoru soldiering. In this poem, Perez recounts how an army recruiter who visits his house is met with resistance. The poem quotes Perez’s mother, who recalls: “I didn’t want you joining the service because I don’t believe in fighting wars or having to go off to fight wars when you were so young. You didn’t even have a chance to live yet.”50 It also quotes Perez’s father, who shares: “And when he found out I was a veteran and I was in the Army [during the Vietnam War], he thought that was a good thing. But I don’t want anyone else in the family going into the military … I always thought, what if you don’t live?”51 In this stanza, both parents note the fatal costs of Indigenous soldiering and work to break the intergenerational cycle of militarized masculinity.

The last page of the three-page poem juxtaposes the Japanese occupation of Guåhan—which Perez’s grandfather survived—with the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the subsequent War on Terror, and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq that ensued.52 Honoring the names of young CHamoru soldiers who continue to sacrifice their lives in the service of US militarism in the closing stanzas of the poem, Perez calls attention to a new generation of Indigenous soldiering. Perez’s own labor, however, is not one of soldiering, but of poetry: of combating the archival erasure of CHamoru soldiers discussed above through literature. What he inherits from his grandfather’s and father’s experiences of Indigenous soldiering during World War II and the Vietnam War therefore is not militarized masculinity but decolonial, transpacific critique.

Māori Soldiering

In contrast to the profusion of cultural productions and scholarship highlighting Māori contributions to World Wars I and II, Māori soldiering during the Vietnam War has been all but overlooked. Part of this has to do with the relatively limited role of the New Zealand Defense Force in Vietnam. In contrast to the positive reception enjoyed by veterans of the world wars, moreover, once Māori soldiers returned home from Vietnam, they were largely ignored by the government and derided by antiwar protesters. The Uncle’s Story, written by renowned Māori novelist and short-story writer Witi Ihimaera, is one of the rare literary texts to depict Māori soldiering during the Vietnam War.53 However, with the exception of Michelle Keown’s Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania, most scholarship on the novel has overlooked the question of Indigenous soldiering, focusing instead on its queer narrative.54 Elaborating on Kweon’s analysis, this section puts The Uncle’s Story in conversation with CHamoru and Hmong narratives of Indigenous soldiering to highlight the settler imperial cartographies of the Trans-Pacific Vietnam War.

Like from unincorporated territory [guma’], The Uncle’s Story both highlights and critiques the intergenerational inheritances of Indigenous soldiering. Similar to Perez’s poetry, the novel depicts three generations of men and their negotiation of Māori masculinities: Michael Mahana, whose queerness challenges his father’s and grandfather’s heteropatriarchal understandings of Māori manhood; Sam Mahana, Michael’s uncle, who falls in love with a white American pilot while serving in Vietnam; and Arapeta Mahana, Sam’s father and Michael’s grandfather, who received a Military Cross during World War II for his leadership as a commander of the renowned 28th Māori Battalion, which consisted of nearly nine hundred Māori men.55 The novel alternates between Michael’s first-person narrative, set in the 1990s, and Sam’s third-person narrative, set three decades earlier, formally establishing an intergenerational male narrative that is mirrored at the level of dialogue. In chapter 3, for example, Arapeta interpolates his eldest son Sam’s decision to fight in Vietnam into a much longer warrior tradition that includes his own generation’s service during World War II: “It is good to see three of this generation carrying on the tradition of their forebears from the Maori Battalion.”56 Invoking “the tapu of Tumatauenga, the God of War,” Arapeta urges Sam and his friends to “[f]ight for the honour of your tribe!”57 In this fiery speech, Arapeta equates military service with cultural responsibility, Indigenous soldiering with the highest honor a Māori man could earn for his iwi. In so doing, he entangles Māori masculinity with settler imperial war-making, initiated by the United States and supported by Aotearoa during the Vietnam War.

Sam’s narrative challenges Arapeta’s militarized definition of Māori masculinity in two regards. First, Sam’s encounters with the Vietnamese produce fleeting moments of racial recognition. In Vietnam, Sam comes to realize that his white military allies could easily mistake his brown skin and black hair for that of the so-called enemy. For example, his Australian friend Jim jokes, “You’re one of them Horis, aren’t you? … If I came up on you in the dark, and if you weren’t in uniform, I’d probably mistake you for one of them locals.”58 Citing the racial slur for a person of Māori descent—a transliteration of the English name George, popular during the early decades of European colonization—Jim alludes to the transpacific dimensions of settler imperial white supremacy, which racialized dark-skinned natives in Vietnam and Aotearoa alike as suspect. Sam retorts, “How would you know I wasn’t … The uniform wouldn’t guarantee you anything, would it.”59 At one level, Sam’s comment references the shared ethnicity of the Vietnamese communists and anticommunists, which made political loyalties hard to decipher during the war. But on another level, it references the ease with which he as a Māori could take on the uniform—and by extension the body and subjectivity—of the Vietnamese, blurring Cold War divisions and articulating nascent connections between the two groups’ anti- and decolonial struggles.

Sam’s sense of racial recognition is heightened by an encounter with an older Vietnamese villager who, despite her anticolonial politics, invites him into her home to eat phở. The woman reminds Sam of his great-aunt and her hut recalls his great-aunt’s whare, so much so that he “felt himself falling, as if he was going through a looking glass.”60 Sam is moved by the woman’s hospitality and grieves deeply when she is killed. These moments of racial recognition prompt Sam to articulate an anti-imperial critique of the war and his role in it after he leaves Vietnam in January 1971: “We fucked the people up so bad that it’s going to take them years to recover. We napalmed the shit out of that country. We went there, did our war thing and then got out scot free.”61 Importantly, this decolonial critique is borne out of his experience of Indigenous soldiering in Vietnam, not in spite of it.

Sam’s queer narrative also challenges the heteropatriarchal aspects of Arapeta’s militarized understanding of Māori masculinity. While in Vietnam, Sam falls in love with Cliff Harper, a white American fighter pilot. On one level, Sam’s relationship with Cliff allegorizes Aotearoa’s, and by extension some Māori’s, intimate complicity with the US settler imperial project in Vietnam. On another level, however, it challenges Arapeta’s belief that queerness “transgressed the order of the Maori world” and “the tapu [sacred] nature of man.”62 Indeed, the first and only time Sam consummates his relationship with Cliff, he describes the sexual encounter in distinctly Māori terms, as “a sun exploding within him, showering Te Kore with light.”63 To quote one of Michael’s Māori mentors, Sam “prove[d] that you can be gay—and a warrior.”64

While Sam’s narrative ultimately ends in tragedy, the decolonial potential of queer Māori masculinity is fulfilled by Sam’s gay nephew, Michael. When Arapeta finds out about Sam’s relationship with Cliff, he disowns Sam: “You are an affront to your iwi. You are an affront to all that I and my Maori Battalion mates fought for.”65 Not long after, Sam dies in a car crash on his way to meet Cliff, cutting short the possibility of a queer Māori denouement. Sam’s story is resolved, however, via the intergenerational narrative of Michael, who, at the end of the novel, joins his Māori feminist lesbian friend Roimata in initiating a new queer Māori tribe committed to both queer liberation and Māori sovereignty. Like Perez (as diegetic narrator) in from unincorporated territory [guma’], Michael positions himself as both intergenerational inheritor and Indigenous storyteller: “We must speak our stories, we must enact them, we must sing our songs throughout this hostile universe.”66 In The Uncle’s Story, what Sam passes on to the next generation, then, is not the pressure to continue a tradition of Indigenous soldiering in settler armies, but the opportunity to redefine what it means to be a Māori “warrior” fighting for decolonization.67 Importantly, like Perez’s father in from unincorporated territory [guma’], this critique is facilitated by Sam’s vexed experience of Indigenous soldiering during the Vietnam War.

Hmong Soldiering

According to Ma Vang, the Secret War “produces knowledge through epistemic erasure and violence” against Hmong subjects.68 As such, Hmong American poet Mai Der Vang’s “Dear Soldier of the Secret War,” the second poem in her award-winning volume Afterland, can be read as an act of resistance: a defiant epistolary written by a postwar narrator to the occluded figure of the Hmong soldier.69 Across the poem’s short, cutting stanzas, censorship—understood as the settler imperial imposition of secrecy—characterizes the specific nature of violence enacted upon the Hmong soldier. For example, the narrator notes how the enemy “sliced off/and boiled” the tongue of the addressee’s younger brother and “forced it down your throat,” implicating the unnamed Hmong soldier in the Secret War’s structure of suppression.70

The Secret War ravaged not only Hmong soldiers but also the entire Hmong community, indexing the genocidal logics of settler imperialism. Unlike CHamoru and Māori soldiers who traveled to Southeast Asia to fight, Hmong soldiers were forced to wage war on their own Indigenous lands, making it difficult to distinguish militarized masculinity from a broader militarized Hmong subjectivity. The poem bears witness to the settler imperial violence enacted on the Hmong soldier’s “missing wife,” dragged “naked, screaming, and bleeding/by her long black hair,” and his son, whose “shell-crumbled” head lay “in the rice/pounder.”71 Moreover, the land as an Indigenous subject is itself ravaged, the “Hmong village” rendered a “graveyard.”72

The majority of the second-person poem addresses the Hmong soldier as a silent recipient; questions end in periods, suggesting the nonexpectation of an answer. The last two italicized stanzas, however, break the silence, empowering the Hmong soldier to directly address the United States:

all of our thousands who died on your side,

why don’t you authorize

another plane.73

Speaking here as a refugee, the Hmong soldier criticizes the hypocrisy of Americans who returned “to the coffee cup,/new linens/in a warm bed,” abandoning all those who fought and died on behalf of the US settler imperialist project in Southeast Asia.74 According to Ma Vang, the “refugee soldier figure”—forced to flee Laos due to soldiering on behalf of the United States—is “a problem of the archive” and an unspeakable figure in US law, since “both the refugee and soldier are subjects of different discourses that do not converge.”75 Refugee soldiering is further intersected with Indigenous soldiering, inviting transpacific juxtapositions. An earlier stanza describes the Hmong soldier waiting “for hours in ragged fatigues/with others abandoned.”76 This reference to “ragged fatigues” not only recalls Perez’s decolonial critique of the fatigue associated with Indigenous soldiering, but also raises the question of what nation was represented by the Hmong soldier’s uniform. Unlike CHamoru soldiers, Hmong soldiers were (and still are) forbidden from wearing official US military uniforms since they were part of a Secret Army whose existence was denied by the United States. Here, the analytic of Indigenous soldiering opens up a critique of militarized nationalism. An early stanza parrots the CIA’s blasé apology—“Sorry about your mountains”—suggesting the dismissal of Indigenous soldiers whose territory did not constitute a nation-state. Such Indigenous refusal to equate belonging with the borders of nation-statehood—what Mai Der Vang captures so beautifully via the title Afterland—points toward decolonial, nonstatist alternatives for understanding “Hmong presence in place and time,” radically (re)mapping “what it means to belong to a place when nonbelonging is foundational to refugee ontology.”77

Like the CHamoru and Māori narratives of Indigenous soldiering discussed above, “Dear Soldier of the Secret War” centers intergenerational inheritance:

Maybe you clench your rifle closer,

sling your elegies

to your back,

hold them as a newborn baby.78

Here, the “rifle” not only symbolizes intergenerational soldiering as in Perez’s poem; it is also transformed into an elegy, a song of lament, that honors the dead the United States refuses to name. Significantly, these elegies are compared to “a newborn baby”: a reference to the “difficult, intergenerational movement of memory’s oral archive from Hmong refugees to their American-born children, the first generation to seek to memorialise the conflict in English.”79 Translating across space, time, language, and medium, Mai Der Vang as Indigenous storyteller commemorates the intergenerational trauma of militarized masculinity and forced displacement, counteracting the silence imposed by the Secret War in Laos.

Indigenous Soldiering as Transpacific Critique

CHamoru, Māori, and Hmong narratives of Indigenous soldiering during the Vietnam War counteract the discursive erasure enacted by military and government archives, which disavow Indigenous subjectivities even as they rely on prior centuries of settler imperial violence to facilitate the recruitment of Indigenous soldiers. Rather than posit Indigenous soldiers as mere agents of settler imperialism—for indeed, some Indigenous soldiers did align politically with the settler imperial state—this article has highlighted how postwar Indigenous authors negotiate the complex intergenerational inheritances of militarized masculinity, positing alternative conceptions of manhood and agency in an attempt to break ongoing cycles of Indigenous warfare. Indigenous soldiering moreover facilitates a multisited analysis of Indigeneity across Oceania and Southeast Asia, marking it an important locus of transpacific critique during the Vietnam War and its afterlives.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022).

Notes

1. Khatharya Um, From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Davorn Sisavath, “The US Secret War in Laos: Constructing an Archive from Military Waste,” Radical History Review 133 (January 2019): 103–16; Simeon Man, Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Timothy K. August, Evyn Lê Espiritu, and Vinh Nguyen, “Introduction—Vietnam, War, and the Global Imagination,” Canadian Review of American Studies 48, no. 3 (2018): 289–95.

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2. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xv.

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3. Man, Soldiering through Empire, 10.

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4. See also Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, Asia Pacific Modern 7 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

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5. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 193; Yến Lê Espiritu, “Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies: A Transpacific Critique,” American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2017): 483–90; Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, “Historicizing the Transpacific Settler Colonial Condition: Asian–Indigenous Relations in Shawn Wong’s Homebase and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer,” MELUS 45, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 49–71.

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6. Juliet Nebolon, “‘Life Given Straight from the Heart’: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawai’i during World War II,” American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (March 2017): 25.

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7. Pedro C. Sanchez, Guahan/Guam: The History of Our Island (Agana, Guam: Sanchez Publishing House, 1991), 352.

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8. Chadwick Allen, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Espiritu, “Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies,” 486.

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9. Lisa Yoneyama, “Toward a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific,” American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2017): 472.

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10. Max V. Soliven, “Where the Political ‘War’ is Ending, and They’re Getting Set for Another ‘War,’” PhilStar Global, November 5, 2002, http://beta.philstar.com/opinion/2002/11/05/182667/where-political-145war146-ending-and-they146re-getting-set-another-145war146.

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11. Catherine Lutz, “US Military Bases on Guam in a Global Perspective,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 30, no. 3 (July 26, 2010), http://apjjf.org/-Catherine-Lutz/3389/article.html.

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12. Earl H. Tilford, Setup: What the Air Force Did in Vietnam and Why (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1991), 263.

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13. Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1995), 250–51.

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14. “A Heartfelt Welcome to Guam,” Guam Daily News (March 20, 1967): 4.

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15. Sanchez, Guahan/Guam, 352.

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16. Cecilia C. T. Perez, “A Chamorro Re-Telling of ‘Liberation,’” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña, Guam: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 70–77.

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17. Keith L. Camacho and Laurel A. Monnig, “Uncomfortable Fatigues: Chamorro Soldiers, Gendered Identities, and the Question of Decolonization in Guam,” in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 157. See also Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “The Exceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA,” in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 33–61; Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 42–49.

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18. Camacho and Monnig, “Uncomfortable Fatigues,” 156–58.

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19. Camacho and Monnig, “Uncomfortable Fatigues,” 160.

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20. For a discussion of Aboriginal soldiering, see Noah Riseman, “Elite Indigenous Masculinity in Textual Representations of Aboriginal Service in the Vietnam War,” Journal of Australian Studies 40, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 32–44.

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21. Ian McGibbon, New Zealand’s Vietnam War: A History of Combat, Commitment and Controversy (Auckland, New Zealand: Exisle Publishing, 2014), 7.

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22. McGibbon, New Zealand’s Vietnam War, 297; Ian McGibbon, “Asian Conflicts: Vietnam War,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, last updated February 1, 2016, accessed December 30, 2021, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/asian-conflicts/page-5.

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23. McGibbon, New Zealand’s Vietnam War, 7.

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24. “British Colonists Reach New Zealand,” History, published February 9, 2010, last updated January 21, 2020, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-colonists-reach-new-zealand.

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25. “New Zealand’s Population Reflects Growing Diversity,” Statistics New Zealand (Stats NZ), published September 22, 2019, accessed November 14, 2020, https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/new-zealands-population-reflects-growing-diversity.

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26. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012), 104.

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27. Quoted in Monty Soutar, Nga Tama Toa: The Price of Citizenship: C Company 28 (Māori) Battalion 1939–1945 (Auckland, New Zealand: David Bateman, 2008), 35.

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28. Wira Gardiner, Te Mura O Te Ahi: The Story of the Maori Battalion (Aukland, New Zealand: Reed Books, 1992); Michelle Frances Erai, “Maori Soldiers: Maori Experiences of the New Zealand Army” (MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1995).

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29. Gardiner, Te Mura O Te Ahi, 13.

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30. Ty Kāwika Tengan, “(En)Gendering Colonialism: Masculinities in Hawaiʻi and Aotearoa,” Cultural Values 6, no. 3 (July 2002): 247.

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31. Witi Ihimaera, “Masculinity and Desire: Rewriting the Polynesian Body,” paper presented at the University of Hawaiʻi, April 18, 2000, referenced in Tengan, “(En)Gendering Colonialism,” 248.

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32. Sisavath, “The US Secret War in Laos,” 103.

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33. Davorn Sisavath, “Hmong and Lao American Vietnam Veterans,” in Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today, ed. Edith Wen-Chu Chen and Grace J. Yoo, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA, 2010), 804.

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34. Ma Vang, History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 39–40.

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35. Keith Quincy, Harvesting Pa Chay’s Wheat: The Hmong and America’s Secret War in Laos (Spokane: Eastern Washington University Press, 2000), 5.

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36. Louisa Schein, “Diasporic Media and Hmong/Miao Formulations of Nativeness and Displacement,” in Indigenous Experience Today, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (New York: Routledge, 2007), 225–45.

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37. Ian G. Baird, “Thinking about Indigeneity with Respect to Time and Space: Reflections on Southeast Asia,” Espace Populations Sociétés, no. 1–2 (2020); Andrew Gray, “The Indigenous Movement in Asia,” in Indigenous Peoples in Asia, ed. Robert H. Barnes, Andrew Gray, and Benedict Kingsbury (Ann Arbor, MI: Association of Asian Studies, 1995), 35–58.

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38. Ian G. Baird, “Translocal Assemblages and the Circulation of the Concept of ‘Indigenous Peoples’ in Laos,” Political Geography 46 (2015): 54–64; Prasit Leepreecha, “Becoming Indigenous Peoples in Thailand,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (February 2019): 32–50.

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39. Baird, “Translocal Assemblages,” 61–62.

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40. Alfred W. McCoy, “America’s Secret War in Laos, 1955–1975,” in A Companion to the Vietnam War, ed. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 289. McCoy’s writing often reproduces settler imperial logics.

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41. Vang, History on the Run, 38.

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42. Susan Haigh, Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 1997; and Canadian Border Boat Landing Permit Requirements: Hearing on H.R. 317 Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, 105th US Congress (June 26, 1997) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997), 26. Referenced in Vang, History on the Run, 104.

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43. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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44. Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [guma’] (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), 22, 74.

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45. Perez, from unincorporated territory [guma’], 14.

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46. Excerpt from “ginen tidelands [latte stone park] [hagåtña, guåhan]” is from from unincorporated territory [guma’]. Copyright 2014 by Craig Santos Perez. The poem excerpt appears with the permission of Omnidawn Publishing. All rights reserved.

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47. “Fatigues,” accessed November 11, 2020, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/fatigues.

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48. See also Camacho and Monnig, “Uncomfortable Fatigues,” 170.

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49. Perez, from unincorporated territory [guma’], 16.

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50. Perez, from unincorporated territory [guma’], 22.

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51. Perez, from unincorporated territory [guma’], 22.

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52. For more on CHamoru soldiers killed during the War on Terror, see Bevacqua, “The Exceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro Soldier.”

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53. See also John Broughton’s play Michael James Manaia (University of Otago, 1991/1994) and James George’s novel Ocean Roads (Huia Publishers, 2006).

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54. Michelle Keown, Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 104–5; Yanwei Tan, “Recognition, Political and Interpersonal: Gay Tribalism in Witi Ihimaera’s The Uncle’s Story,” Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 2 (2014): 366–86; Sandra Tawake, “Cultural Rhetoric in Coming-Out Narratives: Witi Ihimaera’s The Uncle’s Story,” World Englishes 25, no. 3/4 (2006): 373–80; Margaret Melkin, “A Maori Writer in Two Worlds,” Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 10, no. 1 (2003): 30.

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55. J. F. Cody, 28 (Maori) Battalion: Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War 1939–45 (Wellington, New Zealand: War History Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1956), 4.

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56. Witi Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2000), 42.

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57. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 42.

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58. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 58.

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59. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 58.

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60. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 90.

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61. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 226.

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62. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 155–56.

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63. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 246.

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64. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 294.

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65. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 257.

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66. Ihimaera, The Uncle’s Story, 326, 365, 371.

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67. Tawake, “Cultural Rhetoric in Coming-Out Narratives,” 377.

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68. Vang, History on the Run, 9.

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69. For more on the occluded figure of the Hmong soldier, see Vang, History on the Run, 38–44, 57–91.

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70. Mai Der Vang, Afterland (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017), 7.

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71. Vang, Afterland, 7.

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72. Vang, Afterland, 7.

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73. Mai Der Vang, excerpt from “Dear Soldier of the Secret War” from Afterland. Copyright 2017 by Mai Der Vang. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.

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74. Vang, Afterland, 7.

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75. Vang, History on the Run, 96, 100.

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76. Vang, Afterland, 8.

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77. Vang, History on the Run, 16, 182.

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78. Mai Der Vang, excerpt from “Dear Soldier of the Secret War” from Afterland. Copyright 2017 by Mai Der Vang. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.

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79. Sarah Howe, “‘Library of Opaque Memory’: Spectral Archives in Brandon Som, Mai Der Vang and Bhanu Kapil,” in The Contemporary Poetry Archive: Essays and Interventions, ed. Linda Anderson, Mark Byers, and Ahren Warner (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 132.

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