Notes
Introduction
1.Le Ly Hayslip with Jay Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace (1989; New York: Plume, 2003), 113.
2.US Department of Veterans Affairs, “Military Health History Pocketcard: Vietnam,” n.d., https://www.va.gov/oaa/pocketcard/vietnam.asp (accessed August 25, 2019).
3.Scholars and theorists have readily accepted sexuality as a multifaceted tool in social history, often connecting the discourse to themes of power, as expressed by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (1978), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 103.
4.Amanda Chapman Boczar, “Economics, Empathy, and Expectation: History and Representations of Rape and Prostitution in Late 1980s Vietnam War Films,” in Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn, ed. Karen Ritzenhoff and Catriona McAvoy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 69–93.
5.Albert Auster and Leonard Quart, How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood & Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1988), 143.
6.Jason Rowan, “Indian Fan’s Sign Begs Question: Is Michael Bourn Too Beaucoup?,” Sportressofblogitude.com, August 8, 2013, http://www.sportressofblogitude.com/2013/08/08/indians-fans-sign-begs-question-is-michael-bourn-too-beaucoup-photo/ (accessed November 18, 2013).
7.In the face of Cafepress’s line of wearables related to everything from the film’s most famous line to mock advertisements for “Mama San’s Massage Parlor” stands the popular retort of “I will not love you long time” items from companies like Blacklava, which dubs itself “a store for all things Asian American.” “Me Love You Long Time Shirt,” Cafepress.com, 2014, http://www.cafepress.com/mf/33323012/me-love-you-long-time_tshirt?productId=368569178 (accessed March 10, 2014); “Mama San’s Massage Parlor Sweatshirt,” Cafepress.com, 2014, http://www.cafepress.com/+mama_sans_massage_parlor_kids_sweatshirt,277872548 (accessed March 10, 2014); “I Will Not Love You Long Time Women’s Boy Beater,” Blacklava.com, http://www.blacklava.net/#/item/i_will_not_love_you_long_time_women’s_boy_beater/ (accessed November 19, 2013).
8.The Office, season 3, episode 8, “The Merger,” dir., Ken Whittingham, November 16, 2006, NBC, https://www.peacocktv.com/stream-tv/the-office.
9.Jeffrey A. Keith, “Producing Miss Saigon: Imaginings, Realities, and the Sensual Geography of Saigon,” Journal of American–East Asian Relations 22, no. 3 (2015): 268.
11.Michael Paulson, “The Battle of ‘Miss Saigon’: Yellowface, Art and Opportunity,” New York Times, March 17, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2nyF0Sb.
12.Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 10–11.
13.Mark Philip Bradley, “Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 211–16.
14.Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
15.Quoted in David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History (New York: Routledge, 2001), 126–27.
17.Christopher S. DeRosa, Political Indoctrination in the U.S. Army from World War II to the Vietnam War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 209, 233.
20.Akira Iriye, “Cultural and International History,” in Hogan and Paterson, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 242. Iriye notes that “culture” is as difficult a term to pin down as “ideology,” “power,” or “security.” By his definition, culture adds significant depth to the study of foreign relations since “cultural phenomena … are not directly involved in state-to-state political, strategic, or economic affairs” (242). This introduction and examination of non-state actors and their impact on states are central to this volume.
21.Katherine A. S. Sibley, “Introduction: Gender and Sexuality in American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 4 (September 2012): 696. For a discussion of cultural transfer, see Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Cultural Transfer,” in Hogan and Paterson, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 257–78.
22.Robert Dean, “The Personal and the Political: Gender and Sexuality in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 4 (September 2012): 763.
25.Patricia Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,” Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005): 422. “Transnationalism” is a term used extensively in migration studies. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc define transnational migration as “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders.” Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration,” Anthropological Quarterly 68, no. 1 (January 1995): 48–63.
26.Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed. (1989; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 172–73. While I agree with Enloe, this book does not expand to cover all these categories. Most notably, I do not engage with the lives of military women, whose involvement developed in different ways from that of civilian women.
28.Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
29.Quote from Arthur Goldberg in Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 491.
30.Michael A. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 84–85.
31.Olga Dror, “Establishing Ho Chi Minh’s Cult: Vietnamese Traditions and Their Transformations,” Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 2 (May 2016): 454.
32.Michael Cotey Morgan, University of Toronto review of Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network by Sarah Snyder, H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews 13, no. 32 (2012): 14, http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIII-32.pdf.
33.Theoretical frameworks for trauma and memory that have proved particularly useful in framing how societies view and remember war are Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction; Stanley Krippner and Teresa M. McIntyre, The Psychological Impact of War Trauma on Civilians: An International Perspective (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Elisabeth Wood, “Variation in Sexual Violence during War,” Politics and Society 34, no. 3 (2006): 307–42.
34.For a concise historiographical essay on major works incorporating culture into the history of foreign relations, see Iriye, “Cultural and International History.” Also see James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael O’Malley, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Major works influencing this volume include Mark Philip Bradley, Imaging Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), and Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
35.Other works that incorporate non-state actors as primary subjects in their works on foreign policy include Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
36.Significant works on these topics include Kyle Longley, Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2008); Heonik Kwon’s After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) and The Other Cold War; and Bradley, Imaging Vietnam and America.
37.Scholars of North Vietnam are particularly strong in their use of Vietnamese perspectives as not simply support but a framework for their research. See Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
38.Meredith H. Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
39.Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Also see Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Kyle A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005).
40.Heather Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11.
42.Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
43.Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009).
45.Wu, Radicals on the Road, 257. Wu’s analysis builds on the works of Heather Stur and on Evelyn Yoshimura, “GI’s and Racism” (1971), Asian Women’s Journal (1975): 64–76.
46.Christina Elizabeth Firpo, Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).
47.Scholars have engaged more directly with the overall economic impact of American escalation in Vietnam, including the rise of a black market economy and corruption in South Vietnam. Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (1985; New York: New Press, 1994), 223–30.
48.In The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters, the journalist Richard Bernstein simplifies the world of sex during the Vietnam War as a “weird” one driven by ease, politics, and necessity. Bernstein’s focus on the differences between East and West leaves his analysis of security and American power over Asian women superficial. He argues that women relied of GIs to care for them, and often entered long-term relationships to earn more money over a longer period, which addresses only one type of relationship that occurred. Richard Bernstein, The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 227, 239.
49.Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988), 264. Sheehan references an unnamed Saigon newspaper that provides an image of this hierarchy.
50.Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 293–95, 310–11.
52.Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 205.
53.Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, eds., Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: New Press/Norton, 1993).
54.Michiko Takeuchi, “ ‘Pan-Pan Girls’ Performing and Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific Theater: U.S. Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan,” in Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, ed. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 79–108.
55.Sarah Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 2–5.
56.Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
57.See Goedde, GIs and Germans; Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Roberts, What Soldiers Do.
58.Gina Marie Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
59.John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
60.Several works addressing the colonial period illustrate how racialized and sexualized beliefs concerning the normative behavior of Southeast Asian women persisted into the American war era in Vietnam. See Firpo, Black Market Business; Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Ruth Roach Pierson, Nupur Chaudhuri, and Beth McAuley, eds., Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Kathryn Robson and Jennifer Yee, eds., France and “Indochina”: Cultural Representations (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005); Ann Laura Stoler, “ ‘Mixed-Bloods’ and the Cultural Politics of European Identity in Colonial Southeast Asia,” in The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (London: Zed Books, 1995), 128–48; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
61.Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995.
63.See Edward Miller, “War Stories: The Taylor-Buzzanco Debate and How We Think about the Vietnam War,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2006): 453–84; Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (1986; New York: Penguin, 1997), 251; Robert Buzzanco, “Fear and (Self) Loathing in Lubbock: How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Vietnam and Iraq” Counterpunch, April 16–18, 2005; Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Jessica Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
1. Vietnam in the American Mind from the Colonial Era through the 1950s
1.Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 65–66; Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, New Cold War History Series (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 53–99.
2.For early American intervention in Vietnam, see Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012).
3.The opening of Vietnamese archives has altered the historiographical paradigm regarding Diem’s relationship with the United States. Previously, historians including Stanley Karnow and Robert Buzzanco portrayed Diem as a figure chosen by Washington as an incompetent puppet to their whims. In contrast, scholars including Philip Catton, Jessica Chapman, and Edward Miller have presented convincing reseach that Diem achieved power independently through shrewd political strategies against corruption, and held that power through a sincere dedication to modernizing Vietnam. Edward Miller, “War Stories: The Taylor-Buzzanco Debate and How We Think about the Vietnam War,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2006): 453–84; Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 2013); Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (1984; New York: Penguin, 1997), 251; Robert Buzzanco, “Fear and (Self) Loathing in Lubbock: How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Vietnam and Iraq,” Counterpunch, April 16–18, 2005; Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Jessica Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
4.Henry R. Lieberman, “Communists Find Asia Ripe for Subversion,” New York Times, December 26, 1954.
7.On contemporary military prostitution, see Katharine H. S. Moon, “Military Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia,” Asia-Pacific Journal 7, issue 3, no. 6 (2009), 1–10.
8.Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus’s edited volume Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: New Press/Norton, 1993) provides an overview of the decades-long sex industries that persisted in Japan, the Philippines, and Korea.
9.Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, “Olongapo: The Bar System,” in Let the Good Times Roll, 47.
10.Bruce Cummings, “Silent but Deadly: Sexual Subordination in the U.S.-Korean Relationship,” in Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll, 169.
11.Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
13.In December 1949 the United Nations had passed a convention that included a provision to ban prostitution. “Major Decisions Adopted at U.N. General Assembly Session: Major Decisions of the U.N. Assembly,” New York Times, December 11, 1949.
14.Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 30.
16.Paul Kramer, “Colonial Crossings: Prostitution, Disease, and the Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-American War,” in Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the 20th Twentieth Century, ed. Emily Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 18–19, 26.
17.Kramer, “Colonial Crossings,” 19, 21–22.
18.Kramer, “Colonial Crossings,” 26.
21.Aida F. Santos, “Gathering the Dust: The Bases Issue in the Philippines,” in Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia, 33–35.
22.On French colonial expansion, see Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
23.Sutor’s work is sometimes translated alternately as either Ethnology of the Genital Senses, Love in the Colonies, or Wanderings in the Untrodden Fields of Anthropology. Robert Aldrich, “Homosexuality in the French Colonies,” in Homosexuality in French History and Culture, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2012), 205–10; Ross G. Forman, “Empire,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 99.
24.Anecdote taken from a translation published in Leland Gardner, Vietnam Underside! “Don’t Worry Mom … We’ve Got Penicillin” (San Diego: Publishers Export, 1966).
26.Jean-Marc Binot, Le repos des guerriers: Les Bordels Militaires de Campagne pendant la Guerre d’Indochine (Paris: Fayard, 2014); Michel S. Hardy, De la morale au moral des troupes ou l’histoire des B.M.C., 1918–2004 (Panazol: Lavauzelle, 2004); Pierre Journoud and Hugues Tertrais, Paroles de Dien Bien Phu: Les survivants témoignent (Paris: Tallandier, 2004).
30.On prostitution in colonized India, see Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003); Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). For French “negrophilism” and African colonial sexuality, see S. J. Rasmussen, “Female Sexuality, Social Reproduction, and the Politics of Medical Intervention in Niger: Kel Ewey Tuareg Perspectives,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18, no. 4 (1994): 433–62; Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “ ‘Miss Eurafrica’: Men, Women’s Sexuality, and Métis Identity in Late Colonial French Africa, 1945–1960,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (2011): 568–93; Jennifer Yee, “Malaria and the Femme Fatale: Sex and Death in French Colonial Africa,” Literature and Medicine 21, no. 2 (2002): 201–15; Brett A. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). Scholars of colonial sexuality have paved the way for works that explore sexuality in postcolonial spaces, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s classic “Can the Subaltern Speak? Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 271–313; Ruth Pierson, Nupur Chaudhuri, and Beth McAuley, eds. Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). On prostitution and marriage in northern Vietnam, see Walter Jones, “Gender as Colonial Exploitation in French Indochina: Concubines in Selected Pre-1965 Novels Published in or Translated to English,” War, Literature & the Arts (2012): 1–15; Isabelle Tracol-Huynh, “Between Stigmatization and Regulation: Prostitution in Colonial Northern Vietnam,” Culture, Health, Sexuality 12 suppl. 1 (2010): S73–87; Vu Trong Phung, Luc Xi: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi, trans. Shaun Kingsley Malarney (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011).
31.Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 51.
32.Nguyen Huu Duong, Mai dam: Mot te doan? nghe nghiep? Hinh thuc no le? [To prostitute oneself: A social evil? A career? A form of slavery?] (Saigon: Van Hoc, 1966).
34.Harry Hervey’s Congaï: Mistress of Indochine (1925) and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), a novelization of Greene’s own experiences in Indochina, illustrate the role of the Asian sexual fantasy in Western literature. See Jeffrey Keith’s overview of The Quiet American’s relationship to colonial sexuality, war reportage, and Western memory in “Between the Paris of the Orient and Ho Chi Minh City: Imaginings and Reportage in Wartime Saigon, 1954–1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 2011).
35.Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (1993; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 169–70.
36.Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 91–105.
37.Eric T. Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 59–60.
38.Quoted in Tracol-Huynh, “Between Stigmatization and Regulation,” S80.
39.Shaun Kingsley Malarney, “Introduction: Vu Trong Phung and the Anxieties of ‘Progress,’ ” in Phung, Luc Xi, 7–8.
40.Police records indicated that police des moeurs, a division seeking out moral offenses such as prostitution and homosexual behavior, reported a sharp increase in arrests of women. Crimes committed by women, most often prostitution, reached a new height in 1902, with more than sixty women for every thousand Parisians arrested, a steep rise from numbers that had stayed consistently below twenty per thousand until the late 1880s. Statistics compiled in Jean-Marc Berlière, La Police des Moeurs sous la IIIe République (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 264–65; Robert A. Nye, “Sex and Sexuality in France since 1800,” in Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories, ed. Frantz X. Eder, Lesley Hall, and Gert Hekma (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 99.
41.William I. Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 116–17.
42.Dang Van Chin, La prostitution à Saigon-Cholon en 1952, Imprimerie Français d’Outre-Mer (Paris: Lauréat de la Faculté de Médecine, 1953); DD: AV 1767, General Sciences Library, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 16.
43.Tracol-Huynh, “Between Stigmatization and Regulation,” S82.
44.Jean-Baptiste Fonssagrives and E. Laffont. Répertoire alphabétique de législation et de réglementation de la Cochinchine: Arrêté au 1er janvier, 1889. T7 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département Droit, Économie, Politique, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k54156886, 182 (accessed October 2020); Gouvernement Général, Bulletin Administratif de l’Annam 13 (July 1, 1921): 574.
45.Société Française de Prophylaxie Sanitaire et Morale, “Bulletin Mensuel,” January 6, 1919, http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb344249939 (accessed October 18, 2020).
46.Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 267.
47.Gouvernement Général, Bulletin Administratif de l’Annam 4 (February 28, 1925): 294; Gouvernement Général, Bulletin Administratif de l’Annam 14 (August 16, 1935): 889.
48.Jones, “Gender as Colonial Exploitation in French Indochina,” 1–4.
49.Clandestine prostitutes failed to seek care, and scholars expect that most carried sexually transmitted infections by the late 1920s. Phung, Luc Xi, 34.
51.Patricia Tilburg argues that late nineteenth-century Paris experienced a notable shift from religiosity to moral laïque (secular moralism) in the education system resulting in “freeing the lower classes from the moral shackles of the Church.” While the turn of the twentieth century in the metropole represented a shift away from social conservatism regarding female sexuality, a similar shift toward the “emancipation” of women did not occur in France’s colonial holdings. Patricia A. Tilburg, Colette’s Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870–1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 5, 59; Michèle Plott, “The Rules of the Game: Respectability, Sexuality, and the Femme Mondaine in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 531–32.
54.Christina Firpo, “ ‘The Durability of Empire’: Race, Empire, and ‘Abandoned’ Children in Colonial Vietnam” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2007).
55.Janet Hoskins, “Postcards from the Edge of Empire: Images and Messages from French Indochina,” IIAS Newsletter 44 (Summer 2007): 16; display ad, New York Times, April 12, 1937.
56.On the 1931 Colonial Exposition, see Nicolas Bancel et al., eds., Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., Culture impériale: Les colonies au coeur de la République, 1931–1961 (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2004); Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Cooper, France in Indochina; Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Ellen Furlough, “Une leçon des choses: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 441–73; Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, Paris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
57.At the 1931 exposition, French officials felt the need to address their treatment of colonial natives. The assistant coordinator of the exhibition, Marcel Olivier, defended the event and proclaimed that colonization “was the strength and pride of Western nations, which did sometimes get carried away by this pride that they abused their strength,” but France, he said, had recognized its mistakes and “colonization has righted its wrongs.” Despite his claims, exhibits portraying live colonized peoples in cages suggested a different image. L’Illustration, May 23, 1931, unpaginated; quoted in Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious, 16.
58.While scholars have formally debated the nature of American imperialism, or lack thereof, since the publication of William Appleman Williams’s 1959 volume The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, the acceptance of the briefly maintained US control over the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century marked the most notable exception to America’s anticolonial policy. Even scholars who oppose the notion that America had imperial desires identify the acquisition of the Philippine Islands after the Spanish American War as creating a formal colonial entity. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 173.
59.French government and tourism agencies reciprocated by offering travel discounts to Americans wishing to attend the exposition, including reduced transatlantic passage. “France Suspends Visa Fee for Fair,” New York Times, April 1, 1931.
60.The large body of literature on Baker and Blacks in Paris includes Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (New York: Random House, 1993); Tyler E. Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Straw P. Archer, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000); Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010).
61.The banana symbolism was surely not lost on her audience, representing both racist imagery for Baker as a woman of color and a nod to overt sexuality. Boittin, Colonial Metropolis, 6–8; “The Legend Named Baker Comes Home” New York Times, February 2, 1936.
62.Baker had achieved international notoriety by 1931, and her title drew attention to the exposition. “Josephine Baker Honored,” New York Times, March 11, 1931. Baker’s international notoriety was not always admiring. She sparked student riots in Vienna in 1928 and at a Yugoslavian university in 1929 that protested her race and exotic dance routines.
63.Baker was always identified as an American entertainer in domestic publications, and her adventures across the continent were reported with fervor in the United States. The New York Times reported on everything from her appearances at popular events to the contentious crowds who greeted her in every city she visited, as well as details of her personal life. During a tour in Yugoslavia, an impassioned fan stabbed himself to show his love for Baker, and student riots forced her to cancel the trip. “Stabs Himself over Josephine Baker,” New York Times, April 30, 1929.
64.Harry Hervey, Congaï: Mistress of Indochine (1925), ed. Kent Davis, foreword by Pico Iyer (Holmes Beach, FL: DatASIA Press, 2014), 1.
67.For other examples, see Jean d’Estray, Thi-Sen: La petite amie exotique (Paris: Maurice Bauche, 1911); Harry Hervey, King Cobra: An Autobiography of Travel in French Indo-China (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corp., 1927); Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955; New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
68.Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 88–113.
69.Quoted in Pierre Journoud and Hugues Tertrais, Paroles de Dien Bien Phu: Les survivants témoignent (2004; Paris: Tallandier, 2012), 323–25.
71.Binot, Le repos des guerriers, 42–43; memo from Chief of State Major de Guillebon to le Général de Corps d’Armée LeClerc, Commandant Supérieur des Troupes Françaises en Extrême-Orient, May 25, 1946, 10 H 2099, Archives de l’armée de Terre et des organismes du ministère de la defense, Service Historique de la Défense, Centre Historique des Archives, Vincennes, France (henceforth SHD-CHA), 2.
74.Memo from Guillebon to LeClerc, 2.
75.Direction Générale du Service de Santé, “Fiche sur la Prostitution à Saigon,” August 14, 1947, folder B.M.C. Quartier Reservé, V. Maladies Vénériennes, Prophylaxie, 1946/1950, 10 H 2099, Archives de l’armée de Terre et des organismes du ministère de la defense, SHD-CHA.
76.Hôpital de Lanessan C.D.V. d’Hanoi, “Rapport Mensuel,” January 1954, folder Veneriens (1954) 2014, 10 H 2099, Archives de l’armée de Terre et des organismes du ministère de la defense, SHD-CHA.
77.Firpo, “ ‘The Durability of Empire.’ ”
78.Memo from Guillebon to LeClerc, 2.
79.Memo from Le Médécin Commandant Robert to Monsieur le Chef de Bataillon, Commandant le 8eme Tabor, December 28, 1948, 10 H 2099, Archives de l’armée de Terre et des organismes du ministère de la defense, SHD-CHA.
80.Compte-Rendu D’Inspection, No. 194, November 9, 1955, 10 H 4583, Archives de l’armée de Terre et des organismes du ministère de la defense, SHD-CHA, 4.
81.“Note sur le controle de la prostitution to Mr le Ministre de la Santé,” 1946, 10 H 2099, Archives de l’armée de Terre et des organismes du ministère de la defense, SHD-CHA, 1.
82.“Note de Service” from Le Médécin Commandant Le Hénaff, Directeur du Service de Santé de la 3e D.M.T., No. 210, December 30, 1954, 10 H 2099, Archives de l’armée de Terre et des organismes du ministère de la defense, SHD-CHA, 1.
86.French and Indochinese military forces’ desires for the services of prostitutes in the field partially normalized the behavior. The number of women working in BMCs in 1952 was only ninety-five. As the First Indochina War escalated, however, these numbers increased significantly. Chin, La prostitution à Saigon-Cholon en 1952, 41.
89.Tracol-Huynh, “Between Stigmatization and Regulation,” S80.
91.Le Médécin-Lieutenant Delmas, Médécin-Chef du 21e Bataillon de Tirailleurs Algériens to Monsieur le Médécin-Colonel, Directeur du Service de Santé des T.F.I.N., December 4, 1948, 10 H 2099, Archives de l’Armée de Terre et des Organismes du Ministère de la Defense, SHD-CHA.
92.These records exist through the 10 H files in the Vincenne SHD-CHA archives, but the most fruitful I witnessed recurred throughout the 10 H 2099 and 10 H 4583 files.
94.I forged this argument from materials from the colonial period through the end of the American War and persisting in popular culture. Prominent examples include the distrust for Phuong in The Quiet American and advertisements warning that prostitutes could be covert National Liberation Front fighters supporting the North Vietnamese cause in the South, popularly known in the United States as Viet Cong. Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
95.“Where the Girls Are” (1969), military video, Boom Boom, Chop-Chop: R&R during the Vietnam War (DVD, 2011).
97.Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Sarah Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Moon, Sex among Allies; Sturdevant and Stoltzfus. Let the Good Times Roll.
98.Telegram from the Ambassador in France (Dillon) to the Department of State, Paris, January 6, 1955, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Vietnam, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1985), 19 (henceforth FRUS followed by year and volume).
100.Jessica Chapman’s account of Diem’s relationship with the Binh Xuyen illustrates the instrumentality Diem’s reduction of the syndicate’s power played in his rise in the 1950s; Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance.
102.Acting Director of the Office of Philippine and Southeast Asian Affairs (Young) to the Special Representative in Vietnam (Collins), December 15, 1954, in FRUS, 1955–1957, Vietnam, 1:1–3.
104.Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–1963 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 60.
105.Peter Hansen, “Bac Di Cu: Catholic Refugees from the North of Vietnam, and Their Role in the Southern Republic, 1954–1959,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4, no. 3 (2009): 177.
106.Brendan Kelly, “ ‘Six mois à Hanoi’: Marcel Cadieux, Canada, and the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam, 1954–5,” Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 3 (2018): 394–427.
107.James T. Fisher, “The Second Catholic President: Ngo Dinh Diem, John F. Kennedy, and the Vietnam Lobby, 1954–1963,” U.S. Catholic Historian 15, no. 3 (1997): 119–37.
108.Heather Stur, “Fateful Misunderstandings about the Republic of Vietnam,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 3 (2018): 392–93.
110.Stur, “Fateful Misunderstandings about the Republic of Vietnam,” 390–95; Hansen, “Bac Di Cu,” 175–78.
113.Major General George S. Prugh, Law at War: Vietnam, 1964–1973, Vietnam Studies Series (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1975), 23.
114.Laurence Goldstein, “Madame Nhu, Woman and Warrior: A Reading of ‘Le Xuan, Beautiful Spring,’ ” Callaloo 28, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 764–65.
115.Goldstein, “Madame Nhu, Woman and Warrior,” 767.
116.Goldstein, “Madame Nhu, Woman and Warrior,” 765.
118.Quoted in Heather Marie Stur, “Dragon Ladies, Gentle Warriors, and Girls Next Door: Gender and Ideas That Shaped the Vietnam War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2008), 67.
119.Monique Brinson Demery, Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam’s Madame Nhu (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 85.
120.UA 17.95 box 1223 Fl 41, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu cartoon, Wesley R. Fishel Papers, University Archives and Historical Collections, Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing (henceforth MSU).
123.“Yank Wooing Upsets Vietnamese,” Detroit Free Press, April 12, 1963; all-text original in folder 41, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, box 1223, UA 17.95, Wesley R. Fishel Papers, MSU.
124.Telegram from the embassy in South Vietnam to the Department of State, March 11, 1962, in FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 2, Vietnam, 1962, ed. John P. Glennon et al. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1990), document 104.
127.Republic of Viet Nam, “Preamble of the Bill on the Family,” 1–2.
128.Republic of Viet Nam, “Text of the Code of the Family: Law Number 1/59,” in Code of the Family, 1.
129.For a detailed study on the structure and role of kinship in wartime South Vietnam, see David W. Haines, The Limits of Kinship: South Vietnamese Households, 1954–1975 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University, 2006).
130.Ruth Sandoval Marcondes and Scott W. Edmonds, “Health Knowledge of Prostitutes in Saigon, Vietnam: A Study of Health Attitudes and Habits Relating to Venereal Diseases Taken from a Group of Prostitutes,” Revista de Saúde Pública 1, no. 1 (June 1967): 19–21.
131.Advanced Research Projects Agency, “Findings and Recommendations Based on Two Reports on Insights into the Role of Women in South Viet Nam,” (Cambridge: 1967), ARPA Order no. 887, 38.
132.Thirty percent reported they had no opinion on the issue. Advanced Research Projects Agency, “Findings and Recommendations Based on Two Reports on Insights into the Role of Women in South Viet Nam.”
134.Advanced Research Projects Agency, “Findings and Recommendations Based on Two Reports on Insights into the Role of Women in South Viet Nam,” 34, 37.
135.Republic of Viet Nam, “Text of the Code of the Family,” 10.
136.Demery sheds light on the personal importance of the divorce law for Nhu, specifically a portion of the law that limited mobility for women in bad marriages more than it freed them. Nhu’s sister Le Chi flaunted an affair. Nhu prevented her divorce because Le Chi’s cabinet member husband knew too much about the Ngo family. The US State Department knew that when Le Chi’s husband made known his desire to obtain a divorce, Nhu intercepted his letters of resignation from his positions as minister of the interior and secretary general to the presidency. She feared that her own potential divorce would leave her with no security. Telegram from the Ambassador in Vietnam [Elbridge Durbrow] to the Department of State, February 25, 1958, in FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 1, Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986), 15; Demery, Finding the Dragon Lady, 104.
139.Memorandum from the Secretary of Defense’s Deputy Assistant for Special Operations [Edward Lansdale] to Desmond Fitzgerald of the Central Intelligence Agency, September 9, 1960, in FRUS, 1958–1960, Vietnam, 1:568.
140.Dispatch from the Ambassador in Vietnam [Durbrow] to the Department of State, enclosure 2, English text of notes on Ngo Dinh Nhu and Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, October 15, 1960, in FRUS, 1958–1960, Vietnam, 1:598; dispatch from the Ambassador in Vietnam [Durbrow] to the Department of State, March 2, 1959, in FRUS, 1958–1960, Vietnam, 1:158.
141.Republic of Viet Nam, “Text of the Code of the Family,” 14.
142.At the 1954 rate of 35 piasters to the dollar, these figures equal $28 to $2,857 US Adjusted for inflation, amounts range from $478 to $25,143. The conversion from piasters to dollars in 1954 is from globalinancialdata.com via an email from Dan Tsang to the Vietnamese Studies Group listserv, October 7, 2006, https://www.lib.washington.edu/SouthEastAsia/vsg/elist_2006/Piastre-dollar%20Exchanbge%20rates.html.
143.Republic of Viet Nam, “Text of the Code of the Family,” 14.
144.Republic of Viet Nam, “Text of the Code of the Family,” 16.
145.MACV Office of Information, “Fact Sheet: Police Harrassment [sic] of Vietnamese Girls Riding with Americans in Taxis,” M-2977/2825, May 12, 1972, Jim B. Green Collection, Texas Tech University, Vietnam Center and Archives.
146.Republic of Viet Nam, “Text of the Code of the Family,” 25.
147.Homer Bigart, “Vietnam’s First Lady Cautions Americans to Obey Dance Bar,” June 13, 1962, New York Times.
148.Outline Plan Prepared by the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam, October 27, 1960, in FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 1, Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986), 616.
153.“Purr of Pounce, Viet Nam Tigress Always Gets Her Way.”
154.Bigart, “Vietnam’s First Lady Cautions Americans to Obey Dance Bar.”
155.Bigart, “Vietnam’s First Lady Cautions Americans to Obey Dance Bar.”
156.Summary of “Saigon Impeding Western Press,” New York Times, March 24, 1962, in “Government—Diem, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu,” 1961–1968, box 1194, folder 5, Wesley R. Fishel Papers, MSU.
157.Summary of “Vietnam’s First Lady Cautions Americans to Obey Dance Ban,” New York Times, June 13, 1962, in “Government—Diem, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu,” 1961–1968, box 1194, folder 5, Wesley R. Fishel Papers, MSU.
159.On Orientalism and sexuality, see Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 1, 7, 19, 40–42, 328; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (1978), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 103; Dana S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized Peoples, 1886–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 72; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 43, 162–64.
2. Morale, Morality, and the “American Brothel”
1.On early American intervention, see Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); David Biggs, “Americans in An Giang: Nation Building and the Particularities of Place in the Mekong Delta, 1966–1973,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4, no. 3 (2009): 139–72.
2.Department of Defense, “The Troop-Contributing Countries (TCC) in South Vietnam: 1960–1972,” in Vietnam War Troop Reduction Statistics—1972, 3 March 1972, folder 03, box 44, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 03—Statistical Data, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University (henceforth TTU), http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2234403012, 6 (accessed August 24, 2016).
3.“Military Barracks to Be Removed from Saigon: PM,” Saigon Post, October 23, 1965, luu tru bao [newspaper archives], General Sciences Library, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
4.“Miniskirts Create Uproar in Saigon,” Free Lance–Star (Fredericksburg, VA), September 12, 1968; “AP Vignette,” n.d., box 1, NSA/NSC Vietnam Information Group: Intel; Other reps/ Government of South Vietnam—Anti-Americanism, 1967–71 (2), Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor (henceforth Ford Library).
5.Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 34. For more on birth control and the sexual revolution, see David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000); Bernard Asbell, The Pill: A Biography of the Drug That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 1995).
6.Robert Scigliano and Guy H. Fox, Technical Assistance in Vietnam: The Michigan State University Experience, Praeger Special Studies in International Economics and Development (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 1.
7.Scigliano and Fox, Technical Assistance in Vietnam; John Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998). On MSU’s role in development projects and the Diem administration, see James Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
8.“Agreement between the Government of Vietnam and Michigan State University,” April 14, 1955, Annex 1, 3, box 1694, folder 18, Ralph Turner Papers, MSU, 9.
9.While the origins of the flyer are not known, even as a spoof it would point to a belief system regarding sexual expectations of Vietnamese women and their relationships with Western men. “Sex by Subscription,” 1956, box 1192, folder 17, Wesley R. Fishel Papers, MSU.
10.Harlan Cleveland, “The Pretty Americans (How Wives Behave Overseas),” n.d., Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, box 649, folder 14, Public Administration Vietnam Project—Personnel, MSU.
11.Cleveland, “The Pretty Americans.”
12.Cleveland, “The Pretty Americans,” 2.
13.“Sex by Subscription.”
14.Fifteen US dollars in 1955 equals roughly $151 in 2021 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=15&year1=195501&year2=201907 (accessed June 16, 2021).
15.“Sex by Subscription.”
16.“Introduction to MSUG Saigon,” n.d., box 679, folder 42, Police Administration Paper, MSU.
17.Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), and Neil L. Jamieson’s Understanding Vietnam (1993; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), shed light on internal debates over modernization, maintaining traditional values, and Vietnamese revolutionary efforts from the 1920s to 1945.
18.Jessica Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 90.
20.Carl Rumpf, “GAMBLING: Lecture at Civil Guard Academy, Cap St. Jacques” n.d., box 685, folder 38, Police Administration Files, MSU, 3.
21.Rumpf, “GAMBLING,” 3.
22.Carl Rumpf, “PROSTITUTION: Lecture at Civil Guard Academy, Cap St. Jacques” n.d., box 685, folder 38, Police Administration Files, MSU, 2.
23.Rumpf, “PROSTITUTION,” 1.
24.Addendum to the Report on MSUG Police Participant Program [Manuscript],” 1960, box 1694, folder 16, Ralph Turner Papers, MSU.
25.Rumpf, “GAMBLING,” 11.
26.Rumpf, “GAMBLING,” 6.
27.Rumpf, “PROSTITUTION,” 10.
28.Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880, expanded ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 166–67; Rumpf, “PROSTITUTION,” 6. Also see Beth L. Bailey and David R. Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (New York: Free Press, 1992).
29.On Thieu’s authoritarianism and its impact on American support, see Sean Fear, “Saigon Goes Global: South Vietnam’s Quest for International Legitimacy in the Age of Détente,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 3 (2018): 428–55.
30.See Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Oakland: University of California Press, 2001).
31.From 1954 to 1957, the proportion of Vietnam’s Catholics in the southern provinces increased from 27.4 percent to 61.6 percent. Peter Hansen, “Bac Di Cu: Catholic Refugees from the North of Vietnam, and Their Role in the Southern Republic, 1954–1959,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 176–77.
32.On the movement of peasants from villages into cities, see David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). The number of American troops peaked at 542,400 in 1968. Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (1985; New York: New Press, 1994), 654–55.
33.On the building and logistics of military bases in Vietnam, see Meredith Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 66–106.
34.“Everything Is News—Explosion in Bar,” Saigon Post, September 25, 1965; “Military Barracks to Be Removed from Saigon: PM,” Saigon Post, October 23, 1965; “Everything Is News—Metropole Hotel Bombed,” Saigon Post, December 29, 1965.
35.Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 95–96; James McAllister, “ ‘A Fiasco of Noble Proportions’: The Johnson Administration and the South Vietnamese Elections of 1967,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 4 (November 2004): 619–52; James McAllister, “What Can One Man Do? Nguyen Duc Thang and the Limits of Reform in South Vietnam,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 117–53.
37.Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1973; New York: Back Bay Books, 2002), 261. For a contemporary wartime assessment of corruption in South Vietnamese politics, see Tran Anh Tuan, “Anti-Corruption and the Censorate: The Vietnamese Experience” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1973).
39.David L. Anderson, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 146.
40.Quoted in United States Mission in Vietnam, A Study: Prospects for the Viet Cong, December 1966, folder 04, box 01, Walter Wylie Collection, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=10980104004, 37 (accessed August 24, 2014).
41.Foreign militaries likewise challenged Vietnamese society, but their numbers were far lower. More work needs to be conducted regarding Vietnamese troops and their relationships with noncombatant women during the war. Willingness or coercion related to brothels openly serving both Americans, RVN, NLF, and North Vietnamese forces is a rich area of research for scholars.
42.Kyle Longley, Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008), 47–49.
43.Longley, Grunts, 96–97; Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 86–116; Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 146–47. On masculinity, see Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Gina Marie Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
44.Sheridan Prasso, The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005), 53, 56, 126–27.
45.American policy makers often feminized countries at risk of falling to communism. Lyndon Johnson, “U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia,” speech, Washington, DC, July 12, 1966, Miller Center for Public Affairs, http://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/speeches/speech-4038 (accessed November 15, 2014).
46.Olga Dror, “Establishing Ho Chi Minh's Cult: Vietnamese Traditions and Their Transformations,” Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 2 (May 2016): 454.
47.Both Dean and Cuordileone place an emphasis on the establishment of the post–World War II culture of masculinity and brotherhood as part of America’s anticommunist identity. Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Kyle A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005).
48.Bill A. Arthur to Paul W. Child Jr., January 27, 1969, “718–04 Personal Affairs Case Files, 1969,” box 1, RG: 0427, USARV, 101st Airborne Division/Office of the Adjutant General Command Reports; 1969–1969, National Archives and Records Administration II at College Park, College Park, MD (henceforth NARAII).
49.Petra Goedde’s GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), and Marilyn Hegarty’s Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2007), both illustrate the military’s accepting attitude toward the male soldier’s need to satisfy sexual needs as a part of wartime morale building.
51.John Ketwig, … And a Hard Rain Fell: A GI’s True Story of the War in Vietnam, 20th anniversary updated ed. (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2002), 27, 30–31.
52.Interview with Robert M. Rankin, May 4, 2004, Robert M. Rankin Collection, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=OH0370, 42 (accessed October 12, 2015).
53.Interview with Robert M. Rankin, 44–45.
54.Republic of Viet Nam, Code of the Family (Saigon, 1959); Major General George S. Prugh, Law at War: Vietnam, 1964–1973, Vietnam Studies Series (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1975), 23.
55.Robert Komer to Robert Weaver, draft letter, 3/6/67, no. 1, “Urban Development [1 of 2],” Komer-Leonhart File (1966–1968), National Security File, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Archives, Austin, TX (henceforth LBJ Library).
56.On migration, see Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution; Le Ly Hayslip with Jay Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace (1989; New York: Plume, 2003); Jim Stewart, The Angel from Vietnam: A Memoir of Growing Up, the Vietnam War, a Daughter, and Healing (Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2007), Kindle, chap. 17.
57.Hoang Loc, “Hoang Loc,” in Tho Linh Chien Mien Nam: ARVN Soldiers’ Poetry, ed. Nguyen Huu Thoi (Falls Church, VA: Tieng Que Huong, 2016), 115.
58.Komer to Weaver, “Urban Development [1 of 2],” 1.
59.Komer to Weaver, “Urban Development [1 of 2],” 2.
60.John H. Nixon, “The U.S. Role in the Development of Metropolitan Saigon,” August 7, 1967, no. 2, “Urban Development [1 of 2],” Komer-Leonhart File (1966–1968), National Security File, LBJ Library, 1–2.
61.“Life in a Vietnamese Urban Quarter,” 1966, no. 3, “Urban Development [1 of 2],” Komer-Leonhart File (1966–1968), National Security File, LBJ Library, 15.
62.For some examples of this, see Saigon Post, October 16, 1965; Saigon Post: The Sunday Post, October 17, 1965.
63.“Life in a Vietnamese Urban Quarter,” 10–11.
64.“Life in a Vietnamese Urban Quarter,” 11.
65.Allan E. Goodman and Lawrence M. Franks, “The Dynamics of Migration to Saigon, 1964–1972,” Pacific Affairs 48, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 200.
66.Goodman and Franks, “The Dynamics of Migration to Saigon, 1964–1972,” 199–214.
67.Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988), 264.
69.“Life in a Vietnamese Urban Quarter,” 32.
70.Ruth Sandoval Marcondes and Scott W. Edmonds, “Health Knowledge of Prostitutes in Saigon, Vietnam: A Study of Health Attitudes and Habits Relating to Venereal Diseases Taken from a Group of Prostitutes,” Revista de Saúde Pública 1, no. 1 (June 1967): 18–23.
71.“V. D. Is Especially Easy to Get in Taiwan,” 09 April 1966, folder 28, box 02, Calvin Chapman Collection, TTU (accessed August 24, 2014), http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0380228035. This pamplet for American GIs abroad in Taiwan for R&R trips was distributed by the US Air Force.
72.Advanced Research Projects Agency, “Findings and Recommendations Based on Two Reports on Insights into the Role of Women in South Viet Nam,” (Cambridge: 1967), ARPA order no. 887, Appendix, 19.
74.Telegram from the Embassy in South Vietnam to the Department of State, February 8, 1967, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 5, Vietnam, 1967, ed. Kent Sieg and David S. Patterson (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), document 44, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v05/d44, (accessed June 10, 2016),
75.Yusef Komunyakaa, “Saigon Bar Girls, 1975,” in Dien Cai Dau (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 54.
76.Komunyakaa, “Saigon Bar Girls, 1975,” 54.
77.Wendy Wilder Larson, “Bar-Girl’s Song to a GI,” in Shallow Graves: Two Women and Vietnam, ed. Wendy Wilder Larsen and Tran Thi Nga (New York: Random House, 1986), 33.
80.David S. Holland, “Chez Rene,” in Vietnam, a Memoir: Saigon Cop (New York: iUniverse, 2005), Kindle, location 1615.
82.Holland, “Chez Rene.”
92.Doug Anderson, “Purification,” quoted in Lorrie Goldensohn, “Lifting the Darkness: American and Vietnamese War Poets,” Asia-Pacific Journal 16, issue 17, no. 2 (2018): 10.
94.Ron Steinman, Inside Television’s First War: A Saigon Journal (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 174.
96.On racism in the US military, see James E. Westheider, Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 83–86.
97.Hart, “The Impact of Prostitution on Australian Troops on Active Service in a War Environment—with Particular Reference to Sociological Factors Involved in the Incidence and Control of Venereal Disease” (M.D. thesis, University of Adelaide, January 1974), plate 6.
98.Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 66–67.
100.Wallace Terry, ed., Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), 25–26, 123, 210.
101.Terry, Bloods, 26–27. For an in-depth examination of the culture surrounding “Sin City,” see Stur, Beyond Combat, 64–65, 90–93, 146, 162–66.
104.For an examination of sexual experiences available in Saigon, see Philip Marnais, Saigon After Dark (New York: MacFadden-Bartell, 1967).
106.Raymond Walls, telephone interview with the author, July 13, 2015.
107.Gavin Hart, “Sexual Behavior in a War Environment,” Journal of Sex Research 11, no. 3 (August 1975): 218.
108.Richard Bernstein, The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters (New York: Knopf, 2009), 226.
111.Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 257.
112.Memo to the Minister of Health from Assistant Director for Public Health, “V.D. Clinic Le Loi Hospital, Vung Tau,” April 23, 1970, box 32, folder 1603–03 Venereal Disease—1970: Advisory Team 79 (Vung Tau City Municipal Advisory Team), Administrative and Operational Records, 1967–1970, MACV/Office of Civil Operations and Rural Dev. Support (CORDS), Record Group 472, NARAII.
113.Memo from APO San Francisco, “R&R Schedule and Space Allocations for September 1969,” n.d., 1969, box 1, folder 719–02: Special Services Programs Data Files, 1969, USARV, 101st Airborne Division/Office of the Adjutant General—Command Reports, 1969–1969, Record Group 472, NARAII, 2.
114.MACV Directive 28–2, “Personnel Processing Instructions within RVN,” July 20, 1969, box 90, folder MIV-6–71 Military Privileges, vol. 1 of 9 vols., July 20, 1969, Rec. US Forces INVESTIG DIV Reports, Record Group 472, NARAII, 3 of Annex B.
115.MACV Directive 28–2, 6 of Annex B.
116.Department of Defense, Office of Information for the Armed Forces, A Pocket Guide to the Philippines (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1969), 25.
119.Disposition form, “Water and Beach Recreation Area,” September 8, 1969, box 2, folder 1304–19, Study Report Dest. Files, 1969, USARV, 101st Airborne Division/ Office of the Adjutant General—Command Reports, Record Group 472, NARAII, n.p.
121.Dat To, “Social Reforms.”
122.Dat To, “Social Reforms.”
123.“Viet-Nam Bulletin: A Weekly Publication of the Embassy of Viet-Nam,” “Asian Allies in Viet-Nam,” March 1970, folder 02, box 33, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 03—Allied War Participants, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2143302026, 6–7 (accessed August 24, 2016).
124.According to controversial studies conducted by Alfred Kinsey, by the 1960s half of women reported that they had engaged in premarital sex, and numbers for men reached 87 percent. Kinsey’s research illustrates that the so-called sexual revolution meant not necessarily a drastic change in sexual behavior but rather an increased willingness to discuss and exhibit the behavior. John Heidenry, What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 21–22.
125.Heidenry, What Wild Ecstasy, 40–89; James R. Petersen, The Century of Sex: Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution, 1900–1999 (New York: Grove Press, 1999), 229–37.
127.Buck, “The Sexual Revolution.” Birth control pills helped shape women’s liberation but were illegal and unpopular in Vietnam. By 1966, 12 million women around the world were using the pill to prevent pregnancy. Heidenry, What Wild Ecstasy, 32; Petersen, The Century of Sex, 146–48; Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (1999; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3–9.
128.Advanced Research Projects Agency, “Findings and Recommendations Based on Two Reports on Insights into the Role of Women in South Viet Nam,” ARPA Order no. 887.
134.Duc Khanh, Ly Ly the Lovely, Saigon Post, September 27, 1965. The doctor is named Dr. No in a humorous play on both monosyllabic Vietnamese names and the villain of the James Bond film Dr. No (1962).
135.“Women's Struggle Movement Increasing in South,” November 1, 1969, folder 12, box 10, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 05—National Liberation Front, TTU, 23–25, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2311012034 (accessed August 24, 2014).
136.Cynthia Fredrick, “Women Play Key Role in Growing Saigon Peace Movement,” Chicago's Women's Liberation Union, n.d., folder 33, box 11, Social Movements Collection, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=14511133007, 2 (accessed August 24, 2014).
137.“AP Vignette,” n.d., box 1, NSA/NSC Vietnam Information Group: Intel; Other reps/ Government of South Vietnam—Anti-Americanism, 1967–71 (2), Ford Library.
138.“Preventative Medicine in Vietnam, 1965–1966,” Preventive Medicine in Vietnam, 1965–66, July 1, 1969, folder 01, box 01, Robert Joy Collection, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1230101001 (accessed August 24, 2014).
139.This has been discussed in, among other sources, Lair, Armed with Abundance, 207; “Preventative Medicine in Vietnam, 1965–1966,” Preventive Medicine in Vietnam, 1965–66, 01 July 1969, folder 01, box 01, Robert Joy Collection, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1230101001 (accessed August 24, 2014).
140.Susan Brownmiller addresses brothels escalating in line with rising American involvement in the war in her classic feminist study Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975; New York: Fawcett Books, 1993), 93.
141.The DoD told GIs in their guide to Vietnam that they were responsible for following Vietnamese laws regardless of not being subject to the jurisdiction of RVN courts. Department of Defense, Office of Information for the Armed Forces, A Pocket Guide to Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1971), 23.
143.Jerome H. Greenberg, “Venereal Disease in the Armed Forces,” Medical Clinics of North America 56, no. 5 (September 1972): 1087–1100.
144.“Vietnam Addresses, Arrogance of Power, Senator Fullbright [sic] (Saigon an American Brothel),” 89th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (May 17, 1966), 10803; “Ground Action.”
145.Randall Bennett Woods, J. William Fulbright, Vietnam, and the Search for a Cold War Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 116–17.
146.“Fulbright Calls Saigon ‘An American Brothel,’ ” Saigon Post, May 9, 1966; J. William Fulbright, “The Arrogance of Power,” May 5, 1966, series 72, box 26, file 9, J. William Fulbright Papers, University Libraries Digital Collections, University of Arkansas, https://digitalcollections.uark.edu/digital/collection/Fulbright/id/589/ (accessed June 5, 2021).
148.Belair Jr., “M’Namara Says Foe’s Hopes Fade.”
149.The discussion was entered along with two of Fulbright’s other addresses challenging White House intellectuals’ abilities to handle management of the war. “Vietnam Addresses,” 10803.
155.Marnais is identified as a travel journalist whose Saigon After Dark was a contribution to the “After Dark” series on nightlife in major cities around the world.
158.For examples of military-sanctioned prostitution, see the previously mentioned works Goedde, GIs and Germans; Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes; as well as Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and as Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, eds., Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: New Press/Norton, 1993).
159.“Ground Action.”
161.Goedde’s GIs and Germans, Hegarty’s Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes, and Roberts’s What Soldiers Do provide expert analysis of the US military’s long-standing acceptance of the male soldier’s need to satisfy his sexual urges as part of wartime morale building.
163.See Vu Trong Phung, Luc Xi: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi, trans. Shaun Kingsley Malarney (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011); Bernstein, The East, the West, and Sex; Stur, Beyond; Jeffrey A. Keith, “Between the Paris of the Orient and Ho Chi Minh City: Imaginings and Reportage in Wartime Saigon, 1954–1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 2011).
164.Medical scholars argue that the disruption of normal social and family activities often leads to increased prostitution during wartime. See Marcondes and Edmonds, “Health Knowledge of Prostitutes in Saigon, Vietnam,” 18; Hart, “Sexual Behavior in a War Environment,” 218.
165.Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–1963 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 91.
166.Nguyen Huu Duong, Mai dam: Mot te doan? nghe nghiep? Hinh thuc no le? [To prostitute oneself: A social evil? A career? A form of slavery?] (Saigon: Van Hoc, 1966), 15.
3. Vietnamese Eradication Efforts and the Americanization of Sexual Policy
1.“Quotes by General Westmoreland at Press Conference,” July 2, 1966, no. 7 History File, 29 May–17 July 99, box 8, Papers of William C. Westmoreland, Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX (henceforth LBJ Library).
2.Meredith Lair argues that depending on dates of service, up to 75 to 90 percent of US soldiers “labored in supporting roles, out of danger, and in relative comfort.” Meredith Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 5.
4.Andrew Borowiec, “South Viet Girls Busy Going after G.I. Dollar,” Daily Mail (Hagerstown, MD), July 11, 1966.
5.As mentioned in the introduction, I am distinguishing my generalized use of the terms from Kate Millett’s 1969 work Sexual Politics.
6.The US military used the term “psychological warfare” when referring to their interactions with civilians, whom they recognized as crucial to American success in the larger war effort.
7.Prostitution in Vietnam has received considerable attention in popular culture from films like Full Metal Jacket and Casualties of War, but few scholars have devoted serious attention to the topic. On prostitution and sexuality from the colonial period through the war, see Trong Phung Vu, Luc Xi: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi, trans. Shaun Kingsley (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011); Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jeffrey A. Keith, “Between the Paris of the Orient and Ho Chi Minh City: Imaginings and Reportage in Wartime Saigon, 1954–1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 2011); Richard Bernstein, The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters (New York: Knopf, 2009).
8.Al Aigner to Richard Nixon, August 5, 1969, box 85, folder “[GEN] CO 165 6/1/69–9/18/69,” White House Central Files, Subject Files, CO (Countries), Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Archives, Yorba Linda, CA; “Preventive Medicine in Vietnam, 1965–1966,” proceedings of a symposium of the Office of the Surgeon, United States Army, Vietnam, 27–28 June 1966, Robert Joy Collection, Texas Tech University, Vietnam Center and Archives (henceforth TTU).
9.George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (1979; Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002), 281–83.
10.Memo from Edward S. Vanderhoof to the Minister of Health from Assistant Director for Public Health, “V.D. Clinic Le Loi Hospital, Vung Tau,” April 23, 1970, box 32, folder 1603–03 Venereal Disease—1970: Advisory Team 79 (Vung Tau City Municipal Advisory Team) Administrative and Operational Records, 1967–1970, MACV/Office of Civil Operations and Rural Dev. Support (CORDS), Record Group 472, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD (henceforth NARAII).
11.Historiographical debates over the role and agency of the South Vietnamese state extend beyond the scope of this chapter. In relation to sexual and social policy, however, the successive heads of government, especially Nguyen Van Thieu, resisted acting as a pawn to the Americans and took a stance against behavior they viewed as potentially detrimental to Vietnamese moral culture. At the same time, the Americans used negotiations with the North Vietnamese to pressure Thieu to act in their favor. Henry A. Kissinger, memo, “July 4 Meeting with Thieu,” July 4, 1971, box 103, folder “Saigon—Background Documents [1 of 2],” National Security Council Files, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files, Country Files—Far East, Nixon Library. John Prados also shed light on this relationship in his 2003 article for the Vietnam Veterans of America website, “Diplomacy on Multiple Fronts,” www.vva.org, January–February 2003.
12.City-level officials like the mayor of Vung Tau in 1971, Major Nguyen Van Tinh, showed a particular concern about not violating the constitutional bans on prostitution. City Mayor Maj. Nguyen Van Tinh, to Municipal Senior Advisor MACCORDS Lawrence L. Swain, Vung Tau, August 21, 1969, entry A1 724, box 32, folder 1605–05 Venereal Diseases—1969: Advisory Team 79 (Vung Tau City Municipal Advisory Team) Administrative and Operational Records, 1967–1970, MACV/Office of Civil Operations and Rural Dev. Support (CORDS), Record Group 472, NARAII.
14.“New Saigon Regime Rescinds Mrs. Nhu’s Laws on Morality,” New York Times, December 19, 1963; “Saigon Bans Stripteases and Twist in Night Clubs,” New York Times, April 15, 1965.
15.Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988), 624–25.
21.“Saigon Plans to Transfer Prostitutes to Enclosure,” New York Times, June 7, 1966; Jonathan Randal, “Red-Light Limits Opposed in Saigon,” New York Times, November 14, 1966.
22.“Saigon Plans to Transfer Prostitutes to Enclosure.”
25.The term “taxi dancer” referred to women who danced with customers for a fee. Their services could also be purchased for longer periods of time, as with an escort, but their services were not necessarily sexual.
26.William Westmoreland, Vietnam War: After Action Reports—Lessons Learned Documents—Battle Assessments (Beverly Hills: BACM Research, 2009). Also see “South Vietnam: Cleaning Up Saigon.” This represented at least the second attempt to move the majority of US forces away from cities. Westmoreland cabled Washington about the concerns and challenges of such a move in August 1966. Cable, Westmoreland to Personnel for Lodge, Sharp, Wheeler, August 1966, April 9, 1966, no. 77, Eyes Only Message File—TO—1 July–30 Sep 66 [2 of 3], William Westmoreland Papers, LBJ Library.
27.“Saigon’s Mayor Orders Bars to Quit City Center,” New York Times, March 7, 1972; Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2013), 147; Lair, Armed with Abundance, 32–33.
30.At the National Archives in College Park, I was temporarily given unrestricted access to FOIA-protected military police desk blotters from Vietnam which indicate that prostitution between American GIs and Vietnamese women constantly challenged officials, who found ways to work around the problems. The women were often taken to the Le Loi Hospital in Vung Tau for VD screening, while men were charged, most commonly, with curfew violations. In one particularly clever write-up, a man caught engaged in intercourse with a prostitute was charged with a uniform violation, while she was arrested by South Vietnamese police. I uncovered numerous stories like these before the collection was taken back. USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal—Military Police Desk Blotters, 01/13/1967–02/17/1970, boxes 5–8, Records of the U.S. Forces in Southeast Asia, 1950–1975, Record Group 472, NARAII.
31.“Hoi thao ve bai tru mai dam” [Seminar on the Eradication of Prostitution], n.d., Tai lieu ghi am 058–04, Vietnamese National Archive Center II, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
32.“Hoi thao ve bai tru mai dam,” 2–3.
33.The term bai tru for “eradication” or “elimination” of prostitution is a standard phrase in the titles of circulating records related to prostitution at the Vietnamese National Archive Center II in Ho Chi Minh City. Compiled reports focused on the industry’s links to social corruption and the need to eliminate the industries include “Ho so v/v bai tru nan so duoi, mai dam tai cac tinh mien Trung Nam phan nam 1968–1973” [Documents Related to the Eradication of Prostitution in the Southern Part of the Central Provinces, 1968–1973], Ho so Phu Thu Tuong [Prime Minister], Ky hieu 31232, Vietnamese National Archive Center II, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; To Department of State from Amembassy Saigon, airgram, “RVN Anti-Corruption Campaign,” February 3, 1969, box 2, NSA/NSC Vietnam Information Group: Intel, Other Reports, Government of [South] Vietnam—Corruption, 1969–73(4), Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI (henceforth Ford Library); To Department of State from Amembassy Saigon, airgram, “Corruption In Vung Tau,” November 10, 1967, box 2, NSA/NSC Vietnam Information Group: Intel, Other Reports, Government of [South] Vietnam—Corruption, 1969–73(1), Ford Library; To Department of State from Amembassy Saigon, airgram, “Recent Events in the Fight against Corruption,” November 24, 1969, box 2, NSA/NSC Vietnam Information Group: Intel, Other Reports, Government of [South] Vietnam—Corruption, 1969–73(1), Ford Library; Lair, Armed with Abundance, 207.
34.References to the prostitution industry damaging America’s image in Vietnam began to appear before the Fulbright hearings brought the industry’s scope to a national audience. In an article from December 1965, the journalist Beverly Deepe discussed the perception of prostitution as American “decadence,” as well as the dangerous effects the industry had on Saigon’s economy and American security. Beverly Deepe, “Bar Hostesses Present Social, Moral Problems,” Tuscaloosa News, December 3, 1965.
35.“ ‘American Brothel?’: Bar Girls’ Business Flourished in Saigon,” Kentucky New Era, July 7, 1966; Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 71–118.
36.Leland Gardner’s Vietnam Underside! “Don’t Worry Mom … We’ve got Penicillin” (New York: Publishers Export, 1966) pointed to the tradition of Western interest in Vietnamese sexuality, and as his subtitle suggests, venereal disease already represented a concern.
37.Dick Barnes, “Secret Data Reveals S. Viet Corruption,” Fort Lauderdale News, March 6, 1968; Records from Vietnam Information Group Files, box 2, Government of [South] Vietnam—Corruption, 1967–73(2), Ford Library.
38.Ernest Gruening, “Corruption in South Vietnam, IV—Must Our Boys Continue to Die to Protect It?,” 90th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record—Senate (March 8, 1968): 5863.
39.David Brown, “Allegations of Corruption in Vung Tau,” October 12, 1967, box 2, NSA/NSC Vietnam Information Group: Intel, Other Reports, Government of [South] Vietnam—Corruption, 1969–73(1), Ford Library.
41.“Miniskirts Create Uproar in Saigon,” Free Lance-Star, September 12, 1968; “AP Vignette,” n.d., box 1, NSA/NSC Vietnam Information Group: Intel; Other Reports, Government of [South] Vietnam—Anti-Americanism, 1967–71(2), Ford Library.
42.Ruth Sandoval Marcondes and Scott W. Edmonds, “Health Knowledge of Prostitutes in Saigon, Vietnam: A Study of Health Attitudes and Habits Relating to Venereal Diseases Taken from a Group of Prostitutes,” Revista de Saúde Pública 1, no. 1 (June 1967): 18–23.
43.Evidence of these links can be seen in the military police desk blotter records, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal—Military Police Desk Blotters, 01/13/1967–02/17/1970, boxes 5–8, Records of the U.S. Forces in Southeast Asia, 1950–1975, Record Group 472, NARAII.
44.Nguyen Van Vy, Minister of National Defense, Republic of Vietnam, to Creighton Abrams, Commanding General, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (Feb 18, 1971), Ho so Phu Thu Tuong [Prime Minister], Ky hieu 1060, Vietnamese National Archive Center II, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
45.Placing cities off limits to soldiers occurred at several points, including the 1967 Operation M.O.O.S.E. in Saigon. That year soldiers were likewise prohibited from freely entering the town near Bien Hoa. Following the 1968 Tet Offensive, the US military tightened restrictions to help eliminate security threats. Gerry Ellenson, email interview with the author, August 30, 2014.
49.It is significant to note, however, that in 1967, postwar rates in Korea, at 321.7 cases per thousand, were higher than those in Vietnam.
50.Gavin Hart, “The Impact of Prostitution on Australian Troops on Active Service in a War Environment—with Particular Reference to Sociological Factors Involved in the Incidence and Control of Venereal Disease” (M.D. thesis, University of Adelaide, January 1974).
51.Seventy-two percent reported they had been to the clinic more than once, and 25 percent had been in more than five times. Marcondes and Edmonds, “Health Knowledge of Prostitutes,” 18–19.
52.Marcondes and Edmonds, “Health Knowledge of Prostitutes,” 19, 21.
53.Marcondes and Edmonds, “Health Knowledge of Prostitutes,” 18–21.
54.In stark contrast to this and other medical reports on prostitutes and prostitution during the war, see Mai Lan Gustafsson’s “ ‘Freedom. Money. Fun. Love.’: The Warlore of Vietnamese Bargirls,” Oral History Review 38, no. 2 (2001): 308–30. Basing her article on extensive interviews, Gustafsson paints a picture of bar girls working happily for their American clients. She acknowledges this discrepancy between these women and those she calls “more traditional Vietnamese women, who spoke solely of their suffering and the horror of war” (311).
56.Sheehan, “How Saigon Sees All Those G.I.’s.”
59.Nguyen Huu Duong, Mai dam: Mot te doan? nghe nghiep? Hinh thuc no le? [To prostitute oneself: A social evil? A career? A form of slavery?] (Saigon: Van Hoc, 1966).
60.Chi Tam, “Why the Setting Up in Saigon of ‘Committee in Defence of the Rights and Dignity of Vietnamese Women’?,” Women of Vietnam (Hanoi), no. 1 (1967): 20–21.
61.Jacques Nevard, “U.S. and Vietnam Form Councils to Avoid Incidents in Saigon,” New York Times, June 10, 1965.
62.“Miniskirts Create Uproar in Saigon”; Charles Mohr, “Amid Cease-Fire Battles, Peasants Remain Stoical,” New York Times, February 1, 1973.
64.The National Police anti-corruption activities failed to make an impact. The punishment for convictions ranged from disciplinary transfers (25 percent) to demotion (20 percent) and reprimands (25 percent). Cases with lesser punishment or a combination of punishments constitute the remaining 30 percent. To Department of State from Amembassy Saigon, airgram, “RVN Anti-Corruption Campaign,” February 3, 1969; To Department of State from Amembassy Saigon, airgram, “Corruption in Vung Tau,” November 10, 1967; To Department of State from Amembassy Saigon, airgram, “Recent Events in the Fight against Corruption,” November 24, 1969.
66.David Brown, “Allegations of Corruption in Vung Tau,” October 12, 1967.
67.David Brown, “Allegations of Corruption in Vung Tau,” October 17, 1967, 7.
68.Documents related to Huong’s efforts are included in box 2, NSA/NSC Vietnam Information Group: Intel, Other Reports, Government of [South] Vietnam—Corruption, 1967–73(3), Ford Library. Also see Gene Roberts, “Change Remains Mostly Promise in South Vietnam,” The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), July 26, 1968.
69.To Department of State from Amembassy Saigon, airgram, “Corruption in Vung Tau,” November 10, 1967.
70.To Department of State from Amembassy Saigon, airgram, “Recent Events in the Fight Against Corruption,” November 24, 1969.
72.Nguyen Van Vy, Minister of National Defense, Republic of Vietnam to Creighton Abrams, Commanding General, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (Feb 18, 1971), Ho so Phu Thu Tuong [Prime Minister], Ky hieu 1060, Vietnamese National Archive Center II, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
73.Memo, “July 4 Meeting with Thieu,” Henry A. Kissinger, July 4, 1971, box 103, folder “Saigon—Background Documents [1 of 2],” National Security Council Files, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files, Country Files—Far East, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Archives, Yorba Linda, CA.
74.“Preventive Medicine in Vietnam, 1965–1966,” Proceedings of a Symposium of the Office of the Surgeon, United States Army, Vietnam, 27–28 June 1966, Robert Joy Collection, TTU.
75.Major Stephen R. Shapiro, USAF, MC, and Lieutenant Colonel Louis C. Breshi, USAF, MC, “Venereal Disease in Vietnam: Clinical Experience at a Major Military Hospital,” Military Medicine 139, no. 5 (May 1974): 374–79.
76.Where the Girls Are, from Boom Boom, Chop-Chop: R&R during the Vietnam War, military video, 1969 (DVD, 2011).
77.Sue Sun, “Where the Girls Are: The Management of Venereal Disease by United States Military Forces in Vietnam,” Literature and Medicine 23, no. 1 (2004): 66.
78.For a detailed analysis of the rise of venereal disease as a medical problem within the military and of the content of the film, see Sun, “Where the Girls Are,” 66–87.
79.Memo from Edward S. Vanderhoof to the Minister of Health from Assistant Director for Public Health, “V.D. Clinic Le Loi Hospital, Vung Tau,” April 23, 1970, box 32, folder 1603–03 Venereal Disease—1970: Advisory Team 79 (Vung Tau City Municipal Advisory Team) Administrative and Operational Records, 1967–1970, MACV/Office of Civil Operations and Rural Dev. Support (CORDS), Record Group 472, NARAII.
80.Memo from Edward S. Vanderhoof to the Minister of Health from Assistant Director for Public Health, “V.D. Clinic Le Loi Hospital, Vung Tau.”
81.Gerry Ellenson, email interview with the author, August 30, 2014.
82.John Ketwig, … And a Hard Rain Fell: A GI’s True Story of the War in Vietnam, 20th anniversary updated ed. (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2002), 138–39.
83.Office of Information for the Armed Forces Department of Defense, A Pocket Guide to Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Superintendent of Documents, 1970), 73.
84.Report, Assistant Adjutant General Captain W. H. Smith to Commanding General United States Army, Vietnam, “Command Health Report RCS MED (R5) for the Month of May 1971,” June 12, 1971, box 13, folder 923–09 24th Corps—1970: USARV, Office of the Surgeon/Preventative Med Div, General Records, 1961–1972, Record Group 472, NARAII.
85.Gerry Ellenson, “Reply to Comment by Amanda Boczar,” 20th Preventive Medicine Unit Archives, Vietnam War, September 27, 2014, http://20thpmu.wordpress.com/comment-page-1/#comment-148.
86.Report from Blair F. Sheire, PFCIC, Epi. Section, 20th PMU SUX, “Survey ‘Trip’ to Vung Tau—Epidemiology Section,” May 18, 1968, box 16, folder 923–10 Outbreak of Skin Disease—1971: USARV, Office of the Surgeon/Preventative Med Div, General Records, 1961–1972, Record Group 472, NARAII.
87.Memo for the Record from William N. Fisherman, Capt. M.C., Epidemiology, “Trip Report—Vung Tau,” March 10, 1969, box 16, folder 923–10 Outbreak of Skin Disease—1971: USARV, Office of the Surgeon/Preventative Med Div, General Records, 1961–1972, Record Group 472, NARAII.
88.City Mayor Maj Nguyen Van Tinh to Municipal Senior Advisor MACCORDS Lawrence L. Swain, Vung Tau, August 21, 1969, entry no. A1 724, box 32, folder 1605–05 Venereal Diseases—1969: Advisory Team 79 (Vung Tau City Municipal Advisory Team) Administrative and Operational Records, 1967–1970, MACV/Office of Civil Operations and Rural Dev. Support (CORDS), Record Group 472, NARAII.
89.Minutes of the Special Meeting Held on 21 March 1970–1030HRS to Discuss Problems of Public Heath Cards, VD Control Program in Vung Tau, entry no. A1 724, box 32, folder 1603–03 Venereal Desease [sic]—1970: Advisory Team 79 (Vung Tau City Municipal Advisory Team) Administrative and Operational Records, 1967–1970, MACV/Office of Civil Operations and Rural Dev. Support (CORDS), Record Group 472, NARAII.
90.“Saigon Is Closing Sleazy Bars for G.I.s.”
91.Minutes of the Special Meeting Held on 21 March 1970–1030HRS to Discuss Problems of Public Heath Cards.
92.City Mayor Maj Nguyen Van Tinh to Municipal Senior Advisor MACCORDS Lawrence L. Swain Vung Tau, August 21, 1969, entry no. A1 724.
93.Department of State, Agency for International Development, Project Implementation Order/Technical Services, Co quan PTQT Hoa Ky—Nha Tai Vu /4776, Vietnamese National Archive Center II, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
94.As early as August 1965, National Security Council member Chester Cooper noted that military-civilian relationships could potentially blow up in the face of the American war effort. Memorandum for Mr. Bundy, “The Week in Asia,” August 9, 1967, 3, National Security File, Name File, Cooper Memos, LBJ Library.
95.City Mayor Maj Nguyen Van Tinh to Municipal Senior Advisor MACCORDS Lawrence L. Swain, Vung Tau, August 21, 1969, entry no. A1 724.
96.Memo from Edward S. Vanderhoof to the Minister of Health from Assistant Director for Public Health, “V.D. Clinic Le Loi Hospital, Vung Tau.”
97.Minutes of the Special Meeting Held on 21 March 1970–1030HRS to Discuss Problems of Public Health Cards.
98.Dr. Le Van Khoa, Regional Health Officer, Region IV, to Dr. L. T. C. Burham, DMAC Surgeon, June 26, 1970, box 29, folder 1606–03 VD + TB CONTROL—1970: MACV, HQ CORDS, MR 4/Public Health Div, General Records, 1966–1972, Record Group 472, NARAII.
99.Telegram to Minister of Health, MOH Saigon, from Dr. Le Van Khoa, Regional Health Officer, Region IV, “INFO: Director of Anti VD program—Saigon,” July 10, 1970, box 29, folder 1606–03 VD + TB CONTROL—1970: MACV, HQ CORDS, MR 4/Public Health Div, General Records, 1966–1972, Record Group 472, NARAII.
100.Charles Mohr, “Amid Cease-Fire Battles, Peasants Remain Stoical,” New York Times, February 1, 1973. Concern over the plight of the peasant rose during the initial weeks after the signing of the cease-fire agreement, formally known as the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring the Peace in Vietnam, but for most this concern did not last. Many women who served as prostitutes, or were accused of doing so, faced prosecution in the years following the American exit from Vietnam.
101.William Westmoreland, “General Westmoreland’s Historical Briefing, April 9, 1966,” no. 5 History File (13 Mar–26 Apr 66), William Westmoreland Papers, LBJ Library.
102.The number of prostitutes is impossible to determine, but a Time report in 1967 estimated fifty thousand bar girls and taxi dancers. The numbers likely shifted greatly over the course of the war in line with population changes and troop numbers, and some did not serve openly as prostitutes but participated in sexual relationships with American soldiers under more ambiguous terms. “South Vietnam: Cleaning Up Saigon.”
4. Love and Companionship
1.I have opted not to include the soldier’s name, but the letter is publicly available in the Nixon Presidential Library. To Richard Nixon, January 30, 1970, box 85, folder “[GEN] CO 165 12/1/69–3/31/70 [2 of 2],” White House Central Files, Subject Files, CO (Countries), Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Archives, Yorba Linda, CA (henceforth Nixon Library).
2.For the purposes of this book, I use the definition of public diplomacy laid out by Nicholas Cull, who simplifies it as “an international actor’s attempt to conduct its foreign policy by engaging with foreign publics (traditionally government-to-people contact),” in The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xiv–xv. For additional information on current trends in public diplomacy historiography, see Kenneth Osgood and Brian Etheridge, eds., The United States and Public Diplomacy: New Directions in Cultural and International History (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Jason C. Parker, Hearts, Minds, Voices: U.S. Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
3.According to his obituary, the soldier appears never to have reunited with Kim or their daughter.
4.Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Kim Norrell, Reflections of a Vietnamese War Bride (Denver: Outskirts Press, 2012).
5.Meredith Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 5.
6.On the evolution of war brides in modern US military history, see Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
7.Ann Laura Stoler, “Troubles with Intimacy,” from “Intimacies and Empires” Roundtable, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York, January 2, 2015.
8.Petra Goedde, Mary Louise Roberts, Katharine H. S. Moon, and Sarah Kovner all illustrate the significance of sexuality in their discussions of GI-civilian interactions and their role in the framing of foreign relations during wartime or postwar occupations. Sexual relations with civilians created significant tensions regardless of whether the civilians belonged to an allied force, an enemy, or something in between. Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Sarah Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
9.American women in or affiliated with the military have been studied at length by other historians. For more on their lives and contacts with Vietnamese civilians, see Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Numerous studies of American nurses are also useful on this topic, including Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Studies of Vietnamese military women more commonly address the North Vietnamese or National Liberation Front women; see Karen Turner-Gotschang and Thanh H. Phan, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: Wiley, 1998); Sandra C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
Thousands of strategically important American female military service members served during the Vietnam War as well. I have yet to find any documents regarding American service women who engaged in sexual relations with Vietnamese civilians, although a case of that nature would make a significant contribution to our understanding of military-civilian sexual relationships.
10.Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed. (1989; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 125–26.
12.Randy Mixter, Letters from Long Binh: Memoirs of a Military Policeman in Vietnam (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011), 114.
13.Le Ly Hayslip with Jay Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Change Places (1989; New York: Plume, 2003), 169–70.
14.“Everything Is News: Rape,” Saigon Post, October 27, 1965, luu tru bao [Newspaper Archives], General Sciences Library, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (henceforth GSL, HCMC).
16.For an example of prostitutes growing close to GIs in a way that borders on a domestic relationship, see Eric Karlson, Fall to Grace: A True Story of Sex, Drugs, Vietnam, and Enlightenment (Boulder: Mariposa Press, 1999). Regarding the mechanical nature of sex with prostitutes, see John Ketwig, … And a Hard Rain Fell: A GI’s True Story of the War in Vietnam, 20th anniversary updated ed. (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2002), 77.
17.Housekeepers in Vietnam reported several incidents of attempted rape in 1965, and increased concern over intimate encounters and their potential for violence certainly influenced ideologies regarding appropriate sexual behavior. “Everything Is News: Rape,” Saigon Post, October 23, 1965, GSL, HCMC.
18.Extract from Radio Australia News, February 24, 1967, Folder on Vietnam: Political Affairs (Bilateral): Australia: Relations With: (And Attitude To), Department of Far East and Pacific, FCO 24/132, HAA3/1 Part B, British National Archives, Public Records Office, Kew, England (henceforth BNA); extract from Radio Australia News, February 26, 1967, Folder on Vietnam: Political Affairs (Bilateral): Australia: Relations With: (And Attitude To), Department of Far East and Pacific, FCO 24/132, HAA3/1 Part B, BNA.
19.Siobhan McHugh, Minefields and Miniskirts: Australian Women and the Vietnam War (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 41–42.
20.Wendy Wilder Larsen and Tran Thi Nga, Shallow Graves: Two Women and Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1986), inside flap.
28.Department of State, Agency for International Development, “Trust Fund Allocation Account Symbol—72 FT 800,” February 22, 1967, Co quan PTQT Hoa Ky—Nha Tai Vu /2064, Trung Tam Luu tru quoc gia II [National Archives Center II], Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
29.According to the August 1, 1966, US-set scrip rate of 118 Vietnamese dollars to one US dollar, this would equal $80,508.47 US. Adjusted for inflation, this would equal roughly $580,722. The conversion from piasters to dollars was obtained from globalinancialdata.com via an email from Dan Tsang to the Vietnamese Studies Group Listserv, October 7, 2006, https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/vsg/discussion-networking/vsg-discussion-list-archives/vsg-discussion-2006/piastre-dollar-exchanbge-rates.
30.Department of State, Agency for International Development, “Trust Fund Allocation Account Symbol—72 FT 800,” February 22, 1967, Co quan PTQT Hoa Ky—Nha Tai Vu /2064, Trung Tam Luu tru quoc gia II [National Archives Center II], 1 [page 2 of packet].
31.For a detailed overview of the WAFC, see Heather Marie Stur, “Blurred Lines: The Home Front, the Battlefront, and the Wartime Relationship between Citizens and Government in the Republic of Vietnam,” War & Society 38, no. 1 (January 2019): 57–79, DOI: 10.1080/07292473.2019.1524345 (accessed August 10, 2019).
32.Photograph caption, “Welfare WAFCs,” 1966, box 137, United States Army Women’s Museum, Fort Lee, Richmond, VA.
33.Heather Stur, “South Vietnam’s ‘Daredevil Girls,’ ” New York Times, August 1, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/opinion/vietnam-war-girls-women.html (accessed August 26, 2019).
34.US Army, “South Vietnamese Women’s Army Corps (WAC) Training for Vietnam War,” 1966, https://vimeo.com/178619259 (accessed November 20, 2020).
35.South Vietnam’s Women in Uniform, n.d., folder 21, box 05, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 11—Monographs, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University (henceforth TTU), https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/71625 (accessed June 10, 2021): 3–7.
36.Inspector General Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), “Disposition Report,” “Report of Investigations: Congressional Inquiry—Vung Tau CofS Action 182–71,” January 16, 1971, box 96, folder MIV-7–71 Congressional Inquiry—Vung Tau Copy 2 of 3 Copies, Rec. US Forces INVESTIG DIV Reports, Record Group 472, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD (henceforth NARAII), 1–6.
37.MACV Joint Messageform from SECDEF to COMUSMACV, “Congressional Inquiry,” January 15, 1971, box 96, folder MIV-7–71 Congressional Inquiry—Vung Tau Copy 2 of 3 Copies, Tab B, Rec. US Forces INVESTIG DIV Reports, Record Group 472, NARAII, 3.
38.MACV Joint Messageform from SECDEF to COMUSMACV, “Congressional Inquiry,” January 15, 1971.
39.MACV Joint Messageform from SECDEF to COMUSMACV, “Congressional Inquiry,” January 15, 1971, 4–5.
40.Richard Tregaskis to Herbert Klein, Presidential Advisor for Communications, 20 October 1970, folder [GEN] CO 165 10/1/70–12/31/70, box 86, White House Central Files, Subject Files, CO (Counties), Nixon Library, 1–2.
41.“Astounding Captured Document Reveals Mind of Enemy,” 1970, folder 16, box 20, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 06—Democratic Republic of Vietnam, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2322016001 (accessed July 20, 2016); “Mme Dinh Reviews NLF Women's Participation in Armed Struggle,” March 8, 1971, folder 04, box 11, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 05—National Liberation Front, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2311104038 (accessed July 20, 2016); “MME Nguyen Thi Dinh Interviewed,” April 1974, folder 04, box 29, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 01—Assessment and Strategy, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2122904043 (accessed July 20, 2016); “Progress, Actions of Viet Cong Women’s Organizations in South Vietnam,” March 1, 1971, folder 04, box 11, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 05—National Liberation Front, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2311104031 (accessed July 20, 2016); “Viet Cong Use of Women in Guerrilla Units Intelligence Collection, and to Induce Men Serving with the Government of Vietnam to Defect,” April 6, 1967, folder 123, box 09, Central Intelligence Agency Collection, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=04109123005 (accessed July 20, 2016).
42.Jim Stewart, The Angel from Vietnam: A Memoir of Growing Up, the Vietnam War, a Daughter, and Healing (Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2007), Kindle, chap. 17.
46.Le Ly Hayslip, telephone interview with the author, June 6, 2016.
49.Hayslip telephone interview.
51.Hayslip, telephone interview.
53.As in Karlson’s account of falling for a Vietnamese prostitute, John Ketwig writes about falling in love with a prostitute while on an R&R trip to Thailand. After returning to try to marry the woman, Lin, he finds her uninterested and eventually is no longer able to reach her. From the memoir, it appears Lin created a sense of a relationship with Ketwig for his enjoyment and her profit during his stay. She did not have the intention to maintain the relationship in the long run, or those who employed her would not allow her to do so. Ketwig, … And a Hard Rain Fell.
58.For a 1972 document on the debate among South Vietnamese police concerning the legality of American citizens and South Vietnamese women dating, living together, or being seen together in public, see MACV Office of Information, Command Information Division, “Fact Sheet: Police Harrassment [sic] of Vietnamese Girls Riding With Americans In Taxis,” May 12, 1972, Jim B. Green Collection, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=22440101002 (accessed January 20, 2015).
59.Stories of GIs keeping apartments off post came up in several casual conversations with veterans and are recounted in the memoirs of Stewart, Hayslip, and others.
61.Scorn for Diem’s policies is noted in Leland Gardner, Vietnam Underside: “Don’t Worry Mom … We’ve got Penicillin” (San Diego: Publishers Export, 1966), 120.
64.MACV, “Fact Sheet: Police Harrassment [sic] of Vietnamese Girls Riding With Americans in Taxis,” 1.
65.See Ngoc-Ha Dickinson, My Love Far Away: A True Story of Love and Survival (Port Charlotte, FL: Book-Broker Publishers, 2014); Hayslip with Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changes Places; Norrell, Reflections of a Vietnamese War Bride.
66.MACV, “Fact Sheet: Police Harrassment [sic] of Vietnamese Girls Riding With Americans In Taxis,” 2.
67.MACV, “Fact Sheet: Police Harrassment [sic] of Vietnamese Girls Riding With Americans In Taxis,” 2.
68.Interview with James Schill, April 10, 2001, James Schill Collection, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=OH0155 (accessed January 31, 2015).
69.E. James Lieberman, “American Families and the Vietnam War,” Journal of Marriage and Family 33, no. 4 (November 1971): 711–12.
73.Public Law 139: An Act to Limit the Immigration of Aliens into the United States, HR 7995, Congressional Record, 68th Cong., 1st sess. (May 26, 1924), chap. 190, 153–70.
74.Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 2.
75.Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 410.
80.Public Law 713: To Place Chinese Wives of American Citizens on a Nonquota Basis, HR 4844, 79th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record, chap. 945 (August 9, 1946), 975; Public Law 717: To Permit the Admission of Alien Spouses and Minor Children of Citizen Members of the United States Armed Forces, S 1858, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (August 18, 1950), chap. 759, 464–65.
81.Philip E. Wolgin and Irene Bloemraad, “ ‘Our Gratitude to Our Soldiers’: Military Spouses, Family Re-Unification, and Postwar Immigration Reform,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. I (Summer 2010): 28.
82.On the basis of numbers from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Zeiger estimates that a minimum of eight thousand Vietnamese entered the United States as wives of service members. Zeiger, Entangling Alliances, 214.
83.For more on anti-miscegenation laws targeting Asian nationalities, see Gabriel Jackson Chin and Hrishi Karthikeyan, “Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asian Americans, 1910–1950,” Asian Law Journal 9 (2002): 1–40; Deenesh Sohoni, “Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asian Identities,” Law & Society Review 41, no. 3 (2007): 587–618; Eunhye Kwon, “Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880–1954” (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 2011).
85.Revision of MACV Directive 608–1 to Chief of Staff, “Marriage in Command,” August 12, 1971, box 32, folder Marriage Application Records, 1971, MACV, Adjutant General, Military Personnel Division—Special Actions Branch, Record Group 472, NARAII.
86.Research in the region of Thinh Liet shows that “nearly 100 percent of the pre-1940 marriages were arranged.” Shaun Kingsley Malarney, Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 149.
90.Hayslip, telephone interview.
92.Jack Langguth, “In Saigon the G.I.’s Mistress Gives Her Parents a Better Life,” New York Times, August 14, 1965.
98.While Hayslip was living with her first American boyfriend, Red, they faced constant harassment on the street, so they often left their neighborhood to avoid local authorities and residents who disapproved of their courtship. Hayslip with Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, 282; Hayslip, telephone interview.
100.Hayslip, telephone interview.
102.Norrell, Reflections of a Vietnamese War Bride, 26–27; MACV Directive 608–1, August 12, 1971, box 32, folder Marriage Application Records, 1971, MACV, Adjutant General, Military Personnel Division—Special Actions Branch, Record Group 472, NARAII, Annex A, 2; Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, 345–47.
103.Revision of MACV Directive 608–1 to Chief of Staff, “Marriage in Command,” August 12, 1971, box 32, folder Marriage Application Records, 1971, MACV, Adjutant General, Military Personnel Division—Special Actions Branch, Record Group 472, NARAII.
104.Revision of MACV Directive 608–1 to Chief of Staff, “Marriage in Command.”
105.MACV Directive 608–1, 5–6.
106.MACV Directive 608–1, 6.
107.MACV Directive 608–1, Annex A, 1–3.
108.MACV Directive 608–1, Appendix, 6–7.
109.In the postwar era, the marriages between Americans and Vietnamese are not openly discussed in Vietnam. At the Vietnamese National Archives in 2013, archivists declined all documents I requested regarding the marriages of US servicemen and Vietnamese women. While it was unclear why the documents on prostitution were made available and marriage records were not, it is possible that the prostitution records show the RVN regime in a more negative light than marriage records might. Whether or not this is the case is not certain. A repeat attempt to retrieve those records from the Vietnamese National Archives could potentially tell us far more about the types of women who applied to follow service members to the United States and why their applications may not have been accepted.
111.I spoke with a veteran in early 2016 who did not give me permission to use his name but recalled using this tactic to bypass the process so that he and his fiancée could marry more quickly. He knew others who did the same.
5. The Policing and Policy Problems of Sexual Violence
1.Meredith H. Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 5–10.
2.See Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975; New York: Fawcett Books, 1993); Gina M. Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2013).
4.Susan Brownmiller takes issue with claims that in the midst of conflict, “rape becomes an unfortunate but inevitable by-product of the necessary game called war.” The use of rape as a war tactic remains a persistent theme in world history, gaining attention through works by scholars including Elisabeth Jean Wood and Dara Cohen in recent years. Cohen’s Rape during Civil War, for example, led the field forward by helping to distinguish how rapes occur during civil wars and the significance of rape as a tool to improve “intragroup cohesion.” Her work is anchored in statistics and theory to establish the significance of wartime rape in the history of conflict. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 32; Dara Kay Cohen, Rape during Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 2.
5.Surviving victims and perpetrators rarely want to speak about their experiences. Those who do often struggle to find a safe outlet to discuss them. Given the general lack of interest in victims in postwar eras or, in the case of Vietnam, the limited ability of Western researchers to contact civilian victims who remained in country, few aid workers and scholars managed to support victims or record their stories. In addition, mid-century science and inquiry practices for handling assault cases lacked sophistication and empathy. Alfred E. Lewis, “False Charges of Rape Keep Sex Squad on Go,” Washington Post, May 10, 1966.
6.Few Vietnamese women have discussed instances of rape that occurred during the war. On this issue, see Nathalie H. C. Nguyen, Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009), ix.
7.Gina Marie Weaver’s study on rape in Vietnam War literature and film, Ideologies of Forgetting, provides the most detailed coverage of the topic to date, and undermines claims that not enough evidence exists to indicate the presence of mass rape. Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting, 7.
8.See Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Rape Is Not Inevitable in War,” Spotlight on Security (Summer 2010), http://yalejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/105217wood.pdf, 389–419.
9.Rapes in this last category have most notably been associated with the war in Bosnia, where Serbian soldiers received directives to utilize rape as a means of ethnic cleansing. Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 56–58.
11.Gary Kulik and Peter Zinoman criticize widespread claims of atrocities and rape, citing concern over sources. Kulik and Zinoman take issue with the arguments of Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, for example, which argues that systematic and policy-driven behaviors resulted in consistent and unanimous policies of brutality against Vietnamese civilians. Accusing Turse of cherry-picking his sources, they argue that his claims cannot be substantiated throughout the war. Gary Kulik and Peter Zinoman, “Misrepresenting Atrocities: Kill Anything That Moves and the Continuing Distortions of the War in Vietnam,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal, no. 12 (September 2014), http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-12.
12.Wood, “Rape Is Not Inevitable in War.”
13.Structural violence refers to, as Kathleen Ho explains, “violence as the avoidable disparity between the potential ability to fulfill basic needs and their actual fulfillment. The theory further locates the unequal share of power to decide over the distribution of resources as the pivotal causal factor of these avoidable structural inequalities.” The fact that many women working as bar girls or prostitutes felt their work offered them considerable opportunities and participated willingly removes the coercive and violent elements present in acts of rape, although this was certainly not always the case. See Kathleen Ho, “Structural Violence as a Human Rights Violation,” Essex Human Rights Review 4, no. 2 (September 2007): 1; Mai Lan Gustafsson, “ ‘Freedom. Money. Fun. Love.’: The Warlore of Vietnamese Bar Girls, Oral History Review 38, no. 2 (2011): 308–30.
14.“Deflower for Cash,” Saigon Post, August 2, 1965, luu tru bao [Newspaper Archives], General Sciences Library, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (henceforth GSL, HCMC).
15.“Everything Is News—Rape,” Saigon Post, October 27, 1965, luu tru bao [Newspaper Archives], GSL, HCMC.
17.This assessment is based on a search of the New York Times in ProQuest Historical Newspapers and the LexisNexis newspaper archives from 1965 to 1970 for stories involving Vietnam and rape as the search terms. The search returned fewer than ten articles referencing rape in Vietnam linked to Americans as perpetrators.
19.Henry argues that the limitations of the legal system added to the dismissal of sexual violence in public memory, since lawyers found no precedent for prosecuting sexual violence on an international scale. Henry, War and Rape, 6–7, 132.
20.The 1990s marked a watershed decade for public discourse on sexual violence in war. Charges against Serbians for the rape and sexual enslavement of Bosnian women marked the first time they were used as categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In addition, former Korean “comfort women” openly spoke about their trauma for the first time during this decade as they sought reparations from the Japanese government. See “Crimes of Sexual Violence,” United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), n.d., http://www.icty.org/sid/10312 (accessed February 1, 2015); Alexandra Stiglmayer, Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Anne-Marie Brouwer, Sandra Chu, and Samer Muscati, The Men Who Killed Me: Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009); Chunghee S. Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 22.
21.Bülent Diken and Carsten Laustsen, “Becoming Abject: Rape as a Weapon of War,” Body & Society 11, no. 1 (2005): 111–28.
22.Rape presents a particular research challenge for two reasons: first, sexual violence during wartime rarely receives as much attention as the foregrounded military, political, and economic components; and second, most cases of rape in Vietnam were never reported or were dropped before official paper trails could be created.
23.For the polar views on rape claims as lies on the one hand or as a strategy of war on the other, see, respectively, Gary Kulik, “War Stories”: False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers—What Really Happened in Vietnam (Washington, D.C: Potomac Books, 2009); Turse, Kill Anything That Moves.
24.“More Sex Crimes in P.I.,” Saigon Post, January 22, 1965, luu tru bao [Newspaper Archives], GSL, HCMC).
25.The most often cited trials for rape, including My Lai, the rape of a captured Vietnamese nurse, and the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a village girl, all involved multiple soldier perpetrators.
27.Cases of sodomy in the military police blotter records provide considerably less detail, most likely because of the illegal nature of homosexuality in the military. Among the case reports I saw, one was very careful to note that the crime was alleged by a third party after the fact, while another did not even give the names of the Americans involved. See “Delayed Entry: Sodomy (alleged),” Military Police Desk Blotter, January 2, 1969, box 6, folder Lai Khe M.P. Sta., Desk Blotter, Jan 1969, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, Record Group 472, National Archives Center II at College Park, MD (henceforth NARAII), 3; “Act of Sodomy (Alleged),” Military Police Desk Blotter, September 24, 1969, box 8, folder Lai Khe M.P. Sta., Desk Blotter, Jan 1969, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, Record Group 472, NARA II, 2.
28.Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 100. The US Air Force tried twelve men for violation of Article 134, on “lewd, lascivious, and indecent acts,” and returned eight convictions.
29.Ronald Spector cites only three marines convicted for rape, while Brownmiller cites thirteen from 1970 to 1973 alone. Brownmiller cites only one conviction from the navy between 1970 and 1973. Ronald H. Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 202; Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 98–100.
32.Testimony of Corporal Christopher Simpson, Winter Soldier Investigation, 1st Marine Division, January 31–February 2, 1971, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html (accessed June 30, 2016).
33.Testimony of Sergeant Joe Bangert, Winter Soldier Investigation, 1st Marine Division, January 31–February 2, 1971.
34.Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 36.
35.The year 1967 appears to have brought about a conscious crackdown on rape crimes, as six American soldiers received sentences for rape in August and September. “5 G.I.’s Convicted of Rape in Vietnam,” New York Times, August 26, 1967; “G.I. in Vietnam Guilty of Rape,” New York Times, September 28, 1967.
36.Seymour Hersh, “New Viet Murder Charge,” Boston Globe, November 13, 1969; “How the Horror of Vietnam Seduced the Anti-War Liberal,” The Guardian, March 8, 1978; Vincent Burke, “Gone Is America’s Sense of Righteous Power … and Some Rejoice at the End of Power’s Arrogance,” Boston Globe, January 28, 1973; Charles Moskos, “Civilian Society to Blame: Antimilitarism—Intellectuals’ New Anti-Semitism,” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1970; Neil Sheehan, “Conversations with Americans,” New York Times, December 27, 1970; Crocker Snow Jr., “How Asians View Vietnam War and U.S. Disengagement,” Boston Globe, January 11, 1970.
37.Opponents of the war viewed My Lai as evidence of the unchecked horrors that occurred every day in Southeast Asia and sought justice for the crimes. Supporters saw the trials as witch hunts that targeted soldiers forced by the government to make difficult choices when faced with dangerous and disguised enemies.
39.The historiography on the massacre at My Lai ranges from activist to denial literature. The more recent historiography includes William T. Allison, My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Michal R. Belknap, The Vietnam War on Trial: The My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Lieutenant Calley (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Kendrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Turse, Kill Anything That Moves.
40.A chronology of events is available in William R. Peers et al., The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-Up: Beyond the Reach of Law? The Peers Commission Report (New York: Free Press, 1976), ix. The reports, by Seymour Hersh, were first published in American newspapers on November 13, 1969. James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 24.
41.Hersh, “New Viet Murder Charge.”
42.Seymour Hersh, “The Thing Was So Deliberate … It Was Point Blank Murder,” Hartford Courant, November 20, 1969.
44.See Peers et al., The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-Up, 299–313. For the text of a letter written by one soldier in March 1969, see “Letter to Military and Political Leaders,” in Olson and Roberts, My Lai, 147–51.
45.Memorandum from the Deputy Secretary of Defense (Packard) to President Nixon, Washington, D.C., September 4, 1969, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. 4, January 1969–July 1970 (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1991), 356–57.
46.Memorandum from the Deputy Secretary of Defense (Packard) to President Nixon, 357.
47.“National Liberation Front Committee Notice,” March 28, 1968, in Olson and Roberts, My Lai, 136–38.
50.“The Massacre at Mylai.”
51.For examples of how the American public reacted to the publication of articles and images regarding the My Lai massacre, see Olson and Roberts, My Lai, 174–77.
52.Westmoreland was promoted to army chief of staff in 1968 after commanding MACV in Vietnam since 1964.
54.Quoted in Seth Robson, “Clemency Is Last Hope for a More Normal Life,” Stars and Stripes, May 12, 2009, http://www.stripes.com/news/clemency-is-last-hope-for-a-more-normal-life-1.91416 (accessed July 9, 2016).
55.Telegram from the Embassy in South Vietnam to the Department of State, February 8, 1967, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 5, Vietnam, 1967, ed. Kent Sieg and David S. Patterson (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2010), document 44, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v05/d44 (accessed June 10, 2016).
56.For example, organizations like the Committee to Denounce the War Crimes of the US Imperialists and Their Henchmen in South Viet Nam used terms that linked Americans to the colonial legacy. See, Committee to Denounce the War Crimes of the US Imperialists and Their Henchmen in South Viet Nam, “Crimes Perpetrated by the US Imperialists and Henchmen against South Viet Nam Women and Children” (Saigon: Giai Phong Publishing House, 1968).
57.International Security Advisory Board, Report on Status of Forces Agreements, US Department of State, 2015. https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/avc/isab/236234.htm (accessed June 16, 2021).
58.Major General George S. Prugh, Law at War: Vietnam, 1964–1973, Vietnam Studies Series (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1975), 87–97.
60.John R. Brown III, Memorandum for Dr. Kissinger, box 118, folder “Vietnam—LT. Calley Case (The My Lai Atrocity) [1 of 2],” National Security Council Files, Vietnam Subject Files, RG 472, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Archives, Yorba Linda, CA (henceforth Nixon Library); Alexander M. Haig Jr., Memorandum for Brigadier General Robert M. Pursley, “War Crimes Cases,” box 118, folder “Vietnam—LT. Calley Case (The My Lai Atrocity) [2 of 2],” National Security Council Files, Vietnam Subject Files, RG 472, Nixon Library.
63.Quoted in Brown, Memorandum for Dr. Kissinger.
64.Peers et al., The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-Up, 514. For a profile of Calley and Charlie Company, see Peers et al., The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-Up; Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin, 1993), 49–50; Olson and Roberts, My Lai, 12–16.
65.According to the Winter Soldier Investigation testimony, an African American soldier in one unit was used to threaten rape against Vietnamese women. According to the witness, the soldier would scare them enough that they would generally talk. The concept of threating rape or sodomy seems almost exclusively limited to female prisoners in these records, although it is likely that it was used against some men as well. “Winter Soldier Investigation Testimony,” quoted in Mark O. Hatfield, “Veterans’ Testimony on Vietnam—Need for Investigation,” Congressional Record, 92nd Congress, 1st sess., April 6, 1971, E 9997.
67.Numerous mentions of rape and concern for the targeting of women can be found in Peers Inquiry, “Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident: Volume II—Testimony,” March 14, 1970, https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/Vol_II-testimony.html (accessed, July 10, 2016).
68.William Thomas Allison’s work gives a summation of the crimes at My Lai, including Gonzales’s testimony. See Allison, My Lai, 39–40. For the text of Gonzales’s testimony, see CID [Criminal Investigation Command] Report of Investigation, 26 June 1970, box 02, folder 14, My Lai Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1540214007 (accessed May 20, 2019). Additional CID Reports of Investigation from the My Lai trials can be found at the Texas Tech University Vietnam Center and Archive.
70.For a published copy of the document, see Nelson, The War Behind Me, Appendix B, 263. The list of incidents presented to Nixon is incomplete, as two documents titled “Incidents” are still classified, likely for the inclusion of FOIA-protected names and private information, and withheld from box 118, folder “Vietnam—LT. Calley Case (The My Lai Atrocity) [2 of 2],” National Security Council Files, Vietnam Subject Files, RG 472, Nixon Library.
74.Documents in box 1, folder 225–04 IG Investigative Files (71) (Phu Hiep), Rec. US Forces DEPUTY SR SDV WarCrimesVietofc, Headquarters, MACV, Investigation Files Re: War Crimes and Malfeasance, RG 472, Nixon Library.
75.Daniel Lang, Casualties of War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969); Daniel Lang, “Casualties of War,” The New Yorker, October 18, 1969, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/10/18/casualties-of-war, accessed June 10, 2016.
76.List of crimes committed and sent to court-martial, June 21, 1968, box 118, folder “Vietnam—LT. Calley Case (The My Lai Atrocity) [2 of 2],” National Security Council Files, Vietnam Subject Files, Nixon Library.
79.Department of Defense Report, “War Crime Type Cases Having some Similarity to the Calley Case,” April 2, 1971, box 118, folder “Vietnam—LT. Calley Case (The My Lai Atrocity) [2 of 2],” National Security Council Files, Vietnam Subject Files, Nixon Library.
80.Department of Defense Report, “War Crime Type Cases Having some Similarity to the Calley Case.”
81.Cecil Barr Currey, Long Binh Jail: An Oral History of Vietnam’s Notorious U.S. Military Prison (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999), xvi, 10.
83.The records I was able to view are located in the files of the USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal—Military Police Desk Blotters, 01/13/1967–02/17/1970, boxes 4–8, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, Record Group 472, NARAII.
84.“Aggravated Assault,” Military Police Desk Blotter, August 1, 1969, box 8, folder Di An M.P. Sta., Desk Blotter, Aug. 1969, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, Record Group 472, NARAII, 4.
85.“Aggravated Assault,” Military Police Desk Blotter, August 1, 1969, box 8, folder Di An M.P. Sta., Desk Blotter, Aug. 1969, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, Record Group 472, NARAII, 4. No further records of the soldier during his time in Vietnam are available.
86.While this PFC does not seem to have received any serious punishment while serving in Vietnam, he has been serving a life sentence in North Carolina since 1974. After serving three years in prison for a 1971 breaking and entering case, he was arrested for burglary and kidnapping only three months after his release and sentenced to life in prison.
87.“Assault (Alleged),” Military Police Desk Blotter, September 3, 1969, box 8, folder Di An M.P. Sta., Desk Blotter, Sept. 1969, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, RG 472, NARAII, 1.
88.“Assault,” Military Police Desk Blotter, June 3, 1969, box 7, folder Lai Khe M.P. Sta., Desk Blotter, Jun 69, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, RG 472, NARAII, 1.
89.“Attempted Rape (Alleged),” Military Police Desk Blotter, October 27, 1969, box 8, folder Dau Tieng M.P. Sta., Desk Blotter, Oct. 1969, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, RG 472, NARAII, 2.
90.“Aggravated Assault (Alleged),” Military Police Desk Blotter, April 28, 1969, box 7, folder Lai Khe M.P. Sta., Desk Blotter, Aug 69, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, RG 472, NARAII, 3.
91.“Offense Report (Rape (Alleged) ART #120),” October 6, 1967, folder D.P.M. Desk Blotter, Oct. 1967, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, RG 472, NARAII, 2.
92.“REF B/E #3, 4 Feb 69 Report of Wounded VN/F,” Military Police Desk Blotter, February 4, 1969, box 6, folder Lai Khe M.P. Sta., Desk Blotter, Jan 1969, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, RG 472, NARAII, 1.
93.“Offense Report (Assault Against V/N/F),” Military Police Desk Blotter, October 14, 1967, box 4, folder D.P.M., Desk Blotter, Oct 1967, USARV/1st Infantry Division, Provost Marshal, RG 472, NARAII, 3.
94.“Everything Is News: Rape,” Saigon Post, October 23, 1965, luu tru bao [Newspaper Archives], GSL, HCMC.
95.Documents in box 1, folder 225–04 IG Investigative Files (71) (Phu Hiep), Rec. US Forces DEPUTY SR SDV WarCrimesVietofc, Headquarters, MACV, Investigation Files Re: War Crimes and Malfeasance, RG 472, Nixon Library.
96.Hayslip with Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, 10; Jo Griffin, “Women Raped by Korean Soldiers during Vietnam War Still Awaiting Apology,” The Guardian, January 19, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jan/19/women-raped-by-korean-soldiers-during-vietnam-war-still-awaiting-apology; “Justice for Lai Dai Han: Vietnamese Victims of Sexual Violence Must Be Recognised,” PR Newswire US, June 7, 2018; “A Vietnamese Rapist Executed Before 3,000,” New York Times, April 3, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
97.Telegram from the Embassy in South Vietnam to the Department of State, February 8, 1967, un Sieg and Patterson, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 5, Vietnam, 1967, document 44, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v05/d44 (accessed June 10, 2016).
98.“New Orders by Thieu Extends Death,” New York Times, September 4, 1972, retrieved from ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
99.Committee to Denounce the War Crimes of the US Imperialists, “Crimes Perpetrated by the US Imperialists and Henchmen,” 4.
101.“National Liberation Front Committee Notice,” March 28, 1968, in Olson and Roberts, My Lai, 136.
102.“National Liberation Front Committee Notice,” 136–38.
105.The “whitewashing” of the war in US commemorations of the conflict has received considerable attention in the Vietnam Studies Group LISTSERV under the heading “Fwd: Pentagon Accused of Whitewashing History of Vietnam War Era,” begun October 13, 2014. Also see Jeff Stein, “Remembering Vietnam: Inside the Pentagon’s Controversial New Commemoration,” November 11, 2013, Vocativ.com (accessed February 5, 2015); Deirdre Fulton, “Pentagon Accused of Whitewashing History of Vietnam War Era,” October 10, 2014, Commondreams.org (accessed February 5, 2015).
106.Nguyen Phan Que Mai, The Mountains Sing (New York: Algonquin Books, 2020); Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (New York: Penguin Press, 2019).
107.Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 30–31.
110.Quoted in Karen Gottschang Turner with Phan Thanh Hao, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: Wiley, 1998), 176.
111.Karima Omar, “National Symbolism in Constructions of Gender: Transformed Symbols in Post-Conflict States,” Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations 5, no. 3 (Winter/Spring 2004), http://blogs.shu.edu/diplomacy/archived-issues/ (accessed July 9, 2016).
113.Notably, these popular images tend to come from the prewar French colonial era. See Harry Hervey, Congaï: Mistress of Indochine (1925; Holmes Beach, FL: DatASIA Press, 2014); Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955; New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
114.It is worth noting that the other prominent female character in the film, who does not have a physical relationship with Americans, is a sniper committed to killing as many Americans as she can. To her, the Americans fall under the category of animals who must be eliminated.
115.Susan Jeffords, Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 138–39.
116.Susan Jeffords attributes the hero, Chris’s, prevention of the rape to his recognition of both the masculine and the feminine within him. Jeffords, Remasculinization of America, 69, 138–39. On Stone’s use of his personal experience, see Marc Cooper, “Playboy Interview: Oliver Stone” (1988), in Oliver Stone Interviews, ed. Charles L. P. Silet (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 74–76; Albert Auster and Leonard Quart, How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood & Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1988), 137.
117.Daniel Lang, Incident on Hill 192 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970). The copyright page notes that the content originally appeared in the October 18, 1969, issue of The New Yorker under the title “Casualties of War,” the title that was adopted for the film.
118.See Amanda Chapman Boczar, “Economics, Empathy, and Expectation: History and Representations of Rape and Prostitution in Late 1980s Vietnam War Films,” in Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn, ed. Karen Ritzenhoff and Catriona McAvoy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 69–94, for an examination of the representations of wartime rape and prostitution in late 1980s Vietnam War films. For other discussions of prostitution or rape in Vietnam War films, see Russell Campbell, Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Jennifer Holt, “1989: Movies and the American Dream,” in American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations, ed. Stephen Prince (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Ralph Donald and Karen MacDonald, Reel Men at War: Masculinity and the American War Film (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011); Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Tanya Horeck, Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (London: Routledge, 2004).
119.Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 449–50; R. W. Apple Jr., “Parole of Calley Granted by Army Effective Nov. 19,” New York Times, November 9, 1974.
6. De-escalation and the Collapse of an Industry
3.Charles Mohr, “Amid Cease-Fire Battles, Peasants Remain Stoical,” New York Times, February 1, 1973.
4.“General Westmoreland’s Historical Briefing, April 9, 1966,” no. 5 History File (13 Mar–26 Apr 66), William Westmoreland Papers, Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX.
5.On postwar conditions and reeducation camps for the South Vietnamese, see Amanda Demmer, After Saigon’s Fall: Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
6.Ngoc-Ha Dickinson, My Love Far Away: A True Story of War and Survival (Port Charlotte, FL: Book-Broker Publishers, 2014).
7.Trin Yarborough, Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005), 34–35.
8.Numbers vary widely on the number of orphans remaining in Vietnam at the end of the war. Simply deciding who counted as a “war orphan” could shift the numbers wildly. Marilyn Young has offered a figure as high as 879,000 children orphaned by 1975, while estimates specifically of the number of Amerasian orphans total between 25,000 and 50,000. Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 301; Sabrina Thomas, “The Value of Dust: Policy, Citizenship and Vietnam’s Amerasian Children” (Ph.D. diss, Arizona State University, 2015), x.
9.Many scholars have written wonderful accounts of the legacy of the Vietnam War in politics and memory, including Amanda Demmer, William Duiker, Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Heonik Kwon, Scott Laderman, Edwin Martini, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Robert Schulzinger, and Christina Schwenkel. Researchers are beginning to focus on the postwar era even more directly from a Vietnamese perspective as new sources become available, and an aging population begins to open up about their experiences. Dissertations in progress on this period show the shift in focus to the postwar era. Francis Martin of the University of Connecticut has been researching South Vietnamese nationalism after 1975 and its effects on US-Vietnamese relations through 1989. For two works that have broken ground regarding postwar sex in Vietnam, see Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendency, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).
10.Strategy Paper to RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 832 from Amembassy Saigon, folder NSC Review of Vietnam Negotiations Game Plan vol. 2, box 68, National Security Files, Vietnam Subject Files, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Archives, Yorba Linda, CA (henceforth Nixon Library).
11.Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 221.
12.See National Security Council Files, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files, Country Files—Far East, box 104, Nixon Library; and folder Assurances to RVN (2 of 2), National Security Council Files, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files, Country Files—Far East, box 105, Nixon Library.
13.Nguyen, Hanoi’s War, 222–23; Nixon to Thieu, January 17, 1973, folder Assurances to RVN (2 of 2), National Security Council Files, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files, Country Files—Far East, box 105, Nixon Library.
14.Pierre Asselin, A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 151.
17.Larry Engelmann, Tears before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), viii.
19.Mohr, “Amid Cease-Fire Battles, Peasants Remain Stoical.”
20.“VIET NAM: Goodbye, Saigon, Goodbye.”
21.Mohr, “Amid Cease-Fire Battles, Peasants Remain Stoical.”
23.Quoted in “VIET NAM: Goodbye, Saigon, Goodbye.”
25.Quoted in “VIET NAM: Goodbye, Saigon, Goodbye.”
26.Department of State, Agency for International Development, “Project Implementation Order/Technical Services,” December 1, 1973, Co quan PTQT Hoa Ky—Nha Tai Vu/4776, Trung Tam Luu Tru Quoc Gia II [National Archives Center II], Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (henceforth NAII), 1.
27.“Nam Women’s Progress Through Figures From the 3rd National Women’s Congress, March 1961 to the 4th National Women’s Congress, March 1974,” n.d., folder 12, box 12, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 11—Monographs, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University (henceforth TTU), http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2391212001 (accessed July 30, 2016).
28.Department of State, Agency for International Development, “Project Implementation Order/Technical Services,” December 1, 1973, Co quan PTQT Hoa Ky—Nha Tai Vu/4776, NAII, 1.
29.Department of State, Agency for International Development, “Project Implementation Order/Technical Services,” 2.
32.On critical refugee studies related to the Vietnam War, see Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
34.George J. Veith, Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–1975 (New York: Encounter Books, 2003), 386–87.
36.Professor Lien-Hang Nguyen described this struggle for her family in 2012. Lien-Hang Nguyen, 2012 National Book Festival, “Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam,” YouTube, May 9, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bolIZpcgrnM (accessed June 10, 2015).
38.This policy, known as the “no-marriage clause,” helped expedite the process that under American immigration law would allow the fiancées of servicemen to return to the United States with them. “THE EXODUS: Turning Off the Last Lights,” Time, May 5, 1975.
39.An Act to Enable the United States to Render Assistance to, or in Behalf of, Certain Migrants and Refugees, Public Law 94–23, U.S. Statutes at Large 89 (1975): 87–88.
40.Guy Gran, “Vietnam: The Human Costs of the American Aid Programs—An Alternate FY 75 Foreign Aid Proposal,” Indochina Resource Center, May 1974, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 03—Antiwar Activities, TTU, 7, https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/183132 (accessed June 15, 2021).
41.Quoted in “Refugees Relocation in Vietnam,” July 1976, folder 06, box 21, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 06—Democratic Republic of Vietnam, TTU, 1–5, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2322106037 (accessed December 16, 2014).
42.“Refugees Relocation in Vietnam,” 2.
43.“Refugees Relocation in Vietnam,” 2.
44.For studies discussing life in reeducation camps, see Demmer, After Saigon’s Fall; Edward P. Metzner et al., Reeducation in Postwar Vietnam: Personal Postscripts to Peace (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001); Hoa Minh Truong, Journey: Inside the Reeducation Camps of Viet Cong (Durham, CT: Eloquent Books, 2010); Sam Vong, “ ‘Compassion Gave Us a Special Superpower’: Vietnamese Women Leaders, Reeducation Camps, and the Politics of Family Reunification, 1977–1991,” Journal of Women’s History 30, no. 3 (2018): 107–37.
46.Lu Van Thanh, The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls: Memoir of an ARVN Liaison Officer to United States Forces in Vietnam (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1997), 108.
48.Interview with James Schill, April 10, 2001, James Schill Collection, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=OH0155 (accessed July 29, 2016).
49.Saigon People’s Forum, “Parents Call for Elimination of Houses of Prostitution,” 12 October 1975, folder 03, box 26, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 06—Democratic Republic of Vietnam, TTU, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2322603020 (accessed January 29, 2015).
50.Della Denmans, “Helping to Rehabilitate the Young in South Vietnam,” New York Times, January 15, 1973.
51.Denmans, “Helping to Rehabilitate the Young in South Vietnam.”
64.Norrell’s father was required to pay an estimated $200,000 US Norrell, Reflections of a Vietnamese War Bride, 77. In The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls, Lu Van Thanh gives a similar account in which his father was assessed approximately $1.5 million piasters against the value of his business, and although told he could request a refund, he never received it. Lu Van Thanh, The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls, 88.
66.“Refugees Relocation in Vietnam,” July 1976, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 06—Democratic Republic of Vietnam, TTU, 1–5; Norrell, Reflections of a Vietnamese War Bride, 76.
67.“Top Ten Countries of Immigration through Family Reunification,” Migration Policy Institute, 2001, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/family-reunification (accessed July 28, 2016).
69.For a detailed examination of 1980s immigration policies, see Thomas, “The Value of Dust.” Le Ly Hayslip writes at length in When Heaven and Earth Changed Places about her fear of returning to Vietnam after the opening.
71.Regarding views of Vietnamese women who associated openly with American (or French) men, see Bach-Thuy Le-Thi, Hope for the Children of War: Viet Nam, 1971–1975 (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014), 95–96, 234.
72.On Vietnamese racism, see Thomas, “The Value of Dust,” 49–50; Michael B. Smith to Mr. and Mrs. Ronald E. Haglund, January 28, 1972, folder [GEN] CO 165 Vietnam 1/1/71- [2 of 2], box 86, White House Central Files, Subject Files, CO (Counties), Nixon Library, 1–2.
74.Thomas, “The Value of Dust,” x; Nan Robertson, “Amerasian War Orphans Come to U.S.: Amerasian Orphans Settling in U.S.,” New York Times, April 18, 1984. Earlier New York Times reports offered a more conservative estimate, with one article stating that “more than 8,000 Vietnamese-American children were left behind.” This is far lower than standard estimates, however. Bill Kurtis, “The Plight of the Children Abandoned in Vietnam,” New York Times Magazine, March 20, 1980, 5.
75.In his memoir of his upbringing with his mother, Bruce King Anderson describes the presence of American forces near bases in Thailand. Bruce King Anderson, Orphans of the Secret War: A Provocative Tale of an Udontani Bargirl and Her Illegitimate Son in the Aftermath of the Americans Leaving the Kingdom of Thailand after the Vietnam War. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015).
76.Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 4–5.
77.Extract from Radio Australia News, “Australia to Receive War Orphans from Vietnam,” December 7, 1967, folder on Vietnam: Political Affairs (Bilateral): Australia: Relations With: (And Attitude To), Department of Far East and Pacific, FCO 24/132, HAA3/1 Part B, British National Archives.
78.Joshua Forkert, “Orphans of Vietnam: A History of Intercountry Adoption Policy and Practice in Australia, 1968–1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Adelaide, January 2012), 87, 120–21, 124.
79.James Marten, introduction to Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed. James Marten (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 4–5.
80.Daughter from Danang, directed by Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco (PBS Video—American Experience, 2004), DVD.
81.Dien Tin [telegram] from Lang Co-Nhi Long-Thanh—Bien Hoa [Long-Thanh Orphanage—Bien Hoa] to Tong Thong Viet-Nam Cong Hoa [president of South Vietnam], February 1, 1971, box 107, folder MIV-29–71 Long Thanh Orphanage, Rec. US Forces INVESTIG DIV Reports, Record Group 472, NARAII.
82.Disposition Form, “Complaint from the Long Thanh Orphanage,” February 28, 1971, box 107, folder MIV-29–71 Long Thanh Orphanage, Rec. US Forces INVESTIG DIV Reports, Record Group 472, NARAII.
83.On the refugee crisis and development of immigration policies, see Thomas, “The Value of Dust.”
84.See Siobhan McHugh, Minefields and Miniskirts: Australian Women and the Vietnam War (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 42–46; Le-Thi, Hope for the Children of War, 45–72.
85.The Committee of 1000, Council on Adoptable Children International, to President Richard Nixon, January 16, 1972, box 87, folder [GEN] CO 165-2 Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) 1/1/71- [2 of 2], White House Central Files, Subject Files, CO (Countries), Nixon Library.
86.Michael B. Smith, Staff Assistant, to Mrs. David H. Campbell, February 22, 1972, box 87, folder [GEN] CO 165-2 Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) 1/1/71- [2 of 2], White House Central Files, Subject Files, CO (Countries), Nixon Library, 1–2.
87.Michael B. Smith, Staff Assistant, to Miss Mary Anne Fox, March 28, 1972, box 86, folder [GEN] CO 165 Vietnam 1/1/71- [2 of 2], White House Central Files, Subject Files, CO (Countries), Nixon Library.
88.Michael B. Smith, Staff Assistant, to Mrs. Samuel D. Berger, July 29, 1971, box 86, folder [GEN] CO 165 Vietnam 1/1/71- [2 of 2], White House Central Files, Subject Files, CO (Countries), Nixon Library.
89.Thomas, “The Value of Dust,” 40.
90.The French policy led to a massive influx of mixed-race children into France. Michael B. Smith to Mary Anne Fox.
91.Thomas, “The Value of Dust,” 40–46.
92.The documentary Daughter from Danang focuses on the emotional toll of the orphan issue both during and after the conflict.
93.For a detailed description of Operation Babylift, including the accident, see Dana Sachs, The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 68–79.
96.Thomas, “The Value of Dust,” 70.
97.Thomas, “The Value of Dust,” 73.
98.Forkert, “Orphans of Vietnam,” 87; Thomas, “The Value of Dust,” 131; Espiritu, Body Counts, 25, 92–97.
99.Amerasian Homecoming Act, August 19, 1987, HR 3171, 100th Congress.
100.She cites a lecture from Hue-Tam Ho Tai at Clark University in 1987. More recently, Ho-Tai’s work on memory has addressed the conspicuous absence of women in Vietnamese memorials or commemoration of the Vietnam War. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, ed., The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 14.
101.Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed. (1989; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 117.
102.On Vietnam’s changing relationship with the West beginning in the Clinton administration, see H. Bruce Franklin, “Missing in Action in the Twenty-First Century,” in Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War, ed. Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 284–87.
104.Patrick Winn, “Vietnam War Babies: Grown Up and Low on Luck,” Salon, September 2, 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/09/02/vietnam_immigrant_visa_globalpost/ (accessed June 20, 2016).
105.Sue Lloyd Roberts, “A US Soldier Searches for His Vietnamese Son,” BBC, April 26, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27159697 (accessed January 31, 2015).
106.Jim Stewart, The Angel from Vietnam: A Memoir of Growing Up, the Vietnam War, a Daughter, and Healing (Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2007), Kindle, chap. 25.
107.Le Ly Hayslip, telephone interview with the author, June 6, 2016.
Conclusion
1.Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendency, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 29.
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3.Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007), 32.
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