Soldiering through Empire. Simeon Man
other State from the point of view of South Vietnam” but the “nearest overseas neighbors,” and stated that the Vietnamese “have learned to look to us for guidance in their efforts at liberty.” To substantiate this point, Manglapus recalled the “volunteer Filipinos” who, at that very moment, “are showing the Vietnamese the capacity of Asians for self-reliance.” These Filipinos told a self-evident story: “We are not just any other country to the Vietnamese. We are a country of fellow Asians, friends, helpers and inspirers.”16
On July 15, 1955, President Ramon Magsaysay formally extended diplomatic recognition to South Vietnam. While metaphors of racial and colonial intimacy had worked decidedly in favor of it, they also fueled the opposition. One week after, Senator Claro M. Recto assailed his colleagues on the Senate floor. Vietnam, Recto argued, did not have the “attributes of sovereignty” because it was “ruled by France and [the] United States.” The Philippine commitment to SEATO, which the senator had opposed from the beginning, did not include obligations to extend diplomatic relations, contrary to the claim of Manglapus and others. With no justifiable basis, the Philippine recognition of South Vietnam amounted to nothing short of “interference” in the country’s “internal affairs.”17 In voicing his opposition, Recto laid bare the colonial dynamics at the heart of the so-called “friendship” between the two countries.
Recto articulated a different kind of colonial intimacy, based not on anticommunist alliances and capitalist integration but on an emergent anticolonialism that was fanning across the region. He was inspired by the Afro-Asian Conference that had concluded recently in Bandung, Indonesia, where the leaders of twenty-nine newly independent nations in Asia and Africa met to proclaim their anticolonial solidarities and refusal to compromise their independence by submitting to the bipolar world order. This anticolonial spirit suffused his speech. He further lambasted the newly appointed South Vietnamese Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem as “a puppet of Colonel Lansdale,” doing the bidding of the United States. Recto declared, “Diem, although anti-French, is helping [to] implant in South Vietnam another form of Western colonialism.” This form of colonialism might be “more profitable for the colonials … because of prospects of better standards of living, civil liberties and political rights, but for that very same reason more dangerous.” He didn’t believe the term “democracy” should fool anyone. He clarified, “Diem made his choice not between nationalism and colonialism but between two forms of colonialism.” A few days before Recto spoke these words, Diem had announced South Vietnam would not participate in the 1956 election to unify Vietnam, a move that Recto feared would embroil Southeast Asia in future war. “Must our boys die on foreign soil and must our cities and countrysides by [sic] laid waste again, just because it occurred to Diem and his American backers to boycott the 1956 plebiscite?”18 His words of caution proved prescient in time. But at the moment, he made his point clear: the recognition of South Vietnam had made the Philippines complicit in another U.S. colonial project in Asia.
In this sense, diplomatic recognition was little more than a formality, for all was already set. The Manila Pact had outlined the regional framework for U.S. circumvention of the Geneva Accords, and the Philippines was already implicated in any future U.S. military intervention in South Vietnam. The formalization of diplomatic relations between the Philippines and South Vietnam only further entrenched this complicity. Amidst these events, the tensions captured by Recto’s trenchant remarks lingered unresolved. To the senator and other dissidents in his party, the events surrounding Indochina in 1954–55 were momentous not for what they purported to represent, but for what they concealed: that colonialism was being carried out in the name of democracy, and this meant dire consequences for the Philippines and its citizens.
THE DEPLOYMENT OF CARE
On October 14, 1954, three months after the Geneva Accords, Operation Brotherhood dispatched its first medical mission to Saigon. Headed by Antonio E.R. Velasco, a doctor and the Jaycee president of Southern Mindanao, the team of seven doctors and three nurses arrived to a spectacular welcome at Tan Sun Nhut Air Base. They arrived by way of Air America, a CIA-owned and -funded civilian airline that flew covert military missions throughout Southeast Asia in the 1950s; however, the U.S. orchestration of the entire affair was hidden at the moment. To the Vietnamese government officials and Jaycees who greeted them on the tarmac, they were “volunteer” medics and unofficial representatives of the Philippine government, contracted for three months to help relieve the emergency of the refugee influx.
Under different circumstances, the presence of Filipino workers in another country would have been unremarkable. Since the early twentieth century, Filipinos had engaged in cultures of transnational mobility, an effect and legacy of U.S. colonialism. In the first decade of the U.S. colonial period, the pensionado and nursing programs were established and brought Filipina/o students and nurses to the United States, opening new avenues for individual advancement and reproducing the gendered division of labor that were at the heart of the U.S. “civilizing” mission in the Philippines. Beginning in 1903, the U.S. Navy also recruited Filipinos, primarily as stewards and messboys. These patterns of labor migration intensified in the years after Philippine independence, as Filipina/os increasingly found work overseas and came to see themselves as participants in the export-driven economy of the postcolonial state. The doctors and nurses who traveled to Vietnam in 1954 were an integral part of this longstanding colonial diaspora.19 Instead of going to the imperial metropole, they found opportunities closer to home, in a country where the United States was working to secure a new nation.
Lansdale, the U.S. intelligence officer who had spent the better part of a decade fomenting counterrevolution in the Philippines, was responsible for bringing the Filipinos to South Vietnam. Lansdale shunned conventional military tactics and opted to become close to the people and earn their trust. During the initial phase of EDCOR, Lansdale first met JCI Director Oscar Arellano who offered the services of his Manila Jaycees to collect basic medical supplies for Philippine Army soldiers to bring to the barrios. Lansdale believed the humanitarian work of the Jaycees could help soften the image of the army, which was a vital component to his EDCOR scheme. His psywar work in the Philippines, most notably his political manipulations that steered Secretary of National Defense Ramon Magsaysay into the presidency in 1953, impressed Secretary of State Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, the CIA director. Operation Brotherhood was a distant outcome of those experiences. In January 1954, John Dulles instructed Lansdale to go to Vietnam “to do what you did in the Philippines.” When Lansdale arrived in Saigon in June, Arellano was meeting with Vietnamese Jaycees to discuss ways to help with the refugee crisis. When Lansdale saw his old friend in Saigon, he thought it was “a touch of Philippine sunshine … [to the] gloomy Vietnamese scene.”20
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