Gateway State by Miller-Davenport Sarah;

Author:Miller-Davenport, Sarah;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 12. Soldiers on R&R greeting their wives in Hawai‘i, 1967. Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

As suggested by Mrs. Thatcher’s disdain for foreign “solo sojourns,” R&R generally had a reputation for debauchery. Single men tended to spend R&R in Asia, “most likely taking advantage of what will be, for most, their one stay on the continent.”86 “Taking advantage” often meant sex with Asian women. Asian R&R destinations, particularly Bangkok and Hong Kong—known to many servicemen as the home of Suzie Wong, the fictional prostitute in Richard Mason’s eponymous 1957 novel—were famous for their carnal pleasures. The resulting carousing subverted American efforts to promote the virtue of the U.S. mission in Vietnam. Military leaders, for their part, treated soldiers’ sexual exploits during off-hours as a necessary form of recreation and condoned prostitution by dispatching military police to patrol red light districts and Army medics to brothels to conduct regular health checks.87 Rape committed by servicemen was also disturbingly common—many soldiers referred to R&R as “rape and ruin”—although the military generally favored covering it up and the problem was underreported by the media.88

But while the military had grown more lax over the decades when it came to regulating the personal behavior of enlisted men, it remained worried about the potential diplomatic problems caused by local opposition to the presence of rowdy American troops in foreign R&R destinations.89 Perhaps its greatest concern, however, was the spread of venereal disease among recruits, which had long been a consequence of war and imperial expansion. The military sought to warn servicemen of this hazard through health education films such as “Where the Girls Are—VD in Southeast Asia” (1969), wherein Pete, a naïve young soldier, succumbs to the sexual allure of an Asian woman he meets on R&R. When he returns to the United States to marry Julie, his American girlfriend, Pete learns that he has contracted syphilis in Asia, endangering his engagement to Julie and putting both of their lives at risk.90

Had Pete taken R&R in Hawai‘i he might have avoided such a fate. In the context of the Vietnam War, Hawai‘i offered an antidote to its depravities and a way to disown accountability for them. It was a place where fresh-faced young men could cement relationships with their American sweethearts and avoid the temptations of debased Asian women. Hawai‘i R&R was decidedly noninternationalist. As such, it revealed the paradox at the core of American Cold War internationalism, which often resorted to racialized violence in the name of spreading democracy and demonstrating U.S. benevolence. Hawai‘i was supposed to be a place that fostered peace between the United States and Asia in part through the friendly interactions of mainland tourists and people in Hawai‘i of Asian descent. But as the war in Vietnam exposed the brutality inherent to the American project in Southeast Asia, Hawai‘i became for many Americans an escape from the nation’s foreign entanglements. For American servicemen, it turned out, the door to the Gateway to the Pacific swung both ways.

The Hawai‘i R&R program was scaled back significantly after the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in 1973.

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