War Travels: The Logistics of Vietnam War Militourism

Abstract

This article explores the everyday entanglements of militarism and tourism that helped sustain soldiering life during the Vietnam War. Free world soldiers in Vietnam were entitled to take between five and seven days of leave in rest and recuperation (R&R) sites located within the war zone and across the Pacific more generally. This article places the literature on militourism in conversation with close readings of archival sources to show how imperial soldier-tourists used trans-Pacific infrastructures of military R&R in a diversity of ways. Militourists in colonized cities such as Manila and Hong Kong often enacted heteronormative fantasies of leisure, seeking out intimate and predatory relationships with local women. The U.S. military also valued R&R as a mechanism for reuniting soldiers with their families, however, and transformed Honolulu into a site for hosting such forms of leave. When considered together, these different forms of militourism emphasize how trans-Pacific R&R infrastructures served simultaneously as conduits of gendered violence, terrains of racial management, and objects of political struggle. What this article offers, then, is a more complex understanding of militourism, one that reclaims vernacular cultures of travel from militaries, markets, and empires, and repurposes them to further the urgent work of abolition, decolonization, and demilitarization.