War Travels

Abstract

<p>This paper 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” sites located within the warzone and across the Pacific more generally. This paper places the literature on <em>militourism </em>in conversation with close readings of archival sources to show how imperial soldier-tourists used transpacific 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. But the US military also valued R&R as a mechanism for reuniting soldiers with their families and transformed Honolulu into a site for hosting such forms of leave. When considered together, these different forms of militourism emphasize how transpacific R&R infrastructures served simultaneously as conduits of gendered violence, terrains of racial management, and objects of political struggle. What this paper 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.</p>