Abstract
This article theorizes and historicizes soap, a medical “gift” distributed by the US military to villages and hamlets in South Vietnam, as a commodity and as an infrastructure in the American war in Vietnam. During the war, soap not only operated as a tool to clean those the US military deemed dirty and uncivilized but also brokered the ideological movement of empire from the nation-state to the occupied regions of the Vietnamese South. Wartime US humanitarianism proffered soap as a counterinsurgent weapon of soft power and as an infrastructural poetic that securitized US empire against the rising tide of communist insurgency. Reading against the hegemonic archival practices that venerate the gifting of soap as benevolent militarism, the article moves to examine the anarchic practice of South Vietnamese black marketeering, which redeployed soap as an illegal market commodity to intercept the movement of US empire and, as a practice that arose in response to wartime capitalism and militarization, allowed natives to command new social relations at the cost of disrupting the Republic of Vietnam’s flows of capital and the United States’ ongoing war campaign. As an informal, opaque, and yet thriving infrastructure of its own, the black market fostered insurgent survival strategies that repurposed military supplies and gifts as versatile commodities, allowing even soap to escape its original containment as a civilizing agent and giving it new uses and meanings.
It is soap day at Sơn Hòa. A throng of Vietnamese villagers clusters around an American Division medic to receive gifts of soap (fig. 1). Their eyes and faces, most of which we cannot see, are eclipsed by their bodies’ forward alignment, evidenced in the eager posture of bare feet raised subtly above ground and torsos lunging toward a hidden center. The only facial features visible with moderate clarity in the darkened photograph are the bright smile of a child to the right and the confused—perhaps skeptical—looks of the children gathered behind him. The medic, who towers above everyone, smiles congenially on the horde of bodies attracted to his bounty. The medic’s visibility given his soaring height and the villagers’ seeming (in)conspicuity in the shadowy aggregate of smaller, compacted bodies makes the representation of his humanitarian gesture suggestively partial. Here, it is not the implication of the villagers’ needs that stands out but rather the portrayal of his benevolence. A woman’s outstretched arm, the centripetal force of his promised charity, and the beaming smile of the small boy who looks up in gleeful anticipation evince an altruistic ethos that enhances the American’s image of kindness and presupposes the recipients’ gratitude for his gifts. Furthermore, it is against the very impression of “cleanliness” implied by gifts of soap that many of the children’s bare, unadorned feet, pressing into the hard dirt, become readily apparent. Soap, a seemingly quotidian object, becomes more than a cleaning instrument in this regard. Its pervasive presence in the archives as a “gift” to the suffering people of Vietnam suggests its multifaceted purposes as a tool to subdue rural resistance by eradicating diseases (read: primitivism) and subversive political persuasions (read: communism) and in this way to work along with advanced military operations to destroy racialized forms of life marked as deviant.1
While Marxist conceptualizations of the commodity have categorized its dialectic according to its attributed technical function (social use value) and market worth (exchange value), the transverse movements of soap in occupied South Vietnam unsettles this classical Marxist definition.2 First, within the informal gift economy of US humanitarian aid, soap exceeds its immediate use value by circulating imperial desires to corral, subjugate, and modernize subversive elements, acting as a surrogate for Western civilization. Thus soap accrues value not for its functionality but for its structuring of hegemonic relations. Second, the appearance of soap on the black market, an illegible site outside of state governance, corrupts the unidirectional principles of humanitarianism by moving beyond the end point of a gift economy, since that economy negates the insurgent modalities of survival that arise in response to the violent occupation and militarization of native life. Pulled from its original place in the corpus of civic domestication programs, soap facilitates new social relations in elusive spheres of inverse capital extraction, enabling networks of exchange to persist outside of imperial time and state-run market relations. While the archives of US occupation idealize the qualitative powers of humanitarian soap in the absence of the market, soap’s reemergence on the Vietnamese black market reveals natives’ recognition of its commodifiable potential—and by extension, their challenge to American capitalist logics undergirding the pacification project of Pacific empire. Both insurgent and disruptive to the war-making enterprise, soap’s secondhand recirculation on an illegitimate platform, operating as excess to US military objectives of democratization and imperial ordering, disavows the state’s ability to accumulate capital and expropriate docile laboring subjects and their labor power.
The unruliness of soap and its circulatory poetics, therefore, gesture to its instantiation as both a commodity and an infrastructure in the American war in Vietnam. Heeding Brian Larkin’s contention that “infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter,” “things and also the relation between things,” I engage with soap as both material matter and as the basis for the movement of other things, specifically imperial fantasies of rural compliance and entwined logics of cleanliness.3 During the war, soap not only operated as a tool to clean and sanitize those the US military deemed dirty and uncivilized but also brokered the ideological movement of empire from the nation-state to the distant hamlets and villages of South Vietnam. Analyzing soap as a sociopolitical infrastructure for the circulation of US liberal empire “reads against the grain” of the institutional Vietnam War archive, which has been preoccupied with the object’s deployment as a means of fostering medical care and proper hygiene rather than as a conduit for the dissemination of military discipline and strategies of counterinsurgency.4
In the historiography of the American war in Vietnam, soap seldom appears in any substantial form beyond writings on its tactical use as an aid to “win hearts and minds,” and when textually present it is quickly subsumed into broader discourses on the pragmatism of disciplinary soft power and civic action in Vietnam.5 Alternately, histories of the war have attributed infrastructure primarily to the built environment—roads, shipping lines, weapons manufacturing, and chemical warfare—and have focused less on the elemental building blocks of empire that network racial ideologies, politics, and social hierarchies across time and space.6 I see these two disparate threads braided in the mechanisms of wartime US humanitarianism, which proffer soap as both a counterinsurgent weapon of soft power and as an infrastructural poetic that moves empire from the US state to subjects in need of exigent rescue. These rhetorics were manifested discursively in the pamphlets and letters exchanged between medics in Vietnam and the American public and materially in tightly bound, paper-wrapped Ivory bars shipped by the ton overseas, imbued with desires to reform and sequester a racialized and intransigent demographic on the verge of revolutionary upheaval. The nation-state’s visions of benevolent rescue, therefore, consolidated alongside securitizations of empire that undermined insurgent possibilities by propagating Eurocentric regimes of cleanliness and sanitation to those the US deemed compromised by medical and social ills.7 When acts of personal autonomy eclipsed these motives, evidenced in incidences of native refusal and archival elisions, they gesture to what Neferti X. M. Tadiar terms “remaindered forms of life-making,” or the creative and adaptive capacities of making life and other forms of sociality in times of war that may be unrecognized by the state but are nonetheless persistent in heterogeneous temporalities beyond the linear, homogeneous time of capitalist production.8
This article begins by “reading along the archival grain,”9 in the words of Ann Laura Stoler, to identify the grammars of US humanitarianism that underwrite the transpacific conveyance of soap and its mobilization of unequal relations between the US military and South Vietnam’s putatively infirm villagers, and which adjudicated the latter’s racial propensity for reason and progress according to incommensurate degrees of public health knowledge. The article then moves to examine the anarchic practice of South Vietnamese black marketeering, which redeployed soap as an illegal market commodity to intercept the movement of US empire and, as a practice that arose in response to wartime capitalism and militarization, allowed natives to command new social relations at the cost of disrupting the Republic of Vietnam’s flows of capital and the United States’ ongoing war campaign. As an informal, opaque, and yet thriving infrastructure of its own, the black market fostered insurgent survival strategies that repurposed military supplies and gifts into versatile commodities, allowing even soap to escape its original containment as a civilizing agent for new uses and meanings. Mobile and untethered to the limits of the state, the black market developed illicit lifeworlds that persisted within US empire but beyond its jurisdiction.
Vietnam’s Operation Soap
In 1962, a formal US Navy program named Project Handclasp began to bring educational materials, food, and medical supplies from American private relief donors to the war front as part of the US military’s pro–South Vietnam civic action projects. Succeeding “Operation Handclasp,” which waged the early Cold War on stated humanitarian principles, Project Handclasp used US Navy and Marine Corps transportation and administrative facilities to pass materials from American manufacturing firms and charity organizations to needy hamlets in occupied South Vietnam. Individuals and organizations donated the goods and supplies to warehouses in San Diego before the navy carried them overseas on a space-available basis. When the navy began to realize the growing need for civic action programs as the war progressed dramatically in 1965, space opened and the flow of supplies increased, with goods arriving at different ports of entry and filling post exchange (PX) stores and warehouses across Vietnam. By January 1966, the navy had transported nearly sixty-three thousand pounds of miscellaneous basic commodities (e.g., food, clothing, medical equipment) to the Third Marine Expeditionary Force, an air-ground task force partly responsible for conducting humanitarian assistance programs alongside combat operations.10 While soap was not the only commodity transferred from American donors to rural villagers, the navy’s “people-to-people effort” stressed donations of medical necessities like soap in order to relieve the Vietnamese from skin diseases and bacterial infections.
As pacification efforts intensified in the mid-to-late 1960s, physicians and soldiers poured into Vietnam in increasingly high numbers. They hailed not just from the US mainland but also from decolonizing countries and territories impacted by US militarist imperialism in the post–World War II period, and included Philippine, South Korean, and Asian American subjects.11 Civil action programs conducted by different branches of the US military considered health assistance a crucial part of the government’s effort to win civilian hearts and minds and, more covertly, to receive valuable intelligence on insurgent movements. Interactions between American medical personnel and Vietnamese civilians numbered almost forty million between 1963 and 1971, during which projects like the Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP), the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE), Provincial Health Assistance Program, Military Provincial Health Assistance Program, Civilian War Casualty Program, and the American Red Cross were active in South Vietnam to provide health care and resources to natives.12 Within the big picture, these medical programs were only smaller building blocks of a larger civic action infrastructure that also included the repair and construction of facilities like schools, churches, and hospitals; nurses and physician training; assistance to sick patients in orphanages and war zones; and voluntary gifts—that is, commodities like soap and hygiene materials.13 The US Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force recognized the utility of civic action programs in the combat environments of Vietnam, where expunging enemy forces from the Vietnamese body politic and the interior body—both of which were presumedly diseased by mistrust and other social ills—required the import of numerous commodities packaged as care and compassion. Increased numbers of medics introduced thousands of bars of American-made Ivory and Lux soap to Vietnamese civilians, offering what one military advisor deemed “a luxury beyond comparison,” for soap provided “a cleanliness to its users that they never knew existed.”14 To medical professionals, the power of soap as an instructional tool and a political conduit was not to be underestimated. The distribution of soap as “presents” on Vietnamese national holidays, Christmas, and other occasions, typically alongside other items like toothbrushes, toothpaste, candy, and chewing gum, became a regular part of pacification rituals in hamlets and villages surrounding suspected communist-run territories.
In a 1965 appraisal of health facilities in South Vietnam, the prominent American physician Howard A. Rusk remarked plainly that “the level of medical practice [here] is about as it was in the United States in 1875.” If it were not for the material, technical, and logistical support provided by USAID (US Agency for International Development), Rusk argued, the incompetent South Vietnamese government and its people would surely continue to suffer.15 In another morose review of the Republic of Vietnam’s medical infrastructure, a reputable medic by the name of Captain Calvin Chapman noted that most of the existing Western medical practices in the region had been established by a few missionaries under French colonial rule. Compared with more capacious medical institutions in the West, Vietnam’s hospitals and sanitary facilities seemed morbidly deficient. Chapman surmised that large pockets of the rural population did not have adequate access to proper health care: “Even in the cities drinking water was unsafe, sewage disposal facilities were inadequate, and no Vietnamese understanding developed concerning disease, hygiene and sanitation.” The war in Vietnam, coupled with belligerent “Viet Cong activity” in the vicinity, had eliminated most of the medical services previously offered in the rural villages, where the majority of doctors had been drafted into the army. Chapman was particularly disgruntled by the Vietnamese villagers’ overdependence on ancient Chinese medicine, which he described as mere sorcery.16 The eradication of such erroneous beliefs, then, would entail American intervention through channels of medical assistance and soap distribution, and called for the displacement of atavistic Vietnamese medicinal practices and the adoption of modern science and medical care.
The physicians’ concerns with Vietnamese vulnerability to illnesses and indigence raise questions as to what the US medical corps considered normal hygienic behavior and what they did not. The historian Nayan Shah has argued that “there is a persistent congruence between the public health logic of normal and aberrant and the racial logic of superior and inferior and their reconfiguration over time.”17 The normative public health knowledge that substantiated these racial logics found influence in Western medical philosophies that attributed Chinese medicine and other culturally specific practices in Vietnam to the incomprehensible, primitive, and thus dismissible realms of illegitimate quackery. The subsequent emergence of US medical infrastructures in South Vietnam not only overturned preexisting medicinal practices rooted in native lifeways but also instilled an institutional practice of cleanliness that disciplined unmodern subjects to display normative behaviors and codified what the US military and medics deemed proper hygienic conduct.
Humanitarian medical programs thereafter sprang up “on a repetitive basis” near Bien Hoa Air Base to offer vaccinations, medical treatments, and surgical soap to natives who were painted as filthy, inept, and indolent.18 From June 1965 through May 1966, the Air Force implemented these programs in a leper colony, two orphanages, two refugee camps, two Vietnamese independent military clinics, and twenty-four hamlets and villages. MEDCAP teams spurred similar programs in other divisions by offering free surgeries, immunizations, and medical treatments, and they regularly distributed personal care kits that came with bars of soap and leaflets to instruct users on proper bathing and hygiene.19 Soap was ubiquitous in these scenes, as was its normalization as an obligatory hygienic ritual. Of course, one should not fully discount the potentially meaningful experiences of the medics who participated in such humanitarian work, nor diminish the degree of relief that medicine and soap provided to the sick patients who received them. Objectives for soap, however, extended well beyond the benign and rather simplistic intent to cure antiquated diseases and impurities in the local Vietnamese, for military officials and medics had myriad reasons for its propagation, including raising support for the war in the United States.
Garnering material support for soap likewise drew extensive overseas participation. The gradual establishment of transnational networks for soap accumulation took place within the folds of letters, pamphlets, and newspaper columns that advertised and promoted the American medical mission to home-front audiences. The transfer of soap from the “clean” hands of Americans to the “dirty” palms of Vietnamese villagers mobilized soap as a concurrent infrastructure and commodity, politicizing medicine as a counterinsurgent imperative. In 1965, an article entitled “Our Town” in the Eastchester Record (New York) observed that the very well-known Captain Chapman, the army commander of the Third Tactical Dispensary, had received “thousands of cakes of soap” through the column’s regular readers. Described as “the good doctor of Viet Nam, who flew through hailstorms of bullets to help the sick and dying,” the captain had been fortuitously blessed with an outpouring of support from the newspaper’s followers. In the previous year, Chapman’s aunt began the process when she suggested in a column that people “send a cake of soap” to her nephew in Vietnam.20 Her entreaty facilitated what eventually became informally known as “Operation Soap,” a mission to proselytize Western hygienic rituals to the villagers of Vietnam and enable the transnational participation of Americans on the home front to the cause of civilian aid on the battlefront.21
The thank-you letters Chapman personally signed and sometimes handwrote to Americans who sent him boxes of soap were not simply receipts for the packages but also attempts to positively promote the American war effort in Vietnam. To boost civilian confidence in the war, Chapman frequently embellished his missives with patriotic messages that, addressed through the confidential, interpersonal epistolary form, enfolded his recipients in the grander cause of saving humanity in the derelict villages of Vietnam. Writing to a Mrs. Florence J. Barnaskey, who had sent him a gift of “fine English soap,” Chapman claimed, “Thoughtfulness such as yours is a reminder that people do care about the many Americans who are doing a very necessary job 12,000 miles from home.”22 In another letter, he asserted that gifts of soap would begin the “long education process” to reform poor hygienic habits in rural villages, helping natives to “recognize the value of the fundamentals of sanitation.”23 By invoking their responsibility to do the necessary job of saving lives via gifting soap, Chapman assured Americans on the home front that their presents were not only magnanimous but also part of the larger war effort to cleanse and purify the Vietnamese people, whose bodies and minds were at risk of contamination.
The cause of medical rescue found greater impetus in the sympathies of Americans who sought to deliver the most innocent figures of the war—young children—from disease and other, invidious psychological dangers. Indeed, children figured prominently in informational letters reported to contributors in the nation-state, often in language that enunciated their victimization, vulnerability, and guiltlessness. As Miriam Ticktin maintains in the context of modern-day humanitarian borders, “their innocence is what qualifies them for humanitarian compassion.”24 Medical officers like Chapman encouraged church congregations, nonprofit charities, and even political groups to launch widespread campaigns for soap collection in schools, hospitals, and university campuses to save the children of Vietnam, who quickly became the target population for the US military’s medical infrastructure and the core justification for the staging of its rescue narrative.25 In one case, the Women’s Auxiliary of the Plattsburgh Junior Chamber of Commerce explicitly stated its desire to donate soap as “we would like very much to especially help the Vietnamese children.”26 With children positioned as the centerpiece of his own medical mission, Captain Chapman forged a paternalistic intimacy between the American public and Vietnamese families, whom he painted as powerless and whose very salvation from disintegration and disease depended on American pity and dollars. “I can assure 2 dollars will go a long way,” he wrote to a donor, “in helping to clean up . . . some of the pathetic adults and children we treat in our village medical programs here.”27
Bathing children with soap was a common practice of hygienic paternalism in the militarized villages of South Vietnam. Alongside routine reconnaissance patrolling in the hamlets, which policed the bodily movements of natives within the confinements of barbed wire and armed surveillance, units like the Marine Corps distributed soap to families and held “sick calls” for the villagers with a designated corpsman and a medical team. The biggest issue with the young children and babies, the medical team and corpsmen surmised, was not some incurable illness or disease but their total lack of cleanliness. To resolve these deplorable conditions, several Marine Corps squads installed makeshift stations in the villages to give children baths. Sergeant Stephen Salisbury, an interpreter for the Civic Action Program, described the practice: “They [the squads] just had an assembly line set up of Marines and the people would bring children to the bathing spot and the men would just hand the child from one to the other and one would wash and one would rinse it. One would wipe it and so forth.”28 In the act of bathing the children, the corpsmen demonstrated to watching parents and guardians the utility of soap, which the US servicemen hoped they would adopt in personal and daily practice.29 These hamlet programs evidence the conjoined alliance of militarization with the soft power of humanitarian aid, or put differently, the integration of military control with the spectacle of civic action. Such actions were also highly gendered, as predominantly male soldiers engaged in the feminized acts of showering babies and children. Against the highly masculinized and hypervisible backdrop of violence and war, the soldiers’ participation in traditionally femininized spheres of domesticity, channeled through the passive economies of soap, palliated the violent occupation of Vietnam by transforming death and injury into their recuperative obverse: health.
The infrastructure of Vietnam’s medical humanitarianism depended largely on the pretext of soap as a free and luxurious “gift,” which generated much-needed subjects for the expansion of US empire (fig. 2). Soldiers and medics alike indulged in profuse displays of Vietnamese gratitude for their volunteer work, and American donors were reminded of their altruism through Chapman’s written accounts of local appreciation for the gifts of soap.30 As a tactical weapon manipulated for different political causes, soap makes transparent the power relations between medics operating in the rural villages of Vietnam and the silenced but “grateful” recipients of their charity—a debt economy that continues to echo in postwar refugee epistemologies.31 Soap’s discursive character thus appears consistently as an infrastructure for political and ideological transmission. By imploring their fellow Americans to send soap to the Vietnamese peasants and children, medics and military officers created an attractive avenue for foreign remedial assistance that further engaged the humanitarian feelings of Americans on the home front to devote their financial capacities to aid vulnerable villagers in an ostensibly terrorized landscape.32 And if such hearts and minds were already influenced by perverse political ideologies, these medics hoped that gifts of soap and lessons of hygiene could somehow alleviate such detrimental afflictions.
In rendering the villagers as passive and grateful recipients of humanitarian aid, the US military largely overlooked their capacities for self-determination. Replete with state reports on US civic and governmental intelligence programs, the archive does not show how soap moved from the caches of humanitarian supplies to the black market. However, the scattered appearances of medical soap in documents on South Vietnamese black marketeering open apertures for our speculation on the clandestine activities and desires of people eclipsed by archival recognition. As Noel Buttigieg has noted in relation to black-market intrigues in Malta during the World War II–induced food shortage of 1942, civilians who participated in illegal dealings often had to negotiate between what constituted “moral” and “immoral” consumer practices, given the collapse of their wartime economy, and black markets allowed many to reclaim a limited sense of control over food in times of scarcity.33 Likewise, mobilizing soap as an insurgent commodity through its entry into the black market would have allowed some Vietnamese to reclaim a small measure of authority from their imperial benefactors and to seek alternate ways of survival beyond laboring or dying as proxy soldiers for the war, thereby disrupting soap’s infrastructural logic as an imperial broker. In the next section, I attempt to delineate the contours of the wartime black market by following the trail of missing and stolen soap, examining both the instability of US capitalism in the war and its antithetical form in the black-market economy.
Apathy, Black Markets, and Refused Benevolence
Although the infrastructure of humanitarian aid to the indigent Vietnamese was cloaked in charitable language, the problems that some medics faced in the villages did not always mesh coherently with the archetypes of the Western humanitarian and the grateful yet impoverished Asian subject. Hidden or less visible within the material reproductions of capitalist and imperial hegemony were uncertainties that civilians themselves displayed, ambivalences fleetingly captured in refusals to wash, groom, and mimic the hygienic demands of empire. A 1967 special to the New York Times reveals an illuminating instance of refused benevolence. When American medics attempted to teach a Montagnard village of Indigenous Djerai (Jarai) people, described as “[living] their immemorial lives in squalor, sloth, and disease,” about soap and its antibiotic uses, many were disheartened to find that “despite repeated instructions, the Djerai steadfastly refuse to use the soap.” Brigade commander Colonel James Adamson admitted in disbelief that “we even take mothers down to the stream and show them how to wash babies, but they never do it again after we leave.”34 Why did the Djerai people refuse, and what does their denial of soap and, by extension, American aid suggest?
Regarding the activities of the US Medical Corps in Vietnam, Thuy Linh Tu has argued that “whether any of these [Vietnamese] subjects consented in a meaningful way to their treatment is unclear. Patients, especially children, likely did not know or could not without repercussion refuse the offer of care, even as the use of their body (and its image) remained outside their control.”35 Acts of refusal and indifference, therefore, rupture understandings of commodity culture as simply an imposition from above with little room for personal negotiation. Timothy Burke’s argument regarding colonial commodities in Zimbabwe widens this script: “The consumption of commodities [in Zimbabwean society] was also shaped by individual acts of will and imagination, engagement and disinterest. It was also a part of struggles and practices that were tangential or peripheral to the central political and social issues of colonial life.”36 Although the archive does not privilege incidents of refusal and chooses instead to hypervisualize the grateful and obsequious recipients of US aid, these barely traceable glimpses of defiance undermine the projects of hygienic reform that prevail in humanitarian narratives. Though voiced through the disappointment and annoyance of American medics, these acts convey the incompleteness of imperial desires to administer social change and program racial orders.
Despite the widespread and systematic distribution of cleansing agents that proliferated hegemonic ideals about cleanliness and ideological purity to native villagers, the appearance of “gifts” of soap in the black markets of South Vietnam, predominantly on the streets of Saigon, Hue, and Da Nang as well as within hamlets and villages, reveals another node of resistance to US aid that elided the constraints of the law because of the pervasiveness of the black market and its diffuse form. On sending Captain Chapman four cases of soap for the people-to-people program, the US Operations Mission to Vietnam issued a warning: “Suggest each cake be cut in two pieces,” a representative advised, “otherwise soap may end up on the black market.”37 The statement hinted that soap became more covetable as its quantities grew. In another source, a physician recalled “seeing cakes of soap in the marketplace that had been used as barter, because not enough time had been devoted to showing the people what it was for and how beneficial it would be.” Although he interpreted this occurrence simply as “the apathy of the Vietnamese,” the summation of their denial as solely the result of inadequate training and ignorance misses the subjective negotiations of value that arbitrated these decisions.38 Rather, they reflect what Tu calls a project of “making do,” which are “tactics of everyday life, of use, reuse, and other innovations that turn people from ‘mere’ consumers into actors and producers.”39 Vietnamese who bartered soap that had been distributed for humanitarian purposes in effect recycled the material into a means of monetary subsistence that breached its original enclosure as a gift, transforming it into a commodity and medium of exchange for other goods—what Jeong Min Kim calls a quasi-currency.40
Scholarship on the prolific growth of black markets in areas besieged by war has attested to their informal and inherently insubordinate nature, occurring in the absence of state regulations and periods of government laxity due to weakened wartime or postwar economies.41 Within the historiography of black markets in imperial and postwar Japan, numerous scholars have demonstrated how alternative urban markets arose out of the inability of state authorities to regulate basic goods, leading to “criminal” commercial activities that handed power and choice back to the people.42 Transactions on black markets take place between both skilled and unskilled suppliers, vendors, and intermediaries and sometimes draw into their orbit soldiers and government officials who turn a blind eye to the operations or purchase items furtively from sellers for personal use. The destabilizing power of these markets lies in their quotidian exchanges and chaotic assemblage, gesturing to the internal breakdown of state infrastructures and the instantiation of a new social order.
Several factors enhanced the desirability of soap as an extralegal commodity on the Vietnamese black market. During the war, the South Vietnamese government imposed high taxes on “luxurious” goods like soap, cigarettes, liquor, and gasoline. If these items arrived as imports from foreign countries, they incurred hefty customs duties that Vietnamese locals were forced to pay to provide income for the national government. However, under international agreements established with the GVN (Government of Vietnam), US military personnel were freed of obligations to pay any taxes on imported goods. Because a significant portion of the sales price on imported commodities was just the government tax, prices of American-owned commissary merchandise, PX goods, and military supplies like soap were often cheaper than equivalent products on the local market.43 To avoid the surcharge, unauthorized black market resellers would acquire American goods by hijacking delivery trucks and manipulating inventory sheets, forging or stealing ration cards, or purchasing untaxable American imports directly from GIs, who might give away the commodity in question “out of the kindness of his heart” or in return for services.44 Some articles reported that American GIs simply could not meet the demand for soap after sharing their small rations with the natives, a deficit that gradually triggered more campaigns to send soap to Vietnam.45 As one MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) report alleged, “If just one in every ten people [above-average GIs] give an extra box of soap to their maid during a month, that means 100 boxes of soap per day into the [black] market. That soap is worth 20,000 piastres a day, or 600,000 piastres a month.”46
The operations of black marketeers vis-à-vis the sale of untaxed goods induced a sizeable loss of revenue for the GVN and, by close relation, a loss of credibility for the US imperial state. As William Allison has argued, the black market demonstrated one of the “fundamental challenges the United States faced in a land peopled with a truly foreign set of cultural mores that matched poorly with American liberal democratic values.”47 An obstacle to the liberal claims of the US empire, the black market became a laboratory for opportunism by Vietnamese civilians and American military personnel alike. It became, in its dissident yet methodical ways, an insurgent infrastructure that remained deliberately opaque, difficult to trace, and impossible to dismantle even after US troops withdrew in 1973 and the American embassy in Saigon closed in 1975.48
In conjunction with the shipment of medical supplies that commenced under the banner of civic action work, the US Commercial Import Program (CIP) established by USAID had been injecting large quantities of commercial goods and American capital into South Vietnam since the end of French colonization in 1954. As US dollars trickled into the country’s national treasury, a select number of businessmen were granted import licenses that allowed them to purchase dollars with South Vietnamese piastres below the market rate, which they could then spend on consumer goods to boost the economy.49 The Saigon government then pocketed the profit it made from selling US aid dollars to fund the war and the national police.50 Unsurprisingly, the program resulted in South Vietnam’s artificial dependence on US sponsorship and material aid.
The distribution of profits made from the sale of American commodities like soap was not an equitable process. CIP importers and resellers in the cities enjoyed far greater financial and material gain than their counterparts in the countryside—a wealth disparity that led to increasing revolutionary fervor and anti-US/GVN sentiments among the rural population.51 While the influx of things like refrigerators, soda, and soap expanded the upper and middle classes and contributed to inflation and gross materialism in a budding society, rural villagers continued to suffer from poor living conditions, which were exacerbated by military incursions and unending warfare between Vietnamese communists and US forces in the countryside. Increasingly resentful of the government and these abhorrent wealth disparities, this most vulnerable population of Vietnamese was targeted by humanitarian programs for reform and cleansing due to their proximity to communist influences, which only heightened revolutionary fervor in the population.52
The importers and entrepreneurs who benefited from CIP shipments differed from black marketeers, who moved and repurposed goods as independent, nonstate actors. Primarily army deserters or jobless transients who attained goods to be sold in the rickety stalls of Saigon and smaller cities, these black marketeers designated by the US military as “unauthorized persons” were not associated with nor contractually bound to the US or South Vietnamese government due to the illegality of their trade.53 Operating in the underworld of Vietnam, they were marked as unregistered and illegitimate in the capitalist structures of power that controlled and maintained the hierarchy of racialized labor, and the profitability of their exploits unsettled both the nation’s internal economic stability and US confidence in South Vietnam. I clarify this difference between CIP importers and black marketeers to bring attention to the divergent, if overlapping, desires of insurgent activities based on survival versus profiteering based on capitalist greed, which benefited only a few Vietnamese connected with the US state.
While valorizing the actions of black marketeers is not my intention, I entertain the ambiguities of the wartime black market to probe its entanglements with formal war economies that structured US racial liberalism and the imperial logistics infrastructure constructed under “just-in-time imperialism,” which Wesley Attewell has argued “[manages] the transpacific flows of commodities and bodies between the US and South Vietnam” to produce “new nodes of racial capitalist anti-relationality.”54 As the war progressed and the CIP expanded, Vietnamese workers along with those from South Korea and the Philippines became racialized cheap labor in logistical supply-chain work that offered little compensation for their bodily expenditure. With the supply of commodities readily available, however, the black market posed intractable problems for the management of a wartime empire. By selecting to become underground resellers, barterers, and unauthorized stall vendors instead of unfree labor on the docks, military bases, and warehouses, the Vietnamese and other racialized Asian workers essentially withheld their labor from the military-industrial complex. In addition, women who participated in the black market could escape the financial binds and gender restrictions that limited most Southeast Asian women to extractive forms of social reproductive labor such as domestic, entertainment, and/or sex work—labor intimately connected to the wartime logistics of empire building away from the fields.55 Counterproductive to the progress of the war, the withdrawal of black marketeers from sanctioned work made transparent the needs of empire to constrain devalued life and also showed the subversive ways in which the black market allowed resellers to upend such valuations by disrupting the flow of capital and labor back into the economy.
Indeed, the US military discouraged participation in the black market, but condemnation did little to curb the wayward enterprise. Multiple “fact sheets” published by the MACV between 1965 and 1972 labeled the unauthorized sale of commodities on the black market as illegal and corrosive to the Vietnamese economy, accompanied by graphics containing soap bars that stressed, “Do Not Support the Black Market” in all caps. Posters addressed both American GIs and Vietnamese civilians, who were cautioned to avoid trading PX goods if they did not want to jeopardize their own economy, government, and futures.56 The potential for US economic goods and greenbacks to fall into the hands of communist forces, moreover, could become a prevalent risk in the eyes of the US State Department and the Department of Defense. According to a speech by Congressman Gerald R. Ford, state leaders initially turned a blind eye to black marketeering in Vietnam but were forced to acknowledge the situation in 1966 when the capturing of AID supplies in rural villages by “Viet Cong” insurgents became more frequent and out of control. Even then, the United States knew it could not halt its shipments of commodities without risking the imminent fall of South Vietnam’s feeble economy. With the war worsening and no visible end in sight, Ford’s cantankerous description of subversive black-market activities as a mushrooming “smelly mess” would seem a somewhat appropriate representation of the situation to those in command.57
The black market, illegible as a legal structure yet self-sustaining as an alternative economic practice and insurgent infrastructure, emphasizes what Tadiar aptly terms “remaindered life-times,” which, in addition to remaindered forms of life-making, points to the “uses, experience, actions, and effects of reproductive life-times made and lived that are not absorbed into the processes of production and maintenance of the life-form of value nor into the processes of generating value from waste.”58 Put differently, practices of survival on the black market circumvent the value-making processes endemic to the political economy of capitalism, which has long consumed and exploited the labor power of the dispossessed and disenfranchised for its social and economic reproduction. The remaindered life-times encapsulated by black-market operations evade capitalist serviceability by animating other spaces of native life that state authorities may consider disposable or illegitimate. In such a way, they become untraceable in linear time, marked by evasions, elisions, and refusals that reject total transparency, including archival legibility.
While archival records do not contain the voices of its participants, the black market could have been a person’s second chance, last resort, or new beginning. US military officials believed black-market sales were largely responsible for damaging the fragile economy of South Vietnam and blamed them on several “bad” GIs and unscrupulous Vietnamese, but these nongovernmental economic transactions imply considerable levels of disinterest and perhaps even disfavor toward Saigon’s warmongering and anticommunist regime, breeding the seeds of opportunism that as a result forged an inscrutable and burgeoning underworld. Fed by war and sustained by need, the parasitical market found an an unwilling yet abundant host in US aid; this relationship formed one of many untenable unions that would write the war’s eventual doom.
Conclusion
A Department of the Army Special Photographic Office video clip from 1967, shot by army photographer William Foulke, begins with grainy footage of Rome plows clearing brush, trees, and bamboo in a nondescript Vietnamese countryside. The giant plows destroy vegetation to root out enemy positions, but their sprockets cut and tread deep scars into the bruised jungle landscape. Minutes later, the video cuts to a MEDCAP worker scrubbing a young child’s head with soap as his mother cradles him, her eyebrows furrowed in distress. The suds color the boy’s skull a bubbly white hue. In the next frame, a group of medics passes out bars of Ivory and Lux soap to a crowd of villagers who eagerly await their gifts. Then one by one, babies and adults are treated for skin diseases, hot spots, and rashes while others loiter, simply observing. The camera pans out for the last scene: vast fields blemished with bomb craters, pockmarked and desecrated—the injuries of war on earth’s alluvial skin. Even as scenes of soap distribution and medical aid cleave the video’s opening and ending clips, violence marks and surrounds the affable gestures of humanitarian work, the true outcome and full reality of the US empire’s pretensions to benevolence.59
Soap thus gifts and takes, for while it bestows cleanliness and good health, it also racializes and destroys. Seeking to ameliorate the poor hygienic conditions of rural Vietnam, physicians and soldiers introduced soap to those they deemed vulnerable to diseases of the body and the mind to construct a complacent society of grateful subjects. These projects, although valorized by military leaders as necessary and venerable work, were unsettled by their contradictory resonances of military violence and ideological coercion. Against these given terms, Vietnamese villagers who refused the soap for personal needs and sought economic profit through the illegal sale of soap exposed the volatility of the American humanitarian mission. Hygiene may have been the central priority for the American medics, but for the locals who bartered and sold on the black market, soap became a multipurpose commodity operating across modalities of individualism, monetary desires, and co-ethnic sociality.
Attentive to the structures of power in the archive, I aver that undoing the infrastructure of imperial militarization begins with the recognition of soap’s multivalent reproductions in South Vietnam’s myriad and intensely problematic wartime economies. As an infrastructure and technology of “civilization,” soap reaches beyond its technical capacities to deaden disease and sustain viable life by interpolating both imperial life-gifting and minoritarian life-making into frictional and coexistent frames. Even against the hegemony of the historical archive and its prioritization of Western humanitarianism, by which the ungrateful, disobedient, and recalcitrant subject is expelled to the margins of US memory or relegated to the nonhuman status of the “Viet Cong,” the transformation of soap and other material goods into commodities with extralegal mobility on the black market evinces the untenability of US benevolence. Where an imperial gift disappears into the illicit void, the script of humanitarian giving is rewritten into insurgent life and reclaimed.
A version of this article was presented at the conference “1972: The War between North and South Vietnam,” hosted by the Vietnam Center and Archive in April 2022 at Chapman University. I am grateful to Nayan Shah for being my first interlocutor for this article at its very beginnings, and to Mariam B. Lam for her thoughtful questions and feedback at the conference. Thank you to the editors of this issue, specifically to Wesley Attewell, and the two anonymous reviewers for their generosity with this article, and to Adrian De Leon and Jason Vu for their brilliant insights, encouragements, and shared struggles on every step of this journey. All mistakes are my own.
Notes
In this article, I use the term natives to refer to the people of occupied Vietnam, while recognizing that being native to a particular locality does not represent Indigeneity in the land. As a multiethnic society, Vietnam is composed of the majority Kinh (Vietnamese) people, who hail from northern Vietnam and southern China. While the current Vietnamese government does not label its fifty-three ethnic minority groups as Indigenous, the Montagnard peoples from the Central Highlands, of which the Jarai (Djerai) people are part, are indigenous to the mountains of modern-day Vietnam. I also maintain the Americanized use of names like Vietnam to be consistent with the source materials and scholarly literature on civic action and black markets in the war; however, as I am cognizant of the ways in which such uses are also US-centric, I use quotation marks around terms like Viet Cong to signal their hegemonic construction.
For the purposes of this project, the predominant archive for the primary source materials is the Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Center Archive at Texas Tech University. When I began this paper during the pandemic, the institution’s large digital database allowed me to access most of the materials I needed without an in-person visit. I did, however, come to the physical archive in July 2022, where I located additional materials to supplement my previous findings. Other sources come from newspaper archive databases, and Wesley Attewell has generously lent me access to important documents from the USAID Commodity Import Program, which I reference later in this article.
An exception to this infrastructural trend is Keva X. Bui’s study of napalm in wartime Vietnam and its cultural afterlives, in which they examine the ways in which napalm provides both material evidence of war’s violence and acts as a political signifier for Cold War racial politics (“Objects of Warfare,” 299).
Large-scale hygienic reforms in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century following the defeat of Spanish forces in 1898 precipitated the US military’s entrance into South Vietnam’s rural villages in the 1960s. Warwick Anderson has detailed how American military and civil health officers who arrived on the archipelago attempted the burden of cleansing natives of bodily and behavioral impurities they believed were impeding the locals’ optimal performance as modern citizen-subjects of the newly installed US empire (Colonial Pathologies, 2–3). Moon-ho Jung has connected these projects of imperial management to the ways in which the US “secured empire” across the Pacific region in the early twentieth century (Menace to Empire).
U. S. Marine Corps Civic Action Effort in Vietnam March 1965–March 1966 (1968), 0720803001, Box 08, Folder 03, John Donnell Collection, Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University (hereafter cited as Vietnam Center), https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/95866.
As Simeon Man makes evident in his investigation of racialized and colonized workers, medics, and soldiers across Asia and the Pacific who participated in military activities in search of opportunity during the US war in Vietnam, US militarization constituted humanitarian civic action under the guise of racial liberalism and the political banner of “an Asia for Asians.” Nonwhite medics and nurses, as early as the 1950s, took part in counterguerrilla and counterinsurgent humanitarian programs in rural Vietnamese villages to accelerate the “transformation” of South Vietnam into a modern nation modeled on the examples of the Philippines and South Korea. In Hawai‘i, in particular, the Twenty-Fifth Division’s “Operation Helping Hand” linked the public drive to collect soap for Vietnamese children to Hawai‘i’s liberal multicultural inclusion into the nation-state, obscuring US military violence and Kanaka Maoli dispossession on the islands. See Man, Soldiering through Empire, 84–87.
“Medical Assistance to Vietnamese Civilians,” AMEDD Center of History and Heritage, https://achh.army.mil/history/book-vietnam-medicalsupport-chapter13 (accessed June 7, 2022); see Wilensky, Military Medicine, 4.
Report - Bridge to Understanding the US Civic Action Program - re: The 9th US Infantry Division (undated), 12730101002, Box 01, Folder 01, Donald Stiles Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=12730101002.
Comprehensive Medical Care in Vietnam (October 26, 1967), 0380104003, Box 01, Folder 04, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0380104003.
US Air Force Humanitarian Medical Programs for the Vietnamese (April 14, 1967), 0380114005, Box 01, Folder 14, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0380114005.
Report - Bridge to Understanding the US Civic Action Program, 42–43.
Our Town, newspaper (1965), 0380105006, Box 01, Folder 05, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0380105006.
Other unofficial soap-collecting missions under similar titles began under the command of other individuals like Marine Cpl. William C. Deans. See Los Angeles Times, “Operation Soap” (photograph).
Letter to Florence J. Barnaskey (February 17, 1966), 0380215085, Box 02, Folder 15, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0380215085.
Chapman, Letter to J. J. Reid (February 16, 1966), 0380215083, Box 02, Folder 15, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0380215083.
Crowley Post-Signal, “Soap for Vietnamese Children”; Daily Herald, “Vietnam Soap Drive”; Los Angeles Times, “Hospital Sends Soap”; Herald News, “Packages for Vietnam.”
Chapman, Letter from Mary E. Grant (May 16, 1966), 0380215145, Box 02, Folder 15, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0380215145.
Chapman, Letter to Mrs. Henry Hunt (May 16, 1966), 0380113071, Box 01, Folder 13, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0380113071.
Interview with Stephen Salisbury (n.d.), USMC0013, US Marine Corps History Division Oral History Collection, Vietnam Center, https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/items.php?item=USMC0013.
Interview with Paul Ek (January 24, 1966), USMC0046, US Marine Corps History Division Oral History Collection, Vietnam Center, https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchiveitems.php?item=USMC0046.
Chapman recounted in a letter to an American couple who sent a large package of soap, clothes, and toys to the children of Vietnam that “they [the gifts] have all been taken to the many villages and hamlets we visit and given directly to poor, dirty but very grateful Vietnamese” (Letter to Melody and Bruce Guiver [May 23, 1966], 0380215149, Box 02, Folder 15, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/itemsphp?item=0380215149).
Neda Atanasoski has articulated “humanitarian feeling” in the context of Vietnam War photojournalism and documentary footage of violence, which contributed to moral outrage in post–Vietnam War US culture (Humanitarian Violence, 74–76). I invoke the term here to gesture to the ways in which the language of destitution and poverty also fostered a humanitarian affect in the American population, who subsequently felt the need to save innocent Vietnamese from the diseases of premodernity and communism.
Soap for the People-to-People program (October 12, 1965), 0380215034, Box 02, Folder 15, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/archive/items.php?item=0380215034.
Physician recalls experiences in Vietnam (February 13, 1967) 0380223033, Box 02, Folder 23, Dr. Calvin Chapman Collection, Vietnam Center, https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0380223033 (accessed March 26, 2021).
Fact Sheet, Provost Marshal - I FFORCE V: Blackmarket - Record of MACV Part 1 (undated), F015800360629, Box 0036, Folder 0629, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=F015800360629.
Fact Sheets, Office of Information: Command Information Division, Black Market, Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and First Aid - Record of MACV Part 1 (September 15, 1971), F015800090718, Box 0009, Folder 0718, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=F015800090718.
Fact Sheets, Office of Information: Command Information Division.
Report, Joint Economic Office - Economic and Financial Data (undated), 19600122008, Box 01, Folder 22, Gary Larsen Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=19600122008.
United States House of Representatives, Committee on Government Operations, Illicit Practices Affecting the US Economic Program in Vietnam (Follow-up Investigation), Fourth Report by the Committee on Government Operations, 90th Congress, 1st Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1967), 3–4; Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, 99–100.
United States Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Improper Practices, Commodity Import Program, U.S. Foreign Aid, Vietnam, 91st Congress, 1st Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1969), 1–2.
United States Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Improper Practices, Commodity Import Program, U.S. Foreign Aid, Vietnam, 91st Congress, 1st Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1969), 1–2.
Fact Sheets, Office of Information: Command Information Division.
Graphics, Provost Marshal - re: Black Market - Record of MACV Part 1 (undated), F015800360649, Box 0036, Folder 0649, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=F015800360649.
Vietnam Black Market, May 20, 1966, Box D20, Ford Congressional Papers: Press Secretary and Speech File, Gerard R. Ford Presidential Library.
Philol Rubber Plantation, video (January 24, 1967), 1040VI0783, William Foulke Collection, Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1040VI0783.
