Authors in Conversation, Ep. 2 with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu & Amanda Boczar

7:57PM Apr 21, 2022

Speakers:

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Amanda Boczar

Keywords:

book

vietnamese

write

people

study

war

soldiers

thinking

prostitution

women

vietnam

sexual assault

american

sexuality

wanted

find

conflict

oral histories

sources

work

Welcome to Authors in Conversation, The United States in the World Series Podcast from Cornell University Press. I'm so excited to be talking to you today about your book. My name is Judy Wu. I'm one of the series editors for the US in the World series published by Cornell University Press. And I'm so happy to be here with Amanda Boczar. She's the author of An American Brothel: Sex and Diplomacy during the Vietnam War. And it just came out in 2022. So congratulations, A manda.

Thank you, it's great to be hear talking to you.

Well, I wanted to ask you, what inspired you to write this book?

Yeah, I think like a lot of projects, it started, you know, someplace a little bit different. This was not the book I plan to write when I first started kind of visualizing what my dissertation and then first book was going to be. And I knew that I wanted to do something in social history. And I thought that I wanted to do Vietnam War era, I did my MA thesis focused around Lyndon Johnson. And I just kind of really fell in love with the social aspects of studying the war, but wanted to stay connected to foreign relations. And over time, I just kept coming back to this idea of how do civilians impact war in different ways. And this focus on non state actors, and every source I ever looked at, seemed to mention in some way, women or girlfriends or prostitutes or some interaction with South Vietnamese women in some way, usually through the lens of an American soldier. And I wanted to know, you know, this is so prevalent, and it's been studied and other wars, but it hadn't been studied for Vietnam, and, you know, a monograph, length, reflection. And so I was just hoping to kind of dive into that a little bit. And over time, it took on, you know, multiple different lenses into these types of relationships. And I found that, like, friendship became a really fruitful avenue to study, I looked at sexual assault and rape, I looked at issues, you know, what happens afterwards, when there are, you know, mixed race children, and there are orphans and other types of issues that happened. And so it became, in some ways, a much bigger project than I had kind of foreseen it becoming. But I was, once I kind of started seeing all the pieces, I felt like I needed to keep them together. And so that's how it kind of took on all of those lenses into one book.

That's great, thank you so much. I want to just read one of your really fantastic many passages in your book. But I thought this one was especially powerful. So you write on page 16: "Sex and war overlapped in unexpected places during Vietnam, including the Americans strategy of maintaining a large rear echelon force, North Vietnam's anti-American propaganda campaigns, and the constant barrage of media coverage on life in Vietnam." And so that, I think, just gets at some of the larger implications of the social and intimate relationships that you're that you're describing. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about what you think are the big takeaways, the big arguments of your work?

Yeah, I think that, you know, what I was getting to there and just kept coming back was, again, this prevalence, it's mentioned kind of everywhere, and I wanted to see how far it went. And very quickly, I realized that went all the way up in the United States to the top, and it was talked about among, you know, leadership in South Vietnam, as well. And they had a lot of concerns and starting, you know, even before, like major American escalation in the early 60s, you have the Diem family, and they're all extremely concerned about American behavior on the on the ground. North Vietnam uses this a lot as well throughout the entire conflict. And they're able to kind of talk about, you know, what is it that American soldiers are doing here? You know, from a political stance, but also a cultural stance, what are the cultural impacts going to be? And so all of these factors kind of play into each other. And when you get back to how are American soldiers being trained, there's definitely this cultural expectation that like there will be women, there will they will be available as if that is some sort of commodity that is expected. And that really factors into expectations soldiers have on the ground when they arrive. Plus, when they arrive, they're staying in cities at the beginning, and you arrive into Saigon. And there are not very many men left there are fighting. And so a lot of the people that you're working with, at the bases or in the bars are women. So you just have general human interactions that are happening and leading to these relationships. And so once I started to kind of recognize that they were moving soldiers based on relationships with civilians and civilian women, they're, you know, they're creating multimillion dollar bases outside of cities, just to kind of stave off issues like venereal disease or, you know, cultural impacts, you know, issues with soldiers being drunk in the streets, those kinds of things that are happening. So they're, they're playing into each other. And I think, you know, just seeing how much of an impact that you know, daily behavior of these non state actors as well as soldiers are having on the way that the military is framing their positioning and how the government's are framing, you know, both their war efforts, and the rationale for their war efforts, was really interesting to me and became kind of that main focus. And so I think that just kind of focusing on that foreign relations bit was a kept drawing me back and kept it from becoming like a straightforward, just kind of like study into soldiers or things that it all was connected.

Thank you so much. I was interested in, in what, which scholars, which historical classical trends shaped your methodological approach in developing the study?

Yeah, I thought about this question a lot over the years, if I could pin it down to a few, but I think I took because I came at it from a lot of different angles, I was trying to study from, you know, an American military perspective, a foreign relations perspective, I was also trying to understand the Vietnamese perspective as best that I could, and from gender studies from all these different entrees, and it became so many different scholars whose work I was trying to piece together into something that was, you know, a coherent book. And I think a lot of this really hinges on, you know, my primary mentor during my dissertation who was hanging when, and, you know, she takes an international approach in her research and everything that she does, and she really pushed me to do international research. And so from the start, I had plans that this book had to be, you know, research coming out of, you know, Australian sources, British sources, looking at French sources, looking at Vietnamese sources, looking at American sources. And so I wanted to find as many avenues into this as I could. And I think she had a lot of, you know, a lot of a role to play in and just thinking of how to frame a book like this. When I started looking at how to structure the book, I was really influenced by the scholars who had done this type of a study for other conflicts. So you know, Mary Louise Roberts's book had just come out of what soldiers do, which is just such a great like, look at World War Two, and prostitution, and dating and rape during that conflict, and she's able to address all those issues. So well, that was really inspirational for me. And she, of course, builds on the great work from Petra Goedde and Maria Hohn and Katharine Moon, for the Korean War. And so all of their work is just really influential for what I do. And when I think about, you know, Vietnam War studies, bringing in different roles of, you know, cultural elements from Mark Bradley, or studies of gender from, you know, Heather Stur, Kara Vuic, yourself, of course. And then, you know, I really also wanted to study soldiers experiences, because so many of my sources came from from soldiers themselves. So I thought it was important to see how people have studied those. So of course, you you know, Kyle Longley and Christian Appy's works are super important for getting to that. And then I, while I was editing the book, I was teaching up at West Point and had the opportunity to spend a whole lot of time with a whole lot of soldiers. And so just getting into their mindset and thinking about how they work and how they study. And that kind of thing was really fun. So, yeah, it was definitely on the shoulders of many, many giants to put together something that comes from this many perspectives. But it was great to have so much to work with.

Thank you so much. I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about your favorite finds, especially as you're describing the multiple archives that you visited, like are there certain perspectives that emerge only because you visit that particular archive? Were there particular stories that sort of surprised you?

Yeah, I I think the I wasn't originally planning to have a chapter on sexual assault and rape. And when I went to the National Archives, I, I didn't expect to find too much. I hadn't found a lot in the sources. i There had been a lot of work done on the lie. That's where the bulk of the court marshals come from. There's only I believe it's about 30 total court marshals that are completed related to sexual assault throughout the entirety of the war. And that conflict had been written about quite a bit. So I hadn't planned to do a whole chapter. And when I went to the National Archives in College Park, they had some military police blotters. And I was able to pull a couple of years starting around 68. And it was from a small town, a little bit north of Saigon. And it was just basically the daily records where the police would military place, American military police would write kind of what had happened throughout the day. And as I'm flipping through them, I just start realizing that so many of the accounts that they're writing about our accounts of assault, they're very rarely really called that. Sometimes it would be called, like violence or just like disturbance. And then the write up would be something that would clearly indicate sexual assault, like a woman whose clothes had been ripped off, and she was bleeding, or had just different elements and factors that that you can piece together as this is what it was, but they weren't writing it. And going through these, these please plotters, you know, I was able to find so many accounts of this, that it made me start thinking about different terms to search with, and different approaches. And recognizing that just because it's not a court martial, you know, doesn't mean people aren't writing about it, it's written somewhere. And so I was able to start pulling in different types of sources. And that led me into a lot of anti-war movement: publications that had been published in South Vietnam, particularly from like the Vietnamese women's union, and those types of organizations, and they would often cite their sources, and you'd be able to track that and find more things and talking to different people over time, piece things together. I also had the opportunity to interview lately Haislip, about her experiences with assault throughout the war and rape. And she was able to give me some really enlightening perspectives on how to approach the issue and how to write about something that was deemed as again, just as prevalent, as you know, prostitution throughout the war, but hadn't been written about even close to as much or as frequently or even made as light of and film. Of course, it was, prostitution is already a taboo topic, when you're trying to find it in the archives, and rape and assault is even more so. So those those documents really took me in a direction that I hadn't initially planned on going in. But I'm really glad that I did. Because I think it's so important to give voice where you can to those victims, and try to piece together how that fits into this overall conflict, for sure.

Thank you so much. You are mentioning oral histories. And you also talk in the book about how you're writing about a taboo topic. And especially when people are recounting uncomfortable experiences in their lives, that they may be reluctant to share insights about their own actions or the actions of others. I was wonder if you can say a little bit more about maybe some of the challenges of doing oral histories? And then what did you What did you make of those challenges?

Yeah, I, if, if I was going to start this book over, that would definitely be the avenue that I would, I would push harder to get. It would be more oral histories. And I had trouble I got a couple of interviews from different people, and several of them, after having the interview would say please don't use any of this, you know, or don't use my name. And then it's very hard to use it as a reliable source if I can't actually quote someone. And so it starts to become more difficult to use them, people became really nervous to talk about these experiences, even, you know, just, you know, day to day occurrences or dating that they, if they dated someone I didn't have any one other than lately Haislip who's who spoke to me about sexual assault. I had hoped to do some more oral histories when I was in Vietnam for some research. And none of them panned out. None of my offers were accepted. And I've known some people who have done, you know, great work in this area. And I've cited a few in the book. And I think that that's, that's something that should be being captured is more oral histories, more interviews with Vietnamese women in particular about their experiences. And, and I think, you know, the biggest challenge is the length, you need the language skills, and you need to build trust, and you need time, you know, to be there in Vietnam, you can't fly in and just say, hey, or call someone and hey, do this interview with me. You got to build this relationship and show how the work is going to be used. And I just think that would be a great project for someone to take on.

Thank you for sharing that. You mentioned in the book that prostitution looms large that that is really where the bulk of concern and discourse lies. But you also mentioned earlier that you found friendship to be a really interesting topic to explore. So I was wondering if you wanted to say more about either prostitution or about friendship?

Yeah. I think prostitution looms so large because it becomes really easy to parody and film. It's, we have so many accounts of it, people talk about the sensational. And for many people, this idea of prostitution is a sensational topic. They, they don't view it as like a normal or mundane thing. And they want to, you know, address it. And so every soldier writing home to his buddies, or writing his memoir is going to talk about his experiences, if he were to have visited a prostitute, or if he didn't, and he wants to write about it anyway. And so you see a lot of that. It's also something that I think American politicians were able to kind of easily grab onto as being like, Oh, this illicit practice, right, this thing that Americans are doing. And so if you have a stance against the war, and that's where the title of the book and American brothel comes from, is this Fulbright quote, where he's saying that all of Vietnam is turning into an American brothel. And it becomes this big war of like, How dare you say that, like, that's, it's offensive to everyone involved to use this terminology. And so, you know, Fulbright throws it out there. And it just becomes kind of this like, shocking moment for so many people trying to understand what's happening in Vietnam. Like, how dare you say, Americans are doing this, how dare you put this on the whole nation of Vietnam and, and so it's this back and forth, and it'd be, but it gets people's attention. And I think that's why prostitution kind of plays such a big role. It's also a really easy commodity to trade in, in the middle of a war. And so it becomes a way to make money for a lot of people and not even particularly the women who are working as prostitutes, but people who are employing them, or finding ways to put them in a position where they must work as prostitutes in order to pay off certain debts. And so you have, you have this, this kind of culture that's being built up and then becomes easy to sensationalized after the fact and culture. And so it just takes up a lot of people's mental energy when they're thinking about what's life like for soldiers on the ground. And then on the other hand, you have these friendships, and you have women who are working in bases and just kind of have relationships with with soldiers and kind of a passing nature, you have a lot of American women who are serving carefully talks about all the different roles that women are playing in the war. And when they're over there, they're building relationships with Vietnamese women, and they're doing outreach, and they're talking. And those kinds of things can get lost. And it becomes really easy to create, you know, Vietnamese woman as an other, rather than Vietnamese woman as an equal and someone who's also, you know, fighting for freedom and having a stance and just trying to survive throughout this conflict that they're living through. And so I wanted to make sure to, like engage with those relationships. They're not written about as much and they're definitely not reflected as much in popular culture, but they're happening. And if you look at, you know, throughout the sources, people often talk about, oh, yeah, this was this person that I knew, or I met with them regularly, or I talked to them. And so I think it just comes down a lot to how we remember the war becomes a lot of you know, what people are studying from it in different ways. And so pulling together all those different parts, I think, is really important.

It's really wonderful that you can shed light on these dynamics. I also wanted to ask you, because obviously, a lot of the focus of the book and also at that time is on the figure of the Vietnamese woman. But there's also American perceptions and assumptions about Vietnamese men. And so I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about both about both aspects.

Yeah, this is something that I, you know, wanted to engage with more and I worked with, especially as I was revising into into the book and thinking about Olga drawers work on how she writes about her Chi Minh. And this idea of like, if you know, the effeminate Vietnamese man from the perspective of of a white American male, right. And, of course, all of this is pushed out on the public from Lyndon Johnson in the early 60s and how he's describing Asian masculinity. And so, it's really interesting to see how American soldiers kind of engage with those ideas, and they seem much more comfortable talking about Asian women than they do about Asian men as it goes through. But I think like politicians and Johnson in particular, he just finds it really easy to try to undermine Vietnamese men as much as he can't by bringing up ideas of of gender and sexuality and how they compare to Americans in his own view of the world. It's definitely you know, a stark contrast to to how they want to describe, you know, Americans out there, and I think they use that for a lot of propaganda reasons.

Thank you so much. I'm curious about your perception of the field of us in the world, diplomatic history, military history. Do you think there's still resistance to thinking about how central sexuality and intimacy is to the understanding of the conduct of war? The conduct diplomacy? And why? If that's the case, why do you think that's the case? Do you think it's changed? You know, how do you think it's a change?

Oh, that's an interesting question. When you think about it, like, how have the fields changed? And I'm also thinking, how have public response to that changed and these ideas, and so I found, you know, I've been probably presenting about issues of sexuality and military history for a decade now or so. And I've never faced too much resistance, you know, and in conference presentations, or even to my publications, necessarily, maybe once in a while, someone will be like, yeah, what's the point, but very rarely, I think that the field is pretty accepting. I'm not sure that everyone in the field is going to jump in and write about it, you know, like, I'm not sure that it's becoming the most popular avenue into this, or why certain people will choose to write about military history, or foreign relations. But I think that it's got merit, and people are recognizing the merit to it. And I think that if there is still resistance, that it's definitely waning, or at least polite. I think. When I went to West Point, I worked on some some textbooks of integrating gender and sexuality into, you know, the curriculum of how do we study warfare. And that was more interesting, you know, breaching these issues with, you know, a bunch of 18 year olds, primarily male, talking to them about why they need to understand military history through a gender and sexuality lens. And that led to some really fun debates with students and getting them to consider these things from the outset. And so I think from an academic perspective, for the most part, you know, the fields are, are welcoming to it, I see a lot of panels when I go to conferences now that will engage with issues of gender and sexuality. And even though they're not the majority of the panels, and I don't think they ever will be. But it is, I think there's definitely a more welcome field than there may have been a decade ago.

I just want to wrap up by asking you if you have any advice for first time authors.

Keep it organized, yeah, it takes a lot longer to put out a book than than I ever realized it would see, and the time it took me from wrapping the first draft of the book, to having the book published this year, I've probably three different jobs, five different houses a baby a pandemic. And so, you know, when you're thinking of like, Oh, I really want to add this element, you know, I'm revising, I want to build up this chapter that was here before, I know, I researched this, this or that place, and then you've got to find, you know, your hard drive that had it. And the hard drives are, of course, not labeled. They're just in a stack. So I think just really good record keeping of where your research is, like, know where your research is, keep it organized, keep it linked to what you've got going on. And when it comes to the actual, you know, writing of the book, I think everyone has advice for writers, and, but everyone's really different and how they write. And you got to find what works for you and try out multiple things till you find it. I think I, when I first started working, I read a lot of books of like, how to be a good writer, and then I would try them. And that would be like, Oh, that's not working. I must not be a good writer. And so I was like, Oh, I better try something different. And I and I ended up finding that I worked really well by writing in big chunks. I knew other people who had to write consistently, you know, a couple hundred words a day. But I built I built some accountability among some friends. And so I had my best friend and I would trade like pager days back and forth when we'd get stuck in a rut and we wouldn't do anything. So just find someone who's willing to at least accept your work. Like I don't think she ever opened a single file I sent her. But she you know, it was someone to receive it each day to make sure I was writing something when I'd really get stuck. And then one day I'd wake up and I'd write 30 pages because that's just the style of writing that I do. So it's just you got to find what works for you. Don't take it too hard if you don't do exactly what the how to write well book tells you how to write, so...

I know you're starting a new position. I was wondering do you want to share what's in your future either for that position or perhaps if you have new research projects that you have in mind

Yeah. So I've, I've left kind of the teaching track in academia, and I'm going to be the curator for digital collections at University of South Florida. And so I found all that archival research I found that I really liked it and really appreciated being in the archives and, and working with primary sources on a daily basis. And so doing a lot with with digitizing those primary sources, making them available to scholars, and accessible as much as possible. And I'm still doing research in military history. I just had a chapter come out on on sexuality and violence in the American military, and, you know, balancing balancing those worlds and having a lot of fun.

Thank you so much, Amanda. That was fantastic.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to Authors in Conversation, The United States in the World Series Podcast from Cornell University Press.