Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

When men are shipped out to foreign locations to engage in wartime activities, it seems inevitable that they will become romantically and sexually involved with foreign women. In Entangling Alliances, Susan Zeiger explores this phenomenon, examining governmental, military, and societal responses to American soldiers’ desires for sex, companionship, and marriage while engaged in combat overseas. She argues that the changing ways Americans treated war brides over the course of the twentieth century demonstrates shifting American sensibilities regarding foreign policy, race, and gender. More than anything, because war brides involved an exchange of women across cultural and national boundaries, American discourse about war brides was ultimately about what constituted American manhood, men’s relationships with women, and the role of the nation in its relationship to other countries.

During World War I, the military preached sexual abstinence while devising methods to keep American soldiers and local women apart, in particular African-American soldiers and white European women. The army’s response to marriage requests vacillated until an official policy was handed down that marriage was a personal, not military, question. Meanwhile, domestic policy concerns in the U.S. triumphed over an internationally-oriented political outlook; xenophobia for newcomers was inevitable and Americans wondered if these foreign women could become good American wives. Though many predicted the demise of these marriages, evidence reveals that the majority made it.

In World War II, military policy differed depending on location. It encouraged marriage in Great Britain and Australia, both Allied countries with similar cultural backgrounds to white middle-class America. Likewise, American society welcomed these brides, suggesting that American women should emulate their domesticity and loyalty to husbands. Alternatively, the military encouraged prostitution, rather than marriage, in both Italy and the Philippines, while American society viewed these war brides as less desirable immigrants. Zeiger argues that both policies—encouraging prostitution or marriage—“shared... the intention to preserve and extend male control over women.” She also points out that though many of these local women showed independence and an assertion of personal freedom by going out with American men, sometimes against their family’s wishes, their stories “end with marriage and dependence.”

Race played a huge role in war bride stories post-WWII and throughout the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Congressional policy actively limited brides from Asian countries, outright barring Japanese spouses for several years, while all interracial couples faced social discrimination and, occasionally, found that their marriages were not legal when they moved from one state to another.

Zeiger argues that the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam saw the “demise” of the war bride as a phenomenon considered and debated by the American public. The military did not provide transport to war brides the way they did in WWI and WWII, and it actively encouraged prostitution rather than marriage, extending its WWII policy of creating red-light districts where prostitutes were regularly examined by medical officials and given “safe” ratings to prevent the spread of venereal disease. Korean and Vietnamese wives were not written about widely in the American press and they have not written about their post-war experiences in America, the way war brides from earlier eras have done. They have been, Zeiger writes, “all but invisible in American culture.”

Demographic information suggests that these Asian war brides tend to be isolated, even in comparison to other Asian immigrants though they have sponsored family members to come to the U.S., unlike earlier war brides. Though Asian war brides were an untold story, there was a lot of media attention paid to the mixed-race children left behind in Vietnam and, sometimes airlifted out and brought to the U.S. Zeiger argues that the story of Amerasian children, and the efforts to bring them to the U.S. allowed Americans to re-conceptualize the war, seeing both Amerasian children and American soldiers as victims in the story. “The American nation becomes father and, also, paradoxically, child. Vietnam, the mother, the war bride, is not part of this reconciliation.”

Entangling Alliances is a compelling read, illuminating twentieth century social struggles encountered by men and women on both domestic and foreign soil over questions of gender, race, and nationality. Though Zeiger argues that the war bride phenomenon died out with the Korean and Vietnam wars, clearly, soldiers still took wives and fathered children with Korean and Vietnamese women. More recently, stories of male American soldiers marrying Iraqi women have been exploited in the media. Because Zeiger only covers the period from WWI up through the Vietnam War, she leaves a perplexing question unexplored: What has happened with female soldiers and local men in the conflicts that the U.S. has engaged in the last twenty years? Have female soldiers, like male soldiers, engaged in romantic and sexual conquests with non-U.S. citizens? I suspect their experience has been radically different than their male counterparts.

Written by: Jessica Powers, June 5th 2010

A Journal for Jordan: A Story of Love and Honor

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:22:00 +0000

By Dana Canedy

Crown Publishers

I can’t remember the last time I cried after reading a book. After reading the last page of A Journal for Jordan I suddenly found myself bawling my eyes out. But enough about me—this is a book review after all.

Based on the title of this book, I expected it to be a journal written by a loved one for a loved one. I was aware that the fiancée of a fallen soldier, who also happens to be a New York Times senior editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, had encouraged her fiancée to start a journal for his infant son after learning about his impending deployment to Iraq. I expected a touching book filled with words of wisdom about life lessons learned. This book is that and much more. In it, Canedy tells the story of an unlikely romance between herself, an independent NYT reporter, and First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, a decorated military officer and gentle soul. The book also includes life lessons and inspiration in the form of King’s journal entries and letters.

Canedy came to the writing of this book from her own improbable journey. An army brat who had seen the toll that military life took on her parents’ marriage, she was determined not to marry a military man as her mother had, and worked her way up the ranks from cub reporter to New York Times editor. While nursing a broken heart and a wounded ego after a demoralizing breakup, Canedy finds herself at her parents house on Father’s Day trying to patch up her tenuous relationship with her father, and meets the man who will be the love of her life.

This is a love story of two individuals who couldn’t be more dissimilar and Canedy charts the up and down course of their relationship with humor and honesty. I especially found her anecdotes about King’s old-fashioned courtliness endearing such as his first visit to New York City:

"It occurred to me that perhaps he was the sort of man who still believed in the dating rituals of a bygone era. I was right. The entire weekend, Charles insisted on being on the curbside of the sidewalk to put distance between me and the traffic. It was a sweet throwback gesture that in any other city I would have appreciated, but it drove me crazy as we tried to keep pace with the pedestrian traffic on New York’s one-way streets…"

By the end of the book, Canedy is a single mother raising a small child and struggling with the reality of a life and a future without King. We travel with her as she navigates her new life as an army widow and mother. She tells in wrenching detail about meeting other military families of fallen soldiers at a memorial service, and her commitment to giving her son a sense of the father that he never knew. It seems fitting to end this review with a passage from a letter that King wrote to Canedy on the plane back to Iraq:

"It takes a special kind of woman to be married to a soldier. He’s always going on deployment or training, missing births, birthdays, and any kind of special occasion you can imagine. You really have to be a self-motivated and strong-willed person. You spend a lot of time alone because he’s gone. It’s a tough job being a military spouse. Though we’ve had our difference, you have always been there for me. Thank you."

Written by: Gita Tewari, March 11th 2009