R&R: Overseas Rest and Recreation during the Vietnam War, 1965–72

China Research Seminar given by Dr Zach Fredman, Duke Kunshan University

This talk examines how American servicemen’s access to sex and good times on overseas rest and recreation (R&R) trips during the Vietnam War both underpinned and imperiled the U.S.-led war effort and anti-communist state-building across the U.S.-allied Western Pacific. Nearly 2.5 million American servicemen participated in the R&R program, which guaranteed each soldier a five-or-six-night overseas excursion to one of the following destinations: Tokyo, Singapore, Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Honolulu, or Penang. U.S. and host country authorities, I show, collaborated to provide American military personnel with morale-boosting, hygienic access to local women’s bodies while promoting capitalist economic development and assuaging historically charged sensitivities about national sovereignty. But their efforts did not go unopposed: locals resisted the program at every R&R site, sometimes violently. This project shows how sex workers and soldiers were at the center of the entanglement between U.S. empire and postcolonial nation-building in Asia during the Cold War.

Zach Freeman is associate professor of history and associate chair of the Division of Arts and Humanities at Duke Kunshan University, a Sino-U.S. joint venture university in Suzhou, China. A scholar of U.S.-East Asian relations, he is author of The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).