For example, were or are there Afghan-Americans or Iraqi-Americans serving in the wars there on the US side? Do they do anything differently, go through special training, get more closely monitored, get limited clearances, or anything of the sort? Or are they considered just another regular military member?
Or, in a hypothetical future war with, say, China, what would happen to the Chinese-Americans serving in the US Armed Forces?
we can look at historical examples, e.g. how American military handled people of German and Japanese descent during WW2, but I don’t think that would have much predictive power. Next time around they will write the policy whichever way they feel like writing it. E.g. the case of Major Hasan suggests that being a self-confessed jihadist is not an impediment to being an officer at a time of an alleged war with Islamic extremists. But that’s right now. Maybe tomorrow the policy will change again.
At any given time, the US military is deployed in many different places, so it wouldn’t be that hard to make sure that all those folks are just deployed somewhere else. That said, though, there’d probably be a push to get them trained and deployed as interpreters, if they know the language and/or the culture. Interpreters are in big demand.
In one episode of MASH (not documentary, I know) they had a Korean-American soldier who was extremly conflicted at having to shoot and kill his fellow countrymen - he came down with some sort of psychosomatic problem, or subconsciouly trying to injure himself, that sort of thing.
Beyond trying to deploy them elsewhere, is there no official protocol for this type of thing? With both the ethnic makeup and armed engagements of the US so diverse, surely this scenario comes up again and again. I understand policy may change with the times, but what has happened recently? The Korean War? The first Gulf War? The post-9/11 conflicts?
(Or am I wrong about the diversity? Is this in actuality much rarer than I suppose?)
When I was in the USAF we had an enlisted admin clerk who was an Austrian citizen, not a US citizen. She didn’t have any security clearance and there were quite a few things we had to keep her out of. The fact we were a frontline combat unit (albeit during peacetime) did not prevent the USAF in its infinite wisdom from sending us this gal. Had we deployed to war, we expected to leave her behind in the US.
Other than that small impediment she was a good worker.
My last tour in Iraq we had a US citizen who was born a Palestinian refugee and when the drama with Iraq leading up to the war started he was living with extended family in Baghdad. He had already gotten American citizenship by this point so he told his family he was getting out and came back to America, then after the war started he joined the Army. After graduating Basic Training he called his extended family in Baghdad and told them not to become insurgents because he didn’t want it on his conciounce if he ended up killing them. He made sure to emphasise not that he wouldn’t kill them, but that he would and he just didn’t want it bothering him. He deployed twiced before getting out and killed insurgents both times. Definitely an American first.
Anyways, the Army did with him what they do with everybody: they signed him a contract that he agreed to, trained him, then shipped him off to war. He signed up for Infantry and never took the language test that could have gotten him an extra $300 a month because he didn’t want moved from the Infantry. So that’s exactly what he was.
Wow. Wonder if that’ll come back to haunt him later in life. Thanks for the story.
Iraqi immigrant (okay, Kurdish refugee) Jotyar Tile fled to the US with his family in 1988 and deployed to Iraq with the US Army in 2007. He doesn’t seem to have been subject to any particular “special arrangements”.
You swear an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and to obey the lawful orders of the President and the officers appointed over you. Your country has a right to expect that you will do your duty.
That said, there may be practical reasons why it makes sense not to send, say, Japanese-Americans into combat against Japanese soldiers: 442nd Infantry Regiment (United States) - Wikipedia
I started skimming the article, but didn’t see anything that suggested they did anything to compromise their orders. What did I miss?
You;'re overthinking it. The point is that they were sent to fight the Germans, rather than the Japanese.
Quite.
:smack:
My German grandfather wound up fighting on the American side during WWI, shooting at his former countrymen (grandfather had gotten his US citizenship years before WWI) so it’s not like this hasn’t happened before.
As pointed out, in WWII (by which time grandfather was deceased) they tended to send Japanese-American troops to Europe and those with ties to German or Italy to the Pacific theater. There were probably some exceptions, though, and not all wars conveniently have separate fronts of that nature.
There’s the story that when some German soldiers were taken prisoner in Italy by the 442nd, they were surprised to see their captors were “Japanese”. And one of the captors told them, “What? You believed Goebbels when he said Japan was fighting on your side?”
There’s no propaganda like counter-propaganda!