Operation New Life to La Vida Nueva: U.S. Military and Refugee Operations, 1975–82

From the 1950s through the 1990s, the US government held Hungarians, Vietnamese, Cubans, and Haitians on US military bases.  Refugees were held on domestic military bases in Arkansas, New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania, and California, as well as bases established outside the continent, namely in Guam, Guantánamo Bay, the Philippines, and Panama.  Anticipating political and presumably personal freedom within the United States, numerous refugees found themselves unexpectedly waiting days, and at times weeks and months, in military compounds.  Military bases became de facto refugee camps for men and women hoping to find asylum and resettlement in the United States. 

The following paper analyzes the US military’s involvement in Vietnamese and Cuban refugee operations, with a particular emphasis on Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas, the largest of the domestic refugee camps.  Fort Chaffee’s history reveals the history of refugee camps within the United States, bringing into relief questions related to citizenship, camps, and the military on the home front.   First, the paper recognizes longer histories of military engagement for both refugees and servicemen and women, and it highlights the interstices between refugees and US military personnel before and during their meeting in refugee camps.  Second, it examines the repurposing of military space and analyzes the military borders, surveillance, and legal apparatus that defined refugees as physically, but not legally, in the United States.  Finally, it argues that the US government increasingly turned to the military for leadership in refugee operations, and the military in turn recognized the value of recasting itself in a humanitarian idiom.  The US military’s transformation in the post-Cold War era to both define more projects as humanitarian and to conduct more such missions can be rooted to its perceived logistical successes in refugee operations.