The day I started writing this essay, hundreds of U.S. Marines arrived in downtown Los Angeles, about ten miles from my home in Pasadena. They joined the 2,000 National Guardsmen already in the city. Both the Marines and the National Guard had been tasked with protecting federal property and personnel. The personnel to be protected were agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE; the people the ICE agents needed to be protected from were protesters outraged at ICE’s aggressive detainment and deportation of undocumented (and in some cases even documented) immigrants in the city.
It’s a statement that should stop anyone dead in their tracks: U.S. Marines. On the ground in an American city; deployed to deter resistance to an agency that is denying due process to both citizens and noncitizens alike.
Most of the protests have been peaceful, despite what media outlets have been showing to the rest of the country. And life has been going on throughout most of Southern California, as best as it can. Two Sundays ago, on the same day that driverless Waymo cars were tagged up and set on fire, our church in Little Tokyo even went ahead with its annual Chili Cook-Off.
But a few days later, the church found itself smack dab in the heart of a curfew zone.
Life has been going on as best as it can on the surface, but if you happen to be an immigrant, if you happen to be brown, if you happen to pay attention to the world and your neighbors and have a shred of empathy, the last couple of weeks have been harrowing. There’s a threat in the air. Not from the protesters—who are justifiably pushing back against the callous abductions of our fellow Angelenos at schools, in houses of worship, in kitchens and offices, in parks and playgrounds—but from our increasingly authoritarian regime. There’s the threat of ICE, of the LAPD, and now the military.
It’s not unlike how the neighborhood felt earlier this year when Altadena was burning just a few miles away, the skies hot with wind-born ash, the hardware stores out of air purifiers and weather stripping, our phones lighting up constantly with alerts, updates, horrors. Like the ash from all those burned homes, the catastrophe of ICE is spreading. ICE agents, we discovered last week, were lodged here in Pasadena, at the AC Hotel on the corner of Madison and Colorado. We pass this hotel almost daily on our walks, along historic Route 66, the route for the annual Rose Parade. Yesterday, six people were detained by federal agents two miles away at the corner of Orange Grove and Los Robles, causing a nearby school to go into lockdown.
ICE was forced to decamp from the AC Hotel to a hotel in Arcadia seven miles away, thanks to protesters and pressure from members of the SEIU, who were incensed with ICE’s assault and arrest of SEIU president David Huerta. But yesterday’s raid has struck terror into the construction crews who have just begun to rebuild Altadena, crews that are largely composed of day laborers who are now too afraid to leave their homes.
And soldiers are patrolling the streets of downtown Los Angeles, carrying M27s.
The Marines came up to LA from Camp Pendleton near San Diego, where every Southern California Filipino seems to have a relative in the military. In addition to Camp Pendleton, San Diego has a major naval base; while Filipinos constitute the largest group of foreign-born veterans in all branches of the military, the Navy in particular has a long history of recruiting Filipinos.
Camp Pendleton was where my cousin became a Marine, even before he became a U.S. citizen. While undocumented immigrants can’t serve in the armed forces, immigrants with green cards can and have served for decades. Since 2002, more than 200,000 of these U.S. service members have been naturalized. It’s not hard to imagine Filipinos among the Marines or National Guardsmen in downtown LA.
How many of these Marines and National Guardsmen are not citizens? How many are legal residents in possession of green cards and so, in our current climate, are as vulnerable to the whims and reprisals of the State Department as Mahmoud Khalil? Are they being asked to participate in rounding up noncitizens, even though they are also noncitizens? According to the Migration Policy Institute, the Philippines was the sixth top source of undocumented immigrants in 2023. How many service members have relatives and friends who are undocumented themselves?
Noncitizen service members undoubtedly feel compelled to prove they are as good at soldiering as their passport-holding comrades, even if that means following orders as unsavory as supporting deportations. But I also imagine that they can’t help feeling sympathy for the women, men, and children terrorized by ICE. For the ones being disappeared without due process. The ones with legal documentation who are harassed and sometimes even detained, anyway.
But of course it is exactly that kind of empathy that military training and the chain of command is supposed to negate.
It is empathy itself that the Musks of the world are trying to bamboozle us into believing is a flaw and not a virtue.
There is at least one bitter irony for Filipino service members who have been deployed to deter Angelenos’ resistance, whether they are aware of it or not: many of the counterinsurgent techniques in which they were trained were first devised in order to deter Filipinos like them who were resisting American occupation. The American side in the Philippine-American War was larger, better trained, and better equipped; in order to stand any chance of winning, the Filipinos resorted to guerrilla warfare. The War made the Philippine archipelago into a laboratory for American counterinsurgency.
After the Philippines, the U.S. military further honed its counterinsurgent practices with “interventions” and occupations of Panama, Honduras, Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and elsewhere. These techniques and strategies are collected in the Small Wars Manual, a U.S. Marine Corps document published in 1940 that has had a lasting influence on American military strategy.
Most of the poems in my recent book, Small Wars Manual, are erasures of the original U.S. Marine Corps manual. I erased each chapter from beginning to the end, with some chapters being 20 pages or longer and others consisting of a single page. I erased letters, spaces, words, sentences, and often whole paragraphs and pages; what remained became a poem. From a creative standpoint, it is dangerous to begin a project with a definite agenda in mind, but with this book I wanted to shine a small light on the histories of violence that informed the original Small Wars Manual. If the original Small Wars Manual continues to influence the wars we wage in other countries, then the twentieth century deaths of both soldiers and civilians in the Philippines still matter, too.
When I first came across the Manual, I was fascinated and horrified by the way that the conquest of the Philippines became, quite literally, a road map for the conquest and colonization of others. I was both lulled and horrified by the flatness of the language, its generalizations about brown races and nations, its callousness and self-deception. It was ripe, I thought, for manipulation, for erasure, as with the texts that served as sources for Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager and Solmaz Sharif’s Look.
But what perhaps disturbs me most about the Manual is how contemporary it feels, how relevant: the warnings and admonitions in chapters such as “Disarmament of the Population” and “Supervision of Elections” seem eerily relevant to our occupation of Iraq; “Psychology” and “Withdrawal” feel prescient of our decades-long failings in Afghanistan. Not only do the twentieth century deaths of soldiers and civilians in the Philippines still matter—they are bound to the more recent deaths of soldiers and civilians in Africa and the Middle East.
Worse still, many of these counterinsurgent tactics, developed overseas against foreign enemies, were brought home to American soil and have been employed by law enforcement since at least the Sixties against groups like the Black Panthers. Now, small wars are being waged against Americans—on American soil—by the military itself.
Our imperial ambitions, our imperial sins, have come home to roost.
The linguistic flatness of the original Small Wars Manual is the language of bureaucracy: it is how violence is downplayed, glorified, codified, recounted, justified. This language, like unexploded ordnance, is all around us. It is in downtown LA right now, and if the administration has its way, it will be in every city in the United States. Even unexploded ordnance that is very old, I learned while spending a semester in London, is quite capable of killing you; right now it is going off in the streets. I hope that we see this language for what it is: heartless and self-deceiving. But it can also be laughed at. It can be appropriated. It can be co-opted and repurposed for our own uses.
The language belongs to us all. Not only legally, not only because it is not protected by copyright, but because it is a record of the violence that we as a nation have visited upon ourselves, and which we continue to visit upon ourselves.
