Abstract
Long before the emigration of thousands of people out of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos at the end of the Vietnam War, the United States and the government of the Republic of Vietnam were confronted with a “refugee problem” in South Vietnam, where more than three million civilians were displaced between 1965 and 1969. This article examines how officials of the United States and the South Vietnam government sought to address the ever-growing crisis of internally displaced people. It analyzes three ways in which the United States and the GVN used the processes of displacement and displaced civilians to gain political advantage by transforming uprooted villagers into “assets of war,” to manage displaced populations by creating a classification system, and to engineer population movements for nation-building projects. These different approaches reveal the importance of displacement as a wartime strategy and the role that displaced villagers served as resources of war.
