"We Would Hear Them:" Paradoxes of the American Military in Okinawa

Okinawa has been the site of one of the largest overseas concentrations of American military personnel and a prominent anti-base movement in opposition to the U.S. military presence since 1945. Reflecting on Marshall Sahlins' "The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam" argument (2000 [1966]), developed in the midst of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, I suggest that the contradictions of the American military presence in Okinawa necessitate the destruction of conscience, even if no active war is being waged on the island. Using an ethnographic reading of U.S. military materials and interviews with soldiers deployed to Okinawa, I argue that military ideology consistently disavows crimes and violence committed by soldiers and displaces soldiers' anxieties about their presence onto fictitious Others. I conclude by showing how those processes evidence the destruction of conscience as American soldiers paper over and ignore the consequences of the American military presence in Okinawa.