An American Brothel

In An American Brothel, Amanda Boczar considers sexual encounters between American servicemen and civilians throughout the Vietnam War, and she places those fraught and sometimes violent meetings in the context of the US military and diplomatic campaigns.

In 1966, US Senator J. William Fulbright declared that "Saigon has become an American brothel." Concerned that, as US military involvement in Vietnam increased so, too, had prostitution, black market economies, and a drug trade fueled by American dollars, Fulbright decried an arrogance of power on the part of Americans and the corrosive effects unchecked immorality could have on Vietnam as well as on the war effort. The symbol, at home and abroad, of the sweeping social and cultural changes was often the so-called South Vietnamese bar girl.

As the war progressed, peaking in 1968 with more than half a million troops engaged, the behavior of soldiers off the battlefield started to impact affect the conflict more broadly. Beyond the brothel, shocking revelations of rapes and the increase in marriage applications complicated how the South Vietnamese and American allies cooperated and managed social behavior. Strictures on how soldiers conducted themselves during rest and relaxation time away from battle further eroded morale of disaffected servicemen. The South Vietnamese were loath to loosen moral restrictions and feared deleterious influence of a permissive wWestern culture on their society.

From the consensual to the coerced, sexual encounters shaped the Vietnam War. Boczar shows that these encounters—sometimes facilitated and sometimes banned by the US military command—restructured the South Vietnamese economy, captivated international attention, dictated military policies, and hung over diplomatic relations during and after the war.

Amanda Boczar is Manager, Library Operations Manager for Special Collections at University of South Florida Libraries, Tampa Special Collections. She holds a PhD in Diplomatic History from the University of Kentucky. Follow her on X @amandaboczar.

A compelling history of the significance of sexual encounters in warfare[...] offers a fascinating foreign policy and military history of the Vietnam War from the bottom up, detailing points of tension and cooperation between the two allies over intimate relationships.

Boczar's sobering analysis of the human toll of the Vietnam War on America's key ally should serve as a warning to current and future policy makers[.].

Boczar convincingly argues that gender, sex, and intimate relationships were at the center of military life during the Vietnam War.

An American Brothel is an important work, one that historians interested in any one of these fields should read. Boczar has provided an invaluable path for other historians to follow as we continue to examine these questions. In sum, An American Brothel is an outstanding book that bridges several fields of historical inquiry and demonstrates unequivocally that sex plays a vital role in wartime foreign relations and experiences.

In An American Brothel, Boczar forcefully argues that such conceptualizations fall far short of gaining a fuller appreciation of what "war" actually entailed in Vietnam.[A] powerful yet compact book.

An American Brothel is an indispensable study of transactional, consensual, and violent sexual relationships between South Vietnamese women and American men during the US War in Vietnam. Boczar's arguments are so persuasiv[.]

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, University of California, Irvine, author of Radicals on the Road:

Amanda Boczar offers new, groundbreaking insights into the experience of the Vietnam War. An American Brothel shows how sexuality and intimacy between Vietnamese and Americans shaped US-Viet NamVietnam relations, from policy to everyday life.

Heather Marie Stur, University of Southern Mississippi, author of Beyond Combat:

Fascinating and compelling, An American Brothel gives voice to two underrepresented actors in the Vietnam War story: the RVN government and ordinary South Vietnamese women. Amanda Boczar offers a new and interesting periodization of Vietnam War history.