Contagions of Empire

Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898–1948

Khary Oronde Polk

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781469655505, 9781469655499
• eBook ISBN: 9781469655512
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

From 1898 onward, the expansion of American militarism and empire abroad increasingly relied on black labor, even as policy remained inflected both by scientific racism and by fears of contagion. Black men and women were mobilized for service in the Spanish-Cuban-American War under the War Department’s belief that southern blacks carried an immunity against tropical diseases. Later, in World Wars I and II, black troops were stigmatized as members of a contagious “venereal race” and were subjected to experimental medical treatments meant to curtail their sexual desires. By turns feared as contagious and at other times valued for their immunity, black men and women played an important part in the U.S. military’s conscription of racial, gender, and sexual difference, even as they exercised their embattled agency at home and abroad.

By following the scientific, medical, and cultural history of African American enlistment through the archive of American militarism, this book traces the black subjects and agents of empire as they came into contact with a world globalized by warfare.

CHAPTER ONE

We Don’t Need Another Hero

Death, Honor, and the Archive of American Militarism

Just asking but was Sgt La David Johnson and the two Nigerians [sic] running towards or away from the firefight?

—INTERNET COMMENT, Military.com, 2018

There is still much that remains uncertain about the death of Sgt. La David Johnson, of Miami Gardens, Florida, who was killed in action on October 4, 2017, outside the village of Tongo Tongo, Niger. What is known, and what U.S. Department of Defense officials have confirmed as the truth, is that his body, shorn of boots and all serviceable equipment, was found two days after the ambush, concealed under the dense crown of a thorn tree. The twenty-five-year-old member of U.S. Army’s Third Special Forces Group had been deployed in a unit to Niger for reasons that were not entirely clear, even to elected members of Congress.¹ This lack of civilian oversight into the specifics of America’s shadow wars in Africa contributed to the administrative fog and swirl of rumors that hung over Johnson’s death in the days, weeks, and months following the ambush.² Seven months after the incident, the Department of Defense released a declassified video to the public that they produced to serve as the official narrative of the event.³ As the narrator’s script attests, “This video is a depiction of the events before, during and after the October 4th, 2017 ambush of a combined force of U.S. Special Operations Force and partner Nigeriens near the village of Tongo Tongo, Niger.” Combining file footage with animation, it offers a videogame-like reenactment to relate what is currently believed to have happened to the four Americans, four Nigeriens, and the twenty to twenty-five enemy combatants killed that day outside of Tongo Tongo.

The U.S. military presently directs its operations in Africa from Stuttgart, Germany, through AFRICOM. Together with two lower-ranking command centers also located in Germany, Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA) and Special Operations Command Forward, North and West Africa (SOCFWD-NWA), AFRICOM extends its imperial shadow over the Maghreb and the Sahel by stationing American soldiers at bases in N’Djamena, Chad, and Niamey, Niger. As of 2017, U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) teams were stationed in northwest Africa to train host-nation partner forces, assist and enhance their security efforts, conduct counterterrorism operations, and carry out joint surveillance and reconnaissance missions with host-nation forces.

According to the narrator, southwestern Niger had become a trafficking route for the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara (ISIS-GS), and on October 2, the U.S. SOF team in Ouallam received intelligence that an ISIS-GS subcommander might be moving into their vicinity. For reasons that remain unclear, the mission plan submitted by the team leader “did not accurately characterize the intended purpose of the mission.” Instead of performing a reconnaissance sweep of the nearby town of Tiloa, the mission for which they had received clearance, the team sought to pinpoint the location, capture, and if necessary, kill the Islamic State subcommander in their territory.

This covert mission was manned by forty-six personnel in total. Among them were eight U.S. Special Forces soldiers, two U.S. Special Operations Support soldiers, one intelligence contractor, one Nigerien interpreter, a three-man Nigerien reconnaissance team, and thirty-one members of the Nigerien partner force. Johnson was a special operations mechanic for the mission, driving one of the trucks. Traveling in a convoy of eight vehicles—only two of which had mounted machine guns—the joint American and Nigerien patrol drove to Tiloa, but was unable to locate the subcommander. On their return to base, however, the team received “high confidence intelligence” that placed the suspect northwest of Tiloa near the Mali border, and the convoy turned around in pursuit. The second attempted capture was also unsuccessful, and on the morning of October 4, the team began its trek homeward.

As they stopped at Tongo Tongo so that the Nigerien forces could eat breakfast and get water, the U.S. team conducted an impromptu “key leader engagement” with the village elder. The convoy was only 100 meters outside the village when its tail end came under light small arms fire. The team leader had gone looking for a fight, and now he found it. The joint team stopped, exited their vehicles, took defensive positions, and returned fire.

Believing there were only a small number of enemy combatants, the U.S. team leader and four Nigerien soldiers attempted to outflank their attackers from behind. The video reenactment represents the American and Nigerien forces as blue and green dots, respectively, while the enemy combatants—far more than the team leaders realized—emerge as an undifferentiated, lava-like red miasma slowly growing over the landscape. Stopped in their advance by a body of water, the flanking element engaged the enemy from its position until the commander observed “a larger than expected enemy force moving to his east, which consisted of motorcycles and vehicles with mounted heavy machine guns.” Returning to the convoy, the commander issued an order to move south, but three American soldiers closest to the line of fire, Staff Sergeants Bryan Black, Jeremiah Johnson, and Dustin Wright, were killed during the staggered retreat.

Only half of the convoy made the retreat south, and those four vehicles reconvened 700 meters away from the ambush site, creating a second defensive position. Soon after, these soldiers received fire from the enemy combatants. Sergeant Johnson moved to his vehicle’s mounted machine gun and fired back. When that weapon ran out of ammunition, he switched to a sniper rifle, and continued to shoot, using his truck as cover.

Michel Rolph-Trouillot has described three processes of historical production: the making of facts, the making of archives, and the making of narratives; all three of these processes are present in what the video shows next.⁴ Less than an hour had passed since the initial ambush, and at approximately 12:25 P.M., enemy combatants began to mass on the convoy’s second defensive position from the southeast. Flanked by enemy fire, the team commander ordered a withdrawal, and three of the trucks were able to leave the area. However, the overwhelming firepower of the enemy left Sergeant Johnson and two Nigerien soldiers unable to reenter their vehicle. Abandoned by their team leader and the rest of their comrades, the three men escaped on foot, running southwest into the Sahel as the enemy pursued them on trucks and motorbikes.

Suddenly, the video’s multimediated narrative pauses. A statement, unaccompanied by narration, flashes upon the screen: “This depiction of SGT Johnson’s movement is not based on eyewitness accounts, but solely on evidence recovered during the course of the investigation.” This was not entirely true. The institutional fabulation of Johnson’s last known moments, a simulated reanimation, if you will, depended not “solely” on the forensic evidence recovered during the investigation. It also drew from a particular history of valor and sacrifice germane to the archive of American militarism, which encompasses the historical production of knowledge about the U.S. military as well the cultural, embodied, and discursive traces left in the wake of this institution in the United States and around the world. From the victory of Mexican forces at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, to General George Custer’s crushing defeat by Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne Indians at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, the “last stand” has been romanticized for over a century of writing on American military defeat.⁵ The computer-animated representation of Sergeant Johnson’s last stand is perhaps the most modern incarnation of this trope, as a moving blue dot on screen is imbued with valiance, physical excellence, commitment to duty, and courage under enemy fire. This narrative cuts against the reports that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the botched mission, particularly those characterizing the incident as “the worst military fiasco under the Trump administration” and the result of “reckless behavior by US Special Forces.”⁶

Sergeant Johnson and his comrades ran for their lives across the arid landscape. Both Nigerien soldiers were killed approximately 400 meters from their truck, their green dots dimming to grey. Yet Sergeant Johnson continued to evade his pursuers. Johnson was well known at home and among his comrades for his athletic prowess. Four years earlier, the then twenty-one-year-old Walmart employee became a local celebrity in Miami-Dade County for riding a BMX bike absent its front wheel back and forth to work, popping a wheelie the whole seven-mile commute to Pembroke Pines. His friends, fans, and Instagram followers nicknamed him “the Wheelie King.”⁷ Depicted in the video as considerably faster than his Nigerien compatriots, Sergeant Johnson sprinted an additional 560 meters—more than half a mile—until he located the only cover available on the barren plain: a single thorn tree. “At this position,” the narrator states, “he continued to fight.” The viewer then sees the climatic finish of the battle: a solitary blue dot firing upon an unsurmountable red mass that slowly engulfs the screen and closes upon his position. The video fades to black just before Sergeant Johnson’s dot dims, ending the simulation of La David Johnson’s last stand.

Six hours after the ambush, American, Nigerien, and French soldiers swept the site of battle in search of Sergeant Johnson’s whereabouts, but were unable to locate his body due to the distance he had run from his last known position, and “the density of the tree under which he had concealed himself.” From the sky, the tree’s spine-bearing branches netted together to form an impenetrable shroud, concealing the location of Sergeant Johnson’s body from the god’s-eye view of surveillance drones for over thirty-six hours.

On the morning of October 6, Tongo Tongo locals informed the Nigerien military they had identified the remains of an American soldier. The narration here is key: “When Sgt. Johnson was found by Nigerien forces, he was beneath the canopy of a thorny tree. Sgt. Johnson was found lying on his back with his arms to his sides. His hands were not bound. Sgt. Johnson was clothed, though his boots and serviceable equipment had been removed by the enemy. The investigation determined Sgt. Johnson was not captured alive.”⁸ The viewer is assured by the narrator that although Sergeant Johnson was killed in combat, he died an honorable death—he was not tortured, his body was not desecrated, and he was not taken alive. Bodily integrity and wholeness are emphasized in this retelling, and the deployment of this Christlike narrative by Defense officials contradicts—and works to silence—earlier reports that intimated the opposite: unnamed Nigerien personnel who claimed Sergeant Johnson’s body was found bound and stripped naked; the numerous stories reporting “additional remains” were found on November 12 at the original recovery site; and the troubling, emotionally wrenching interview given on Good Morning America by his pregnant widow, Myeshia Johnson, who was told by President Donald Trump in his condolence call to her that her husband “knew what he signed up for.”⁹ Curiously, Mrs. Johnson was prevented from viewing her husband’s remains before his burial in Florida on October 21. “Why couldn’t I see my husband?” she asked anchor George Stephanopoulos. “Every time I asked to see my husband, they wouldn’t let me.… They won’t show me a finger, a hand. I know my husband’s body from head to toe, and they won’t let me see anything. I don’t know what’s in that box. It could be empty for all I know, but I need to see my husband. I haven’t seen him since he came home.”¹⁰

In the absence of his body, the speculative reassessment of La David Johnson’s last stand has gained new importance, particularly in an unchecked social media landscape where wholly uncorroborated accounts have already depicted him variously as traitor in cahoots with Islamic militants and as a coward who—unlike his three white comrades killed in battle—died running away from the firefight.¹¹ While such insinuations might be correctly viewed as discomfiting reflections of our current political moment, they are also rooted in a discourse of African American inferiority whose tendrils have historically denied black soldiers claims to citizenship rights. As only the most recent high-profile instance of a black soldier dying in America’s wars abroad, Johnson’s death in Niger underscored the intense, ongoing contest over how “the political lives of dead bodies” should register within a discourse of American military honor, a discourse founded upon ideals of white supremacy.¹² This chapter reckons with this troubling history in order to trace the contours of Johnson’s afterlife in the archive of American militarism, to better comprehend how and why an African American husband and father of three perished under a thorn tree in Niger, however provisional and incomplete those answers are likely to be. The search for such answers (or perhaps better questions) would benefit from consultation with the work of Achille Mbembe.

Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” has been extremely influential in contemporary critical theory and cultural studies. The concept has helped contemporary ethnographers of violent conflict consider how mass graves act as “crucial testimony to the wounds of hist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations in the Text
• Introduction
• Chapter One: We Don’t Need Another Hero: Death, Honor, and the Archive of American Militarism
• Chapter Two: Negro Heroines: Gender, Race, and Immunity in the Spanish-Cuban-American War
• Chapter Three: Charles Young in Five Acts: Patriots, Traitors, and the Performance of American Militarism
• Chapter Four: Contagious Immunity: Race, Sexuality, and the Black Venereal Body Abroad
• Chapter Five: Communicable Subjects: African American Soldiers Trip the Global Color Line
• Epilogue: The Long Arc of Black Military Opportunity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index