A recurring theme in various ethnic groups’ experiences in America is the achievement of American identity through military service.  For immigrants and citizens, fighting for the country has been the litmus test for loyalty and belonging.  However, this decision comes with a cost: relinquishing any previous national identities.  For many ethnic minorities, the desire to belong in America and the need to identify with their homelands creates an unwinnable internal war.

            For example, Hank Reyes in Zoot Suit faces immediate resistance from El Pachuco, the macho ideal that embodies his ethnic heritage, when he reveals his ambitions to join the Army.  “Forget the war overseas, carnal.  Your war is on the homefront.” (Valdez 30).  Hank doesn’t say he wants to join the military to seem more American; his closest justification is when he talks to Della about maybe “not coming back” after he joins the Navy:

              Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this feeling like there’s a big party going on                     someplace, and I’m invited, but I don’t know how to get there.  And I want to                 get there so bad, I’ll even risk my life to make it.  Sounds crazy, huh?  (55)

For Hank, military service is a ticket to something better, a pass to the better life he knows exists, but has yet to actually experience.  At the end of the play, the multiple endings suggest that military service would fully redeem Hank in a way that even his acquittal could not: in one scenario, Hank fights in Korea, dies, and posthumously earns the Congressional Medal of Honor (94).  The catch is that even when military service brings him some acceptance, it’s only after he loses his life.

            The stakes grow higher when military service demands that immigrants or children of immigrants fight against the nations they came from, such as in No-No Boy.  Even though Ichiro never lived in Japan, his mother impressed upon him a faithfulness to her native land that he carried unwittingly into adulthood.  When the US government interned him and his family, along with all Japanese Americans during WWII, Ichiro had to choose the lesser of two evils: join the army and fight Japan, or refuse enlistment and brand himself “un-American.”  Ichiro’s refusal to join the military, and the socially understood implications of that decision, forms the core of No-No Boy’s conflict.  After spending two years in prison for his refusal, Ichiro returns home to a proud mother; her reaction clearly shows that military service equals American, and refusal equals Japanese.[1]  His peers, especially the Japanese American men who didn’t refuse, realize this fully as well.  Returning veteran Eto spit on Ichiro as soon as he discovered he was a “no-no boy” (Okada 4); his brother Taro felt so much pressure from his peers because of Ichiro’s refusal that he organized a group beating of him (78) and then ran off to join the army himself to salvage his threatened status as an American (81).  Society at large, even other marginalized minorities, took their shots at Ichiro, the new lowest of the low; African Americans mocked him with chants of “Jap-boy, To-ki-yo” (5) and Chinese Americans like Bull, who never had to make the impossible choice Ichiro faced, took shots at him at the Club Oriental as soon he sat down at the bar (74).  Even Ichiro sold himself short, assuming no one would hire him because he’d been in prison the previous two years rather than the “more socially acceptable” internment camp.

            Not that everyone who fought in WWII resented Ichiro’s decision.  Ichiro’s friend, Kenji, fought in the Air Force, and lost part of his leg in combat.  While Ichiro envied Kenji’s situation, even with the leg injury, Kenji said both of their decisions were better and worse than the other (73); each choice had its merits, each choice was a loss.

            Like Kenji, Tayo in Ceremony endures the gamut of consequences for his military service.  When he reminisced with his friends about the war, Tayo said that all the Indians in Vietnam liked that “they had the uniform and they didn’t look different no more.  They got respect” (Silko 41).  The respect was short-lived; he felt the same old ostracism he felt before the war when he interacted with Whites after the war.  Tayo shouted

First time you walked down the street in Gallup or Albuquerque, you knew.  Don’t lie.  You knew right away.  The war was over, the uniform was gone.  All of a sudden that man at the store waits on you last. … [T]he white lady at the bus depot, she’s real careful now not to touch your hand when she counts out your change” (42).

Worse yet, he felt further isolated because he had rejected his already tenuous Pueblo identity by putting on the uniform in the first place.  As a “half-breed,” Tayo was often marginalized by his peers and even his Auntie.  He was teased for his “Mexican eyes” and always wished he “had dark eyes like other people” (103).  The horrors he endures and carries with him after war reveal the cost of the “better” choice: pursuing an American identity via military service requires killing, figuratively and literally, other nationalities, as well as damaging his own identity.  Tayo seeks cleansing from Ku’oosh after fighting in “the white people’s war,” even though he says

           I never killed any enemy.  I never even touched them….Maybe you could help                me anyway.  Do something for me, the way you did for the others who came                  back.  Because what if I didn’t know I killed one? (36)

Tayo may not fully fit into Pueblo society, but he’s Pueblo in his heart, and his sickness there requires a Pueblo cure.

            Tayo witnessed Harley’s horrific torture at Emo’s hand – witnessed the continuing cycle of violence engendered by the war.  The brutality made Tayo feel like “his own sanity would be destroyed if he did not stop them and all the suffering and dying they caused” (252).  Tayo’s Pueblo identity could not bear the destructive nature of “real” Americans; only by reclaiming his native spirit could he salvage his identity and heal his war-torn soul.

            The price of military service in exchange for an American identity takes a deep and often unending toll.  Fighting for America forces many minorities to abandon their native identity, or choose one half of themselves at the expense of the other.  They might even have to fight against their homelands, or violate their inborn values of loyalty to family or unwillingness to kill.  Even the best case scenario – becoming an American war hero – seems possible only through death in combat, posthumous and not truly inherited by the living.  The choice to fight versus the refusal to fight proves to be no choice at all: either path leads to a lifetime of suffering, and the fleeting benefits of service live and die in the uniform.

Works Cited

Kingston, M. H. The Woman Warrior.  New York: Random House, Inc., 1989.

Okada, J. No-No Boy.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.

Silko, L. M. Ceremony.  New York: The Viking Press, 1977.

Valdez, L. Zoot Suit and Other Plays.  Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1992.

[1] Ironically, Maxine Hong Kingston mentions in Woman Warrior that her brother was a family hero for fighting for the US in Vietnam, welcomed back “with chicken and pigs” and lauded in a way Maxine never was (47).