Repatriation via Saigon

Abstract The South Korean Vietnam War deployment (1965–73), typically understood as a mercenary expedition, was also an exercise in the management of refugees and other displaced populations. While the South Korean Army managed its own refugee villages in South Vietnam, the overseas dispatch of military labor also promised to ameliorate the problem of mass displacement at home, an ongoing legacy of the Korean War (1950–53). The northern exile writer Sŏnu Hwi (1922–86) was a notable proponent of this vision of the war as a frontier, framing Vietnam as a surrogate for an inaccessible North Korea and an outlet for the social contradictions of Cold War developmentalism in South Korea. Focusing on the embedded novel Wave to the Mekong River (1966–67), this article argues that Sŏnu's expansionist fantasy deviated from official justifications of Vietnam as a war for development. At the same time, it suggests, Sŏnu's ideological equalization of exile and displacement also informed an emergent antiwar literature showing that the deployment aggravated, rather than resolved, the marginalization of mobilized youth.