CONSTRUCTING A FAÇADE OF FEASIBILITY: RMK-BRJ IN THE VIETNAM WAR, 1965-1972

Abstract

In 1965, steady communist offensives and political instability in Saigon signalled an imminent South Vietnamese defeat in the Vietnam War. U.S. policymakers' ideological framings of the deteriorating situation prescribed a two-pronged solution. First, the U.S. would wage a capital-intensive and technologically advanced war against communist forces. Second, the U.S. would support the South Vietnamese government’s nation-building efforts through intensive infrastructural development. Initiating these efforts required a colossal construction effort to build the U.S. war machine overseas and to install the scaffolds of a nascent nation. This thesis tracks the role of RMK-BRJ, a consortium of private construction contractors, in South Vietnam throughout their contract from 1965 to 1972. While RMK BRJ has previously been evaluated as a force multiplier on the battlefield and a driver of South Vietnam’s infrastructural development, this thesis seeks to situate its impacts within U.S. policy goals. This thesis argues that RMK-BRJ's construction effort partially materialized the visions for South Vietnam enshrined in U.S. policy goals both intentionally and inadvertently. In the war effort, improved logistic arteries and support infrastructure enabled men, materiel, and modern war machines to be transported to and throughout South Vietnam to produce death at scale. In the nation-building effort, the widespread involvement of local labour in public works construction bestowed upon South Vietnam both the functions of a nation and, additionally, a base of South Vietnamese that perceived themselves as such. By creating symptoms of success in the war effort and the nation-building effort, RMK-BRJ was complicit in protracting fundamentally paradoxical policies. Throughout this process, RMK-BRJ introduced the unpredictable throes of private enterprise into the battlefield, both for better and for worse.