Originally Posted by Guest

Mencken reports the earliest use of the word gook: he wrote that US marines occupying Nicaragua in 1912 took to calling the natives gooks and that it had previously been a term for Filipinos.[11] He further mentions that the natives of Costa Rica are sometimes called goo-goos.[12] The first written use was in 1920 and mentions that the marines occupying Haiti used the term to refer to Haitians.[13] US occupation troops in Korea after World War II called the Koreans "gooks".[14] After the return of US troops to the Korean peninsula, so prevalent was the use of the word gook during the first months of the Korean War that US General Douglas MacArthur banned its use, for fear that Asians would become alienated to the United Nations Command because of the insult.[1][15][16] Although mainly used to describe non-European foreigners, especially Asians, it has been used to describe foreigners in general,[17] including Italians in 1944, Indians, Lebanese and Turks in the '70s, and Arabs in 1988.[4] This dual usage is similar to the offensive word wog in British English.
In modern US usage, "gook" refers particularly to Communist soldiers during the Vietnam War. It is generally considered to be highly offensive.