Desertion In the Time of Vietnam ,by Jack Todd

            Jack Todd (born 1946) wasn't a pacifist when he was a kid growing up in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. He and his best friend Sonny Walter played war, and amused themselves by fighting until they were bloody. They carried rifles on hikes in the woods, fantasized that they were searching for fugitive serial killer Charlie Starkweather, and shot at anything that moved. They were also trouble-makers, and Todd describes his adolescence as the time when he graduated from throwing stones at street lights to drag racing on Main Street. [58-59]

            Jack's dream to become a United States Marine came true, but the Corps discharged him in 1967 because of a knee injury.

            He was a reporter for the Miami Herald in the era of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Ted Kennedy's drive off the Chappaquiddick bridge, Charles Manson's massacre, and Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's first steps on the moon. It was also the era of the Nixon-Agnew administration -- with the great cultural divide between love-it-or-leave-it and the peace movement. It was the era of the police riot at the Democratic National Convention [20-45].

            Jack and a young Cuban-American woman named Mariela were in love.

            Sonny fought in Vietnam, and Jack saw him come home an emotional wreck, afraid of everything from noises to darkness.

            In 1969 Jack received a draft notice from the U.S. Army. Sonny begged him to go to Canada, and showed him photographs of the gore. Nevertheless, Jack reported to the induction center in Denver. He felt a bit of envy for a lucky guy who had been seriously mangled in a motorcycle accident and got sent home 4-F, but Jack was told he was 1-A, and in 1970 he went to basic training. [71]

            Experiences in basic training caused his conscience to torment him ....

            During the 1969-1970 Christmas leave, Jack hitchhiked to California, then north, and escaped to Canada.

            The boss at the Vancouver Sun congratulated Jack on his escape and gave him a job, but a strike put him out of work a week later. [185-194] After years of assimilation, Jack eventually became an award-winning sports columnist for the Montreal Gazette, and still lives in Montreal.

            Jack has made several trips back to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, which he still calls "home" -- it's like "looking for ghosts" but "it's still home." [282] In 1975 he saw his mother for the first time in six years. Jack's father died in a traffic accident in 1984, and Jack returned for the funeral. He went home again in 1985 for his 20th high school reunion. However, after Jack's mother died in 1988, the Reagan administration prohibited him from going home for the funeral, despite President Carter's earlier amnesty for all draft resisters and deserters. [284]

            The book is more than the memoir of Jack Todd. Although he often tells the story with an Alice's Restaurant style of ironic humor, there can be no overstatement of how sad the reality is. It's the unfortunate story of a whole generation of idealistic youth who wanted to change the world, but who were not only ideologically but also personally stomped down by the unfeeling politics beyond their control.

          In 1969, Jack Todd was twenty-three and happy beyond his dreams. He had left behind a hardscrabble youth in a small Nebraska town, had an exciting and enviable job as a reporter on the Miami Herald, and was wildly in love with his beautiful Cuban-American girlfriend. As the war in Vietnam drew closer, he assumed that he would fight, as the men in his family had always fought, though he was increasingly troubled by America's role there. His oldest friend had just returned from Vietnam and was already showing signs of the war-caused trauma that would destroy him; he had seen and done things too terrible to describe. He begged Jack to dodge the draft, to go to Canada. Nevertheless Jack entered the army and completed basic training when, on Christmas leave, he made an agonizing decision. By now deeply opposed to the war, he crossed the border into Canada, leaving behind his family, the girl he loved -- and his beloved homeland.

          Now one of Canada's most successful journalists, Jack Todd is a remarkable writer of great power and vibrancy. It has taken him thirty years to come to terms with the guilt and shame of desertion, to break the silence, to tell this controversial, important, profoundly American story. In a dark century, when many "only obeyed orders," he chose not to. This is an intensely moving personal story told with passion and literary verve, as well as an eloquent account of a tortured time in American history. It is hard to put down, and impossible to forget.

          Jack Todd made a fateful decision in 1969. A farm boy from a time and place where the obligation to serve in the military was taken for granted, Todd had just completed basic training at an army post near Seattle when he opted to take a Vietnam-veteran friend's advice and slip across the border into British Columbia rather than risk his life fighting in an unpopular war. His life in Canada was by no means easy; he spent time on Skid Row among fellow deserters and draft evaders, many of them parasitical criminals, and, although he was a veteran journalist, he had to start from scratch at a Vancouver paper, slowly winning the acceptance of his colleagues.

          Todd renounced his American citizenship, which made him one of a handful of Vietnam-era deserters to have been ineligible for the general amnesty offered during Jimmy Carter's presidency -- he could not even return to the United States for his mother's funeral. In this graceful memoir, Todd revisits what he calls his "absurd decision" to leave his country. Absurd, in part, because he later discovered he would not have been sent to Vietnam at all, but was instead slated to serve as a military journalist in Germany. For that decision he has many regrets, although he has clearly made a good life for himself in his adopted country. The cost was perhaps too great, though: "The effect of forced exile is felt not in any sudden tearing away but in the corrosive loss, over a period of time, of too many of the things that make you who you are."

-- Gregory McNamee