Gość: Soup Nazi
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23.02.05, 04:53
February 28 2005
UNITED STATES
From AWOL to Exile
The U.S. military is getting better at curbing deserters, but a small number
are fleeing to Canada. Here’s why
By Daniel Eisenberg
Only a few months after U.S. Army Specialist Darrell Anderson received a
Purple Heart last year for his service in Iraq, his heart wasn’t in it
anymore. By Christmas, while on leave at his parents’ home in Lexington,
Kentucky, Anderson, 22, was dead set against the war. Haunted by memories of
civilian casualties, he had become a nervous wreck. So early last month, a few
days before he was due to return to his unit’s base in Germany and prepare for
a redeployment to Iraq later this year, Anderson rented a car and drove to
Toronto. Since arriving, Anderson has joined several like-minded U.S. soldiers
fighting an uphill battle to gain refugee status in Canada. “I joined the Army
to get money and defend my country, not to kill innocent people and fight for
a war that is unjust,” says Anderson, who earned his medal for the minor
injuries he sustained April 11, when a homemade explosive device sprayed
shrapnel all over his armored vehicle during a patrol in Baghdad.
Anderson thinks of himself and others like him as war resisters. His critics,
who have no sympathy for volunteer soldiers suddenly opposed to combat, prefer
terms like coward and traitor. But now that Anderson has been awol for more
than 30 days, he is known in the U.S. military as a deserter, facing the
possibility of years in jail. (No deserter during wartime has received the
stiffest punishment, execution, since the last days of World War II.)
Although the American public remains sharply divided over the Iraq war, the
number of soldiers like Anderson who are going to great lengths to get out of
their service is actually smaller than it has been in many years. Still, for
the first time since the Vietnam War, when Canadian Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau made his country a “refuge from militarism” for tens of thousands of
U.S. draft dodgers, some disaffected young Americans are seeking sanctuary up
north, risking permanent exile from their native land—or jail time back in it.
A newfangled underground railroad has even sprung up, started by a group of
religious, union and peace activists to help American soldiers get settled in
Canada.
Other members of the armed forces have taken the drastic measure of deserting
without fleeing the U.S. Navy Petty Officer Pablo Paredes, 23, a
weapons-control technician who refused on Dec. 6 to board the U.S.S. Bonhomme
Richard to help transport 3,000 Marines to Iraq, has been assigned to
janitorial work while awaiting a ruling on his conscientious-objector
application. Raised in the Bronx, Paredes joined the Navy because he was eager
to get an education. Nearly five years later, he says he is ashamed to be a
member of the same military responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison
and claims to be a victim of the “poverty draft,” which he says encourages
poor people with no career prospects to join the armed forces. The most famous
deserter, Marine Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun, who briefly appeared to have
been kidnapped in Iraq last June only to resurface in Lebanon unharmed,
recently disappeared again, failing to return after a holiday leave from his
base in North Carolina, where his pretrial hearing was being held; he is now
on the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s most-wanted fugitive list. In
what may be the most desperate attempt to avoid going back to Iraq, Army
Specialist Marquise Roberts, 23, allegedly had his wife’s cousin shoot him in
the leg and then told police he had been caught in random crossfire on a North
Philadelphia street corner.
Overall, however, desertion is rarer than it has been in quite a while. The
number of deserters classified as such by the Army dropped 33% from fiscal
2003 to last year, to 2,436—less than 1% of the total service and the fewest
since 1998. One reason, surely, is that the men and women who join the
military have a greater sense of duty in wartime. But it is also true that the
military has become more efficient at preventing desertions: since 2001, unit
commanders, instead of one central authority, have had responsibility for
identifying potential deserters and reintegrating those who have gone awol.
Even as the number of desertions has fallen, the number of prosecutions, while
still tiny, has edged up, from 153 in fiscal year 2002 to 171 and 176 in the
past two years. Whereas offenders once had a good chance of getting a slap on
the wrist and a dishonorable discharge, they now must consider the
well-publicized case of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, 28, of the Florida
National Guard, who is serving a yearlong sentence at a military prison for
his refusal to return to Iraq for a second stint.
The Pentagon, which did an extensive study of deserters four years ago, says
the vast majority tend to be younger soldiers with troubled records who make a
break for it because of personal or financial woes rather than moral or
political objections. “Often, we have found, soldiers cannot find an honorable
way out and just leave their units,” says Lieut. Colonel Susan Danielsen, the
provost marshal at Fort Bragg Army base. Whatever the reason, discontent in
the ranks seems to be starting to show, especially among National Guard and
Reserve soldiers, some of whom probably never bargained for the full-time,
life-threatening commitment that their service, in many cases, has become.
Staff members at the G.I. Rights Hotline, based in Oakland, California, say
calls from soldiers seeking help have jumped 30% in the past year, to around
33,000 in 2004, almost a third of which were from soldiers contemplating going
awol.
Even though everybody who enlists swears that he or she is not a conscientious
objector, annual C.O. applications to the U.S. military, while still very
rare, have nearly tripled since 2002, to 61 in 2003 and 67 last year.
Anderson’s attorney, Jeffry House, 58, says he gets a few inquiries every day
from U.S. soldiers interested in fleeing to Canada. A Wisconsin native who
went to Canada in 1970 as a draft dodger, House says he has five American
clients applying to be refugees. Extrapolating from those and additional cases
he knows about, he estimates there may be 75 to 100 U.S. soldiers hiding in
Canada, although there is no way to confirm that number.
The incident that eventually spurred Anderson to seek House’s counsel took
place just before he earned his Purple Heart. While trying to quell a
disturbance outside a police station one night, his unit came under heavy
attack. Anderson says he saw a car that appeared to be emitting sparks drive
into the middle of the melee. Instructed to start shooting, Anderson held his
fire—and the car turned out to be carrying only a startled family. Afterward,
Anderson claims, his sergeants told him, “‘Next time, you open fire, just in
case.’ Basically they have a standard procedure that if you’re fired upon, you
fire at everybody that’s around.” Without commenting on specific rules of
engagement, a Pentagon spokesman vehemently rejected Anderson’s description of
the rules.
For now, Anderson has been given lodging by a teacher in Toronto, where he
remains in a state of legal limbo. His case and those of most of his fellow
resisters are on hold until Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board decides the
fate of another deserter, Private Jeremy Hinzman, 26. Raised in Rapid City,
South Dakota, and unsuccessful in two attempts to gain C.O. status, Hinzman
arrived in Toronto with his wife and infant son at the beginning of last year,
two weeks before his unit, the 82nd Airborne, was due to go to Iraq.
Although var
