Freedom and Fear Just Over the Hill

April was the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Iraq, with 137 killed and about 1,000 wounded. Some of the casualties were barely out of high school. Five pregnant wives were left behind. Thirty-six of the dead were fathers, and 60 children lost a parent. At least 21 American soldiers thus far have committed suicide in Iraq, not counting those who killed themselves after returning home. By all accounts, including the most recent survey by the Pentagon itself, troop morale is low.

At least two U.S. military deserters -- Pvts. Brandon Hughey, 19, and Jeremy Hinzman, 25, -- this spring crossed the border into Canada asking for sanctuary. A Quaker-aided Canadian “underground railway” was there to receive them.

Here in the United States, well-established pacifist and “GI hotline” groups report escalating calls from soldiers actively seeking help to file for conscientious objection. A combat squad leader in Iraq, Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, was convicted this month by a military jury of desertion for leaving his combat unit in protest of the war.

The number of deserters -- that is, those absent 30 days “with intent to stay away” -- is still small, nothing yet like the mutinous days of the Vietnam-era “GI resistance.” But we can expect more, especially if a draft is revived.

Desertion is the ultimate act of cowardice or defiance, depending on who is doing the deserting from what. The few Nazi soldiers who threw away their rifles and took off were considered “good,” as were Saddam Hussein’s troops who defected during Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. But what about our own GIs who go AWOL from the no-exit Iraq war out of expediency or principle?

In World War II, only one deserter, Pvt. Eddie Slovik, was executed. During Vietnam, when I was a stationmaster at the London end of a worldwide underground railway for war resisters, the Pentagon’s policy tended toward leniency, if only because there were so many runaways. Once, at U.S. naval headquarters in Grosvenor Square, London, I attended the court-martial of a sailor AWOL for five years but who got off as not guilty because he had taken his hat with him, thus “proving” he might one day return to duty.

On the other hand, for AWOLs and their families, the act of desertion is usually life-changing, with profound and unpredictable consequences, aside from legal penalties.

It’s tricky to draw parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, but there are certain similarities. As in today’s army, most deserters were volunteers, not conscripts; most came from rural or small-town America; and in almost every case, the deserter’s life changed forever.

A decision to go “over the hill” might begin on an impulse resulting from a girlfriend’s “Dear John” letter or a petty wrangle with a sergeant but end with the deserter, often for the first time, questioning the very purpose and meaning of his life. It could also mean years of hiding, and constant fear of being found. Some Vietnam deserters I know never got over the habit of running.

Desertion is a hard road. To survive as an outcast, reviled as a traitor, supported perhaps by a few friends and an antiwar movement that itself was divided over desertion, took guts, guile and tenacity -- just the qualities an army needs in war.

The Vietnam-era deserters are not a faceless statistic to me. I’ve kept in touch with some of them. Legally they’re in the clear, as a result of presidents Ford and Carter’s amnesties, or because they made a private accommodation with the military. Those who survived life on the run are today’s normal citizens. One is a nurse to terminally ill children, another an urban sociologist with a focus on air pollution, another a computer businessman overseas. For whatever reason, desertion is the ultimate rejection of war. It’s an embarrassing, difficult subject, not least for the Pentagon, which keeps changing its policy from arresting and sending deserters back to their units for “rehabilitation” to discharging them in disgust to whatever the latest policy happens to be.

In the past, the Pentagon just wanted the problem to go away. It didn’t. And won’t.

Clancy Sigal is a novelist and screenwriter.