Let Them Stay: U.S. War Resisters in Canada, 2004-2016

Introduction

By Luke Stewart and Sarah Hipworth, January 2016

It has been over a decade since the first United States soldier came to Canada refusing to participate in the attack and occupation of Iraq that began in March 2003. While it is difficult to know just how many U.S. war resisters came to Canada, it is believed that during the war’s height (2006– 2008) there were roughly 200-300 who crossed the border. None of these soldiers could know when they came that their cases would drag on in legal limbo for as long as they have. To this day, not one U.S. war resister has been offered refugee status in Canada.

At a campaign stop in Winnipeg during the 2015 Canadian federal election, Alexina Key asked then prime-ministerial hopeful Justin Trudeau whether he would enact a provision to let her husband, Joshua Key, and other war resisters stay in Canada. Invoking the legacy of the Vietnam war resisters and Pierre Trudeau’s opening of the borders during that time, Alexina demanded to know what a new Liberal government would do if elected. Put on the spot, Trudeau said he would examine the case with full compassion and openness.

Canada is remembered as a sanctuary for tens of thousands of Vietnam war resisters. Less well known is that while 20,000-30,000 American draft dodgers came to Canada between 1965 and 1973, so did at least 4,000 U.S. soldiers who deserted or went AWOL. At the height of the war in Vietnam, U.S. soldiers coming to Canada in opposition to the Vietnam War were seen as a political liability to the governments of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. Between January 1966 and May 1969, the Canadian government, by implementing Operational Memorandum No. 117, ordered Canadian border officials to exclude U.S. military deserters from Canada while allowing draft dodgers in. Only after pressure from the Canadian anti-draft and anti-war movements was the government forced to reverse its policy of discrimination and let military deserters into Canada.

It took three years for Canadian officials to reverse its policy of exclusion during the Vietnam War. Today soldiers seeking sanctuary in Canada from another illegal, immoral, and unjust war have languished in a state of legal limbo for twelve years and counting. Immigration rules have changed since Vietnam, and instead of applying for landed immigrant status at the border, about 50 U.S. war resisters applied for refugee status at the urging of their lawyers. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the exclusion of military deserters during the Vietnam War was accomplished in secret. Today it is public policy in the form of the discriminatory Operational Bulletin 202, issued in 2010 by the Conservative government.

The transition from a conscript (or draft) army made up of what is commonly known as citizen soldiers to an all-volunteer force after the Vietnam War has left many with the notion that professional U.S. soldiers have a responsibility to obey all orders because they volunteered to serve. This argument ignores the transformation in post-1945 international law with the adoption of the Nuremberg Principles in 1950 and the U.S. military’s own Army Field Manual of 1956, which state that soldiers have a duty to refuse unlawful orders and can be held individually liable for illegal acts. In fact, soldiers court martialled for publicly refusing to participate in the war on Iraq have received jail sentences ranging from six to 24 months in military prison. In an astounding 94 per cent of cases, deserters are administratively discharged. The campaign for sanctuary learned that it is the soldiers who publicly refuse orders that are punished more harshly in the military justice system.

When soldiers are confronted with a war they believe to be an act of aggression or one in which they believe war crimes are being committed, they face very few options. Over the past decade we have heard the argument that they should have applied for conscientious objector status instead of coming to Canada. However, the regulations for conscientious objection have not evolved sufficiently to recognize a soldier’s obligations under international law. To be a conscientious objector in the American system, you must be opposed to war in any form and not to a particular war like Iraq. Nor is there any rule stating that a commanding officer needs to inform troubled soldiers that they can apply for conscientious objector status. Therefore, soldiers facing possible (re)deployment to an illegal conflict or the prospect of going to jail for disobeying orders deserted to Canada, applied for refugee status, and argued that as soldiers, their opposition to the war would amount to persecution in the United States.

In December 2013, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) affirmed an individual’s conscientious objection may be expressed through draft-evasion or desertion. We believe that the U.S. war resisters who refused to participate in Iraq or Afghanistan are the new conscientious objectors. They have a right and a duty not to participate in an illegal war or to follow unlawful commands. Soldiers who are confronted with (re)deployment face stark choices. As they recount in the following pages, many soldiers were told they only had two options: deploy or go to jail. In the post–Nuremberg Tribunal era and with the emerging international right to conscientious objection, soldiers need more options available to them than jail or deploying to a war they believe is illegal.

This edited collection places the oral histories, writings, and personal narratives of U.S. war resisters at the forefront of their struggle for refugee status or permanent residency in Canada. The principled opposition to the war on terror that these soldiers of conscience represent is a clarion call for us to heed as we enter another century wrought by war and conflict.

As these personal writings from soldiers demonstrate, war is hell. It kills the innocent people they were ostensibly sent to protect, and many of the soldiers who return are physically or mentally maimed. Soldiers’ experiences of war matter, and their interpretations of war are at least as valid as those of generals, government officials, academics and journalists. Soldiers who have gone to war and chosen to walk away from death and destruction deserve to be listened to.

The wars waged against terrorism by U.S. and its allies, including Canada, have brought suffering, pain, and death to the innocent civilians of the invaded countries. In March 2015, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that the death toll from twelve years of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan had reached at least 1.3 million people. The Cost of War Project at Brown University estimated that the total number of people displaced due to these wars, by 2014, had reached 2.7 million in Iraq (1.3 million internally displaced and 1.4 million refugees) and 3,328,000 in Afghanistan (415,000 internally displaced and 2,913,000 million refugees).

With these grim statistics in mind—statistics that tend to paralyze us, or worse, sanitize and normalize war—this book challenges the notion that the U.S., or any country, has the right to invade and occupy a sovereign nation whenever it pleases by amplifying the voices of those soldiers who were there to see it first-hand. Their stories demonstrate that international law and the laws of war still matter. Soldiers who fundamentally believe they are participating in an illegal war or have committed, or will commit, war crimes or crimes against humanity, should be allowed to refuse to participate in that war.

The editors spent several years, first separately and then together, collecting the stories of and working in close collaboration with the U.S. war resisters who came to Canada. The book is divided into two sections. The first presents individual accounts of the war resisters and their families, in order of their arrival in Canada. In this section you will find resisters’ oral histories, public statements, writings, and interviews. We have also included relevant newspaper articles, and statements of support by individuals and organizations. The second section provides details of the political and legal campaigns undertaken since 2004 in the struggle to allow the resisters to stay in Canada.

The stories presented here speak of war, death, and destruction, but these experiences represent more than just soldiers of conscience refusing to participate in wars they feel are criminal. Their stories tell us something about humanity, courage, perseverance, struggle, and hope. The case of the war resisters in Canada forces us to confront serious questions of war and peace, soldiers’ right to conscience, and their ability to refuse orders that are immoral, illegal, or unjust under international laws of war.

By denying conscientious objectors a safe haven in Canada, we turn our backs on our most cherished values and our historical role of offering sanctuary to Americans who are fleeing their country of persecution. This should make Canadians and Americans pause to think about the direction we are choosing to take in these early years of the 21st century.

Part I: Hell No, We Won’t Go (Back)

Personal Narratives of U.S. War Resisters

From Left to Right: Ryan Johnson, Joshua Key, Jeremy Hinzman, Phil McDowell, Dale Landry, Jules Tindungan, Kimberly Rivera, Dean Walcott, and Chris Vassey. Fort Erie, Ontario; 16 October 2010.

Jeremy Hinzman and Nga Nguyen

Jeremy Hinzman was a U.S. soldier in the elite infantry division of the 82nd Airborne from late-2000 to early 2004. As he went through basic training and airborne school, and after reading influential books, he began to change his mind about war. In August 2002 he applied for conscientious objector (CO) status and from December 2002 to July 2003 he served in Afghanistan in a non-combat role. As is often the case with soldiers, Hinzman’s CO application was adjudicated in the war zone after he deployed instead of before. He was refused CO status while in Afghanistan and when he returned to the U.S., he learned that his unit would deploy to Iraq in January 2004. Instead of going, he and his family drove to Canada. Hinzman lives in Toronto with his wife Nga Nguyen, son Liam, and Canadian-born daughter Meghan.

The Soldier Who Refuses to Fight

On a snowbound afternoon 955 kilometres north of where the U.S. Army says he should be, Private First Class Hinzman, Jeremy D., No.503946779, is sitting in the sunroom of the rambling old mansion owned by Toronto’s pacifist Quakers. He is describing the chants he learned in basic training.

You’re always walking around in formation. And you have this [marching] chant: ‘We’re trained to kill, and kill we will.’ And during bayonet training, the instructors ask this question, ‘What makes the grass grow?’ and everyone chants in response, ‘Blood, blood, blood.’

The U.S. Army wants him in Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the 82nd Airborne Division, America’s Guard of Honor. But this week Mr. Hinzman, 25, passed the 30-day limit for being absent without leave. He officially became a deserter.

Just before midnight on Jan. 2, he and his wife, Nga Nguyen, 31, quietly loaded their 21-month-old son, Liam, and a few belongings into their 1996 Chevrolet Prism and disappeared into the darkness for a 17-hour drive to the Canadian border. They left just before his unit—the second battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment—was shipped overseas.

As a result, Mr. Hinzman is believed to be the first U.S. soldier to apply for refugee status in Canada after refusing combat duty in Iraq—the first echo of the 12,000 deserters and 20,000 draft resisters who came north more than 30 years ago to escape the Vietnam War.

In 2002, Mr. Hinzman asked the army to declare him a conscientious objector because he had arrived at the religious conviction that killing and war in any guise are wrong. His request was rejected.

He has in principle the basis for a refugee claim. He believes that the invasion of Iraq is an international human-rights violation in which he cannot morally take part; he says he will be subjected to persecution for this belief if sent back: imprisonment and dishonourable discharge, leading to discrimination in the job market. (They were always telling us, ‘You get dishonourable discharge and you’re going to be flipping burgers your whole life.’)

There is a precedent of sorts. Canada accepted an Iranian conscript who said he had deserted thinking his country was going to use chemical weapons.

In practice, however, the odds that Mr. Hinzman will be declared a refugee are not robust. For Americans of any sort, says University of Toronto law professor Audrey Macklin, an expert on refugee law, the chances are low. Extremely low. Very rare. As in, there may be a couple of favourable decisions by the Immigration and Refugee Board that have escaped notice.

Chuck Fager is executive director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, the city bordering Fort Bragg. Last year, his counsellors received 6,000 calls from troubled soldiers. He says Mr. Hinzman fits the profile of today’s recruits: undereducated people from small-town and rural America with few employment opportunities who join up for the money.

Both Mr. Hinzman and his wife grew up in Rapid City, S.D., population 62,000, in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. After high school, he decided not to go to college because he was afraid of saddling himself with student debt and starting a whole cycle of middle-class existence. He went to work as a baker.

Ms. Nguyen earned an undergraduate social-work degree from the University of South Dakota and found a job working with disadvantaged preschool children. She met her future husband through a mutual acquaintance and fell in love.

They moved to Boston in 2000 to experience life in a big city. Ms. Nguyen, burned out from social work, found a job in a health-food store. Mr. Hinzman took whatever employment he could find.

They wanted to start a family, but Mr. Hinzman felt his life was going nowhere and hit on the idea of joining the army. If he served a four-year stint, the military would give him $50,000 he could use for college. Ms. Nguyen tried to talk him out of it. I could see his thinking … but the military! I finally said, ‘You decide, and I’ll support you.’

He enlisted on Jan. 17, 2001, leaving Ms. Nguyen—they had married a few weeks earlier—in Boston while he did his basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia.

At first, he liked the army. He signed up for a paratroop regiment. He liked the camaraderie. He liked the idea of free housing and subsidized groceries. Shooting rockets and machine guns and jumping out of planes, it’s all fun until you start to think about the bigger picture and what it’s all about.

Meaning an army’s bottom-line purpose is to kill people. Right. And the chants, that was disconcerting to me. I mean, you could play the game and yell it, but you could see that your fellow trainees were really getting into it … like they were totally losing their whole notion of self, turning into these little automatons. It was kind of frightening to me, but I pushed it to the back of my head. It was a pretty easy game to play.

Before enlisting, he had become interested in Buddhism, and one day at Fort Benning, the sergeant was doing his rounds and found him in the lotus position, meditating. There was a big to-do about that, and people found out and were asking questions—‘What the heck were you doing?’—and I had to explain myself.

In July, 2001, Mr. Hinzman finished training and was posted to Fort Bragg. He was assigned a two-bedroom sixplex house with a little yard, and Ms. Nguyen joined him.

She felt isolated at the base, home to 45,000 service people. She tried going to wives’ meetings, but she didn’t fit in. The other women were either patriotically proud of their husbands or afraid to voice dissent for fear of harming their husbands’ careers.

In the first week of September, she learned that she was pregnant. On Sept. 11, she heard a news broadcast and knew immediately that life was going to change.

The young couple suddenly found themselves amid frenetic patriotism they didn’t share. They were horrified by the jetliner attacks but intellectually (Mr. Hinzman read the left-tilting Nation and Noam Chomsky) saw them as a consequence of U.S. foreign policy.

They attended Quaker meetings in Fayetteville, where they found friends and a spiritual approach to violence in the world that, says Ms. Nguyen, felt very right.

Mr. Fager recalls that Mr. Hinzman didn’t rush into applying for conscientious objector (CO) status. He had philosophical issues to work through. And Mr. Hinzman says he felt conflicted. He liked his job. He was a good soldier. But he didn’t want to kill.

Finally, on Aug. 2, 2002, he asked to be transferred, as a conscientious objector, to non-combat duties. He submitted a six-page eloquent, thoughtful, often moving explanation of how spiritually he had come to change his mind about using a gun. He wrote that he had entered the army to be part of a force that was working to do good … to help stem the tide of senseless conflict…. Although I still have a great desire to eliminate injustice, I have come to the realization that killing will do nothing but perpetuate it. Thus, I cannot in good conscience continue to serve as a combatant in the Army.

The army lost the application.

Which happens a lot, says Mr. Fager, who now advises soldiers to apply by registered mail.

Mr. Hinzman was told on Halloween that his paperwork had never turned up. By then, his unit knew it was going to Afghanistan.

He reapplied immediately. And he went to Afghanistan, where he was assigned to kitchen duty for eight months until his application could be considered.

A hearing was held before Lieutenant Dennis Fitzgerald at Kandahar Airfield on April 2, 2003.

Three of his sergeants testified that he was a good soldier who embodied Army Values. But one of them, First Sgt. James Carabello, said he couldn’t understand how Mr. Hinzman, with all his training, could suddenly decide he was a conscientious objector.

He fully knew what our mission is, and that is to do an Airborne Assault onto an objective and destroy the enemy. This did not become an issue until it was apparent we were going to deploy to Afghanistan.

That wasn’t true. He had applied several weeks before learning about the deployment.

Even so, Lt. Fitzgerald rejected the application. His hearing was over 25 minutes after it began.

In a volunteer military, the presumption is that soldiers are not opposed to war, says Lt.-Col. Rick Mathis, a senior policy army chaplain at the Pentagon. The purpose of the hearing, he says, is to allow applicants to rebut that reasonable presumption. And although army regulations do permit a successful CO applicant to be assigned to non-combat duties—medic, clerk, cook—in practice, Col. Mathis says, I haven’t seen it.

In other words, the army thinks that you’re not reasonable if you become morally opposed to war after you’ve voluntarily enlisted. But if you make your case, you’re discharged. And if you don’t, you pick up your gun. There’s no middle ground.

When Mr. Hinzman and his unit finally returned to Fort Bragg, he was made his company’s armourer, looking after the weapons. Eight months later, on Dec. 20, he was told that his regiment was shipping out again, this time to Iraq.

Back in Rapid City for Christmas, he agonized over what to do, sharing his thoughts with family members, except for his highly patriotic grandfather. His mother and grandmother were sympathetic (his father is dead), and on Dec. 28, he decided to join the 1 per cent of U.S. soldiers—about 4,000 a year, the Pentagon says—who desert.

His wife felt relief. For Ms. Nguyen, the issue was simple: I wanted Liam to have a father. The college money? It would be no good if you’re dead.

The family returned to Fort Bragg, and on Jan. 2, Mr. Hinzman had the day off work. The couple cleared out their refrigerator. They packed up their books and stored them in the basement of Quaker House. They arranged for a civilian friend with a truck to pick up other belongings after they had left. They had already wired their savings to a bank in Rapid City. And they had looked up maps on the Internet to find the best route to Toronto.

At 11 p.m., they bundled Liam into the 1996 Chevrolet Prism and drove into the night.

Jeffry House, picked by Mr. Hinzman from a list of lawyers provided by the Quakers, says the first thing his new client asked was whether U.S. officials could cross the border and take him back.

They can’t. They never could. But other things have changed. In the Vietnam era, the federal government never declared fugitives from the military to be refugees; it just didn’t look too closely at how they got into the country or qualified as landed immigrants. Mr. Hinzman isn’t likely to receive the same laissez-faire scrutiny.

The family moved into a basement apartment this week to await their hearing. Mr. Hinzman wants to be a bicycle courier once he can legally work. He’s very fit, Ms. Nguyen says.

Last week, three soldiers from a sister regiment sent to Iraq at the same time as the 504th were killed by a roadside bomb. A fourth was critically injured.

An American Deserter in Canada

"Those who make the conscientious judgment that they must not participate in this war … have my complete sympathy, and indeed our political approach has been to give them access to Canada. Canada should be a refuge from militarism."—Pierre Trudeau¹

More than 50,000 Americans came to Canada during the Vietnam War to avoid serving in that conflict. They were called draft dodgers. However, nearly half of these men did not dodge the draft, but deserted after having already been on active duty.

Once again, America is in a conflict that was not based on its being under imminent threat. What is at stake is geopolitics and ideology. At this point in the Iraq War, more American soldiers have died than at the same point during the Vietnam conflict. While being vastly superior in technology and manpower, America faces an enemy that has an unconventional way of fighting. A growing number of American soldiers have decided that they are unwilling to kill or be killed without a tangible reason. This is remarkable in a period when, unlike the late sixties, not every facet of society is being questioned.

However, one issue in the current discontent was not present 30 years ago: America no longer has a draft. Except those who have served extraordinarily long, every American soldier who now serves freely signed a contract for a specified length of time. Because no state coercion was involved, many who would otherwise be sympathetic argue that these soldiers, unlike draftees, have lost the right to question orders, no matter how moral or immoral, legal or illegal they may be.

I say this is not so. A contract is an agreement by two sides that certain acts will be performed under certain conditions. There is a quid pro quo involved. Boundaries surround the playing field. But as a deserter, my bias may keep me from writing about it objectively.

Why Soldiers Refuse

There has been press coverage of soldiers who have deserted to avoid serving in Iraq. Most of the soldiers who are now making their way to Canada have already served in Iraq and cannot in good conscience go back. Most reportage fails to report the circumstances that lead a soldier to sever his bonds with his country. Whether the quest for refuge succeeds or fails, the consequences of such a decision will last for the rest of his life.

There are financial factors too. In this era of outsourcing, the stability that comes from having a trade or an education is no longer guaranteed. The Horatio Alger myth of the common man climbing the social ladder is just that—a myth. Sure, every able person who is accepted to university can obtain the means to attend. But except those from privileged backgrounds, it is commonly necessary to incur loans to study and gain the ticket to a better life. Because astronomical sums are involved, one may become a serf, with debts that have no end.

In addition, America lacks the universal health care that is available in every other industrialized country. Millions of responsible Americans are one illness away from bankruptcy. Though many companies offer health insurance to their employees, it is not free. Organized labour in the United States is becoming a relic and many youths grow up in broken homes, without religion—except for the rigid, divisive mega-churches that dot the American landscape.

Coming of Age in America

Economic factors propel most youth to join the military, but many are also motivated by the ostensibly higher meaning that the military offers. Service, sacrifice, teamwork, the good of the nation, health care, and money for college are all things that the military stands for. This offers an easy solution to problems facing those coming of age in today’s service economy. Why not enlist?

This was my experience in the winter of 2000-2001. I had been out of high school for nearly three years. Although my marks were not atrocious, they would not have put me in contention for many scholarships. When I explored the possibility of financial aid, I learned that my family made too much money for me to qualify—but they did not make enough to help with tuition. I came from a broken home. Although I was able to hold down a job, it was leading nowhere. Walking into the recruiter’s office, I told him to not bother with the sales pitch.

I believe that what differentiates humans from animals is our ability to tell right from wrong. While we vary somewhat in our conceptions of good