Gimme Shelter: U.S. Military Deserters Once Again Flock to Canada

Looks like this time they picked the wrong country

By MEGAN FELDMAN

Just 5 feet tall, with a baby strapped to her chest and a soft, faltering voice, Kim Rivera is anything but soldierly. Yet, two years ago she was a private in the “War on Terror,” guarding a gate with an M4 rifle and frisking Iraqi civilians at a base in eastern Baghdad.

Now, on a Wednesday evening in January, the 26-year-old mother of three stands in a room in frigid, snow-covered Toronto. Her fair-skinned face and round blue eyes are framed by auburn hair pulled back in a low ponytail, and she places a hand on her bundled baby as she faces about 100 people seated in folding chairs in the middle-class apartment building’s community room.

Rivera clears her throat and unfolds a sheet of paper.

“I was fighting your kind for killing my kind,” she begins, reading a poem she wrote last summer and dedicated to the people of Iraq. “I was fighting for your liberty; I was fighting for peace.” She pauses and takes a deep breath. “But in reality, I was fighting to destroy everything you know and love.”  

The audience listens in silence. Some nod. A few wipe tears from their eyes. They are peace activists and professors, fellow American Iraq War deserters in their 20s and American hippies in their 60s, Vietnam draft dodgers and Canadian mothers.

They’re all rooting for Rivera, red state–warrior-turned-peacenik deserter. They’re hoping and praying that by some lucky chance or the benevolent hand of a politician or judge, the young mother will escape the deportation order that has been issued here and the court martial that awaits back home.

Three years ago, before Iraq and Canada, Rivera’s dreams of going to college and starting a career had faded. She’d spent five years working at Wal-Mart in her hometown of Mesquite, Texas, met her husband in the store’s food court and had her first two children. After several years of living with relatives and struggling to save for their own apartment, Rivera saw the Army as the only way out. Through the military, she could make more than $10.50 an hour, plus get health insurance and higher education. And since she and her husband were both overweight and she was certain that she could shed the necessary pounds faster than he could, she began talking to recruiters.

She enlisted in early 2006. When she signed the contract, she thought of the war in Iraq as a remote and necessary evil. She was raised to praise the Lord and praise her country, and if that meant ridding the world of terrorists while allowing her and her family to get ahead, so be it. Yet after three desolate months in Iraq, consumed by homesickness, missing her children and disgusted by what she saw of the war, she deserted while on leave in 2007 and fled with her family to Canada.

Like her decision to enlist, that gamble hasn’t paid off the way she’d hoped. The Canadian government ordered Rivera to leave the country by January 27, or be deported to the United States, where there’s a warrant for her arrest. Desertion, according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, carries penalties of up to five years in prison, a dishonorable discharge and, in wartime, a potential death sentence.

As the first known female soldier to walk away from the war in Iraq and fight for residency in Canada, Rivera has become a poster girl for a new generation of war deserters and, in particular, the small colony of American deserters living in Toronto and hoping they’ll be able to stay there.

More than 15,000 soldiers have deserted the Army since 2003, and most are thought to be living in the United States, keeping a low profile and trying to avoid a traffic ticket or anything else that would alert authorities to their presence. Army spokesmen stress that only 1 percent of all soldiers desert and that the problem is not large enough to warrant pursuing them for prosecution. Nevertheless, while desertion rates have held steady since the late ’90s, military records show a crackdown on deserters since the war in Iraq began. In both 2001 and 2007, for instance, roughly 4,500 soldiers deserted in each of those years. But in 2001, only 29 deserters were convicted; in 2007, that figure was 108.

The War Resisters Support Campaign estimates that several hundred deserters are living in Canada. Of those, around 40 have come forward to file asylum claims. The others, living under the radar without legal status and likely waiting to see how their peers’ cases pan out, have little to buoy their hopes. While an estimated 25,000 draft dodgers and deserters migrated from the United States to Canada during the Vietnam War, the notion that Canada will absorb today’s deserters as it did their predecessors is dead wrong. The Canadian government — led by conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper — has so far rejected all of the deserters’ requests, and the soldiers referred to as “war resisters” by their supporters are awaiting review from the country’s federal courts to determine their fate. As the cases make their way through the Canadian court system, Rivera is among the first wave to face impending deportation, and a host of others is expected to follow in the coming months. The case of Robin Long, a soldier from Boise, Idaho, who last summer became the first deserter to be deported from Canada, provides a preview of what lies aheaad for deserters upon their return home. Long was handed over to officials at Fort Carson, Colorado, last August, pleaded guilty to desertion and is serving a 15-month prison sentence at Naval Consolidated Brig Miramar, near San Diego. More recently, Cliff Cornell, a deserter from Arkansas, who has lived in British Columbia since leaving his unit four years ago, when he was ordered to Iraq, opted to return to the United States in February after exhausting his legal options. He was arrested by American border agents and sent to Fort Stewart, Georgia, to face charges. Meanwhile, former Cleveland, Ohio, soldier Andre Shepherd went AWOL from his base in Germany and is requesting political asylum from German authorities. His case will test a 2004 European Union measure that requires member countries to grant asylum to soldiers resisting unlawful wars and, if it succeeds, will likely result in a flood of American deserters arriving in Germany.As the community of war resisters in Toronto braces for legal blows, deserters from California, Connecticut, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida and New Jersey continue to rely on the help of Canadian antiwar activists and American Vietnam-era draft dodgers. The War Resisters Support Campaign, led by New York–born Vietnam deserter Lee Zaslofsky, organized tonight’s rally for Rivera and two other Toronto resisters facing deportation. A member of parliament, as well as a local city councilman and various deserters and activists, are here to speak. All watch, silent, as Rivera attempts to describe the emotional and philosophical about-face that led her to abandon her unit and flee to Canada. It’s an internal sea change she often finds difficult to articulate. So tonight, less than a week before Rivera’s scheduled deportation date, she relies on the last stanzas of her poem.

“I was becoming something that wasn’t me, that I didn’t stand for as a person,” she says, choking up. Then she makes a plea: “Canada, I am here. Will you take the time and the heart to understand what I am now fighting for, with words and not a gun?”

In October 2006, Private First Class Rivera deployed to Iraq with the 704th Support Battalion out of Fort Carson. She arrived at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad to find a different war from the one she expected. Instead of driving a truck, she was guarding a gate. Instead of doing “lots of rebuilding,” as she’d thought the Army would be doing, most of the troops seemed to be dedicating their time to raids on civilian homes. She didn’t like the way a lot of guys acted when they returned from patrol. “We tore their house up!” she recalls one soldier saying, jocular and triumphant. She observed that he seemed pretty happy about it. “Hell fuckin’ yeah!” he replied. “They prolly killed my buddy.” Rivera began to imagine what it would be like if foreign soldiers broke into her apartment in the middle of the night and dragged her and her husband, Mario, out of bed in front of their 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. She also disliked the fact that “Hajji” was her unit’s preferred term for Iraqis. She didn’t know the word was a title for a Muslim who’d made the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca; all she knew was that the way they said it made it sound just as mean as “sand person of color.”

At the same time, Rivera missed her husband and children more than she ever thought she would. She had always loved them, but one of the things that gnawed at her was that on some level, her decision to enlist — even if it meant going to an unknown and dangerous place — stemmed from a desire to escape her family situation.

She and Mario’s money crunch had forced them to shuttle between their parents’ homes in Mesquite while trying to save for their own place. This made for friction. Rivera felt that her mother — an insurance agent who became the sole breadwinner when Rivera’s father was hurt at his munitions-factory job — resented her and felt burdened by the young family. To make matters worse, tension developed between her mother and Mario. Rivera, who is Anglo but took her husband’s surname, was convinced that her mother refused to accept Mario because he’s the son of first-generation Mexican and Honduran immigrants.

As she worried about money and became exhausted juggling work and kids and family feuds, Rivera grew increasingly stressed. The more frustrated she became, the more frequently she became enraged at her husband. If he was working, she felt unsupported at home. When he took time off to be with her and the kids, she grew angry because he wasn’t making more money. But when she lost her temper, he’d just stare straight ahead and refuse to fight, which fueled her fury. She’d hurl a shoe or two at his head or fling a radio out the window.At FOB Loyalty, when Rivera recalled those heated moments, she felt horrible and missed her family even more. She got in trouble with her commanders for spending an excessive amount of time talking to Mario on the phone, though one night the habit may have saved her life. One mortar explosion after another rocked the base while she was talking to her husband. When she returned to her bunk, a sizable piece of shrapnel lay on her pillow.

The final turning point came one day in December. An Iraqi man walked through the gate with a little girl, and Rivera moved to frisk them. She assumed the man was coming to file a claim for reparations in exchange for damage caused by American forces. Rivera stopped dead when she turned to the girl. The child looked to be the same age as her daughter, Rebecca. The toddler screamed and wailed inconsolably, her cheeks streaked with tears. Rivera felt sickened by the girl’s cries and wondered what had happened to her and why her mother wasn’t there. Long after the pair had disappeared, Rivera couldn’t stop thinking about them. Seeing the Iraqi child weeping was a watershed moment for her. From then on, she couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was wrong. The bloodshed. The loss. The fact that her children were on the other side of the world, learning and saying and doing new things each day, which she was missing and would never be able to recapture.

Rivera returned home in January for two weeks’ leave, and she and Mario took the kids to Texas to visit their families.Rivera had trouble sleeping. Every time a car door slammed, she’d flatten herself onto the floor. Her mother-in-law, Reyna Rivera, recalls her having panic attacks and crying on the floor, begging God for a way to avoid another stint in Iraq. “She wasn’t stable enough to handle that, and she shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” Reyna says. “To think of her going back — my God.”

Mario, searching for options online, came across the Web site for the War Resisters Support Campaign in Toronto. He called Zaslofsky, the coordinator, who told him the organization would help provide legal aid and temporary housing. At first, the idea struck Rivera as ridiculous. They didn’t know a soul in Canada. At the same time, she couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Iraq. Deliberating and praying over where to go and how to hide, she let pass her scheduled flight date out of the United States. She knew that 30 days after going AWOL she’d be listed as a deserter, the authorities at Fort Carson would alert law enforcement, and a warrant would likely be issued for her arrest. Rivera didn’t want to live as a wanted criminal in her own country, so Canada began to look like a better option. While her commanders searched for her by calling relatives and leaving messages on her phone, recommending that she return within the month if she wanted to receive more lenient punishment, she and Mario loaded the kids into their Geo Prism and drove north. On February 18, 2007, they reached Niagara Falls and drove over the Rainbow Bridge. It was a gray, dreary day as they made their way across the river gorge. Dark storm clouds gathered behind them, but as they emerged on the other side of the bridge in Ontario, the sun came out. Rivera took it as a sign that they had done the right thing.

It’s late January, and the past few days have brought grim news to Zaslofsky’s small office on the fourth floor of a brick building that houses unions and peace organizations. Along with Rivera, two other deserters living in Toronto have been denied residency and are scheduled to be deported by the end of the month. To add insult to injury, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was quoted on the news, complaining that the “bogus refugee claimants” were clogging up the courts with futile petitions. Zaslofsky’s group has declared the last stretch of January “Let Them Stay Week” and is holding nightly rallies and advocacy events, as well as pushing around-the-clock phone calls to the immigration ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office, requesting that the government reconsider its view that desertion does not merit shelter in Canada.

On this overcast afternoon, Zaslofsky, a mustachioed 60-something with bright blue eyes and thinning brown hair, sits at his desk, typing furiously. The wall behind him is papered with posters. One, an image of a soldier with his back turned, reads, “Stop the deportations now” and “War resisters welcome here.” Another advises, “Cut and run. In an immoral war, it’s the thing to do.” Amid the fliers are several photographs. One shows Jeremy Hinzman, a paratrooper from South Dakota, who served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. In 2004, after eight months in Afghanistan and with orders to deploy to Iraq, Hinzman fled north with his wife and 1-year-old son to become the first deserter of his generation to seek political refuge in Canada. Nearby is a picture of Joshua Key, a welder and father of four from Oklahoma, who served seven months in Iraq with the 43rd Combat Engineer Company and deserted in 2004. A photograph of a smiling Robin Long before he was deported and imprisoned serves as a sobering reminder of what’s at stake. The deserters have become a tight-knit community, enjoying weekly dinners at a Chinese restaurant near the office, keeping tabs on one another’s court cases and celebrating the babies born to resisters and their spouses. To Zaslofsky, the young men and women have become his surrogate children, and he doesn’t want any of them jailed. Hunched at his computer, he reads a recent e-mail from a soldier at Fort Knox.

“I’ve been having some problems with what my military does and while I’ve put in for conscientious-objector status, it will most likely get denied, leaving me in a real bad spot,” the soldier writes. “I believe what the Army does is to commit murder … unfortunately, the Army treats anyone with my feelings poorly. I can’t talk to my buddies because, well, simply put, they hate me for what I’m trying to do. I was wondering what the process of political refuge entails and whether it’s advisable to do this.”

Given the grim political climate, what will Zaslofsky tell the man?

“I’ll advise him to call,” he says. “You never give up hope. We’re not discouraged; we’re angry.” Indeed, as he speaks, his face grows red and defiant. “We have a Rush Limbaugh government here — this isn’t how Canada is supposed to be.”

The political landscape was different when he deserted in 1969. Zaslofsky was drafted after graduating from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He reported for basic training but was disturbed by the stories soldiers returning from Southeast Asia told. When news of the My Lai massacre broke, Zaslofsky asked his sergeant major for an explanation of the mayhem that had led American soldiers to slaughter more than 300 unarmed civilians and toss them into a mass grave. “In war, bad things happen,” he recalls the man telling him. “I asked myself, ‘If I were in a situation like that, would I be the heroic guy who says, ‘Hey stop, this is terrible,’ or would I join in because I was experiencing the same rage and frustration they were?’ I felt I couldn’t be sure.” When he received orders to go to Vietnam, he filed for conscientious-objector status but was denied. In January 1970, he drove into Canada. While President Nixon struggled to keep a lid on the antiwar protests roiling the States, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was welcoming America’s deserters by the thousands.

It’s unclear whether today’s deserters will be affected by the fact that America now has a president who campaigned on his conviction that the Iraq War was illegal, which is precisely the refrain of most war resisters, many of whom volunteered to go to Afghanistan but refused to serve in Iraq. Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, who has been active in the peace movement, says President Obama is unlikely to make war deserters much of a priority in the near future. “I can’t imagine he’d consider amnesty or anything until the war has wound down sometime in his second term,” Zunes says. Even if Obama agrees with the resisters about the unfounded case for war in Iraq, he’s still the commander in chief, and it remains a crime to desert one’s comrades in a time of war.

Wayne Hall, an Army spokesman, emphasizes that desertion constitutes a punishable crime for good reason. “AWOL and desertion are crimes that in a time of war put other soldiers’ lives at risk,” he says. “Not only do these crimes go against Army values, they degrade unit readiness.”

Hall questions why soldiers would enlist and only later, once receiving orders to deploy, change their minds and cite political or philosophical reasons for deserting. The fact that large numbers of Americans fleeing the war in Vietnam — 33,000 in 1971 alone — were running from a compulsory draft, while today’s deserters are turning from the consequences of their own choices, has earned these new deserters a scarlet letter in the minds of many Americans. Rivera has been called a “parasite” and a “traitor” in comments posted to her blog, and Zaslofsky says he frequently receives letters from across the United States which not only call the recent deserters “pussies” and cowards who abandoned their brothers in arms but also fools who enlisted deliberately only to shirk their duty.

Yet Zunes and other sociologists point out that unlike the draft dodgers and resisters who fled north decades ago, many of whom were well-educated and had been able to put off the draft for several years by attending college, most recent deserters come from impoverished backgrounds and joined the military because it was the only way they could get an education and an above-minimum-wage job.