Welcome to Resisterville

There was significant media coverage of Allen Abney, a retiree from Kingsgate, B.C., who was recently arrested at the U.S. border on a federal warrant for deserting the U.S. Marines in 1968. Many folks firgured that Abney deserted because of ideological opposition to the Vietnam war. But last week, after being released from a military brig in the U.S., Abney had nothing but praise for the Marines and described his desertion as the result of youthful ignorance and a desire to visit home (Abney was born in the U.S., but raised in Canada).

While Abney doesn’t fit the profile of American war resisters who fled to Canada, the incident has focused the media on the issue of war resistance and in today’s Vancouver Sun there is a story about Nelson, B.C. the home to a community of Vietnam-era American war resisters.

Unlike Abney, the resisters profiled by Doug Ward remain anti-war and stedfast in their condemnation of U.S. military agression.

See the article below:Saturday » March 25 » 2006

Welcome to Resisterville
Unlike ex-marine Allen Abney, many Vietnam dissenters remain steadfast against the U.S.

Doug Ward
Vancouver Sun

Saturday, March 25, 2006

CREDIT: Peter Battistoni, Vancouver Sun
Jeff Mock, a Quaker-raised American who resisted the Vietnam-era policies of his government and moved to Nelson, says living here makes him glad his sons don’t have to deal with the Iraq war.
NELSON – It was 37 years ago, but Brian Bailey still remembers clearly the day a police officer in Berkeley, Calif. fired a load of buckshot that splintered Bailey’s motorcycle helmet, putting him on a road leading to the Slocan Valley in the West Kootenay.

“One of the cops tried to blow my head off with a shotgun,” said Bailey, getting riled up as he recalled what happened to him at the 1969 student demonstration near a piece of land protesters famously dubbed People’s Park.

“I was already upset about Richard Nixon being president and the Vietnam War. But getting shot was the last straw,” said Bailey, now 64, explaining why he quit his motorcycle repair shop and joined other friends in search of cheap land in B.C.

They found it near Nelson in 1970 and Bailey has been in the area since. His feelings about the Slocan Valley haven’t changed since the day he arrived. “Just look at the view out there,” said Bailey, sitting in the front room of a neighbour’s house, pointing to the panorama of snow-capped mountains. “You look at that and go: Wow.”

And his vitriol towards the current U.S. government is as unchecked as his long grey beard. “The only way I can describe my reaction to the American government is that I want to throw up whenever I think of it.”

Bailey is one of the estimated 100,000 Americans who moved from the U.S. to Canada because of the Vietnam War. Surprisingly, slightly more women came north than men, according to John Hagan, a University of Toronto professor and author of Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada.

About 50,000 were draft-age war resisters or “draft dodgers.” About half these people, according to Hagan, remained in Canada. About 40 per cent of this group — 10,000 or so — remained in B.C., many in the Kootenays.

These Americans blended into Canadian society, becoming hockey dads and moms, MLAs, local politicians, professionals and entrepreneurs. The absorption of these Americans into Canadian life was so seamless that their historic migration is often forgotten, although every so often something happens that reminds us of their flight north to a much more peaceful Canada.

One continuing reminder is the American invasion of Iraq, which some say is turning into a quagmire reminiscent of the Vietnam War.

“The Iraq war has brought back memories of why I left the U.S.,” said Jeff Mock, a Nelson tofu-maker who fled to Canada in opposition to the Vietnam War.

“It’s made me glad that my two sons, who are of military service age, don’t have to deal with that.”

The Vietnam War era was also recalled earlier this month when Allen Abney, a retired man from Kingsgate, was arrested at the U.S. border on a federal warrant for deserting the U.S. Marines in 1968.

Initially, it was assumed by many that Abney had bolted from the Marines because of the Vietnam War. And that upon his release from a military brig in California last week, Abney might have harsh words about that war and the marines who placed him in custody.

But Abney did not fit the conventional profile of a Vietnam War-era resister. Abney was born in the U.S. but raised in Canada. He had wanted to be a marine throughout his youth and volunteered while living in Toronto.

Abney, now a 56-year-old grandfather, said that his decision to desert had nothing to do with either being opposed to the Vietnam War or being afraid to go.

“I just got to thinking one night, being dumb and stupid, that it would be nice to go back home.”

He said that the other war resisters came to Canada “out of their belief that the war was wrong, and I respect that position.” Abney added that this was not his view of the war.

Abney went on to praise the marines and “the young warriors” currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sitting in the kitchen of his old character house in Nelson, Mock said Abney’s pro-military remarks didn’t reflect the Americans he knew who came to Canada.

“He [Abney] had been a kid who didn’t want to get himself shot, I suppose, and was afraid enough to come to Canada. But it’s not the reason I came to Canada or why most of the people that I know did.

“Most people I knew either believed that war was immoral or that the Vietnam War was immoral. I believed both of those things.”

Mock, 57, grew up near New York City in a pacifist Quaker family. He was offered conscientious objector status on religious grounds by his local draft board, which meant he wouldn’t have to serve in Vietnam.

But Mock couldn’t bring himself to accept an offer that was not available to other young Americans. And he wasn’t about to join the military. So prison time appeared inevitable.

“But my girlfriend didn’t want me going to jail and so we came to Canada instead.”

His girlfriend, Irene, drove Mock to Canada in a friend’s Volkswagen bus in 1970, eluding the agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who were looking for him.

Bob Lerch also avoided going to Vietnam and now lives in the Slocan Valley where he owns a car repair shop called Organic Mechanix.

Sitting inside his garage, Lerch said he didn’t believe Abney’s statement that he regrets bolting from the marines.

“It’s hard for me to imagine him saying that all of a sudden his life was a mistake,” said Lerch, adding that “there’s lots of people who came up here and I’ve never heard anybody, who stayed here, say that.”

Lerch believes that Abney was pressured by the U.S. Marines to be pro-military upon his return to Canada. “If I had his choice, I’d do the same thing. I mean, in order not to go to prison, I’d say anything.”

Abney, in response to Lerch’s remark, said: “That comment is certainly not true. The marines didn’t pressure me one bit to say anything, one way or the other.”

Lerch doesn’t advertise his draft dodger status. He says on his auto shop’s website that he moved from New York City in 1974 to the Slocan Valley for a “lifestyle change.”

But Lerch, 59, is clearly proud of his decision not to go to Vietnam.

“Basically I didn’t want to kill anybody, especially a bunch of farmers,” said Lerch.

“The Vietnamese weren’t attacking the states. And I’d had friends who had been drafted and they came back so screwed up.”

Just as Lerch was about to be drafted into the army, a friend returned from Canada. “He told me: ‘You wouldn’t believe how nice it is up there.’ He was going back and asked if I wanted to come.”

Lerch crossed the border in 1970 and spent his first few years working in Vancouver, often on construction crews with other young Americans working illegally until they could get their landed immigrant status.

Eventually, he bought an old school bus and headed for the Maritimes to buy some land. On the way he stopped in the Slocan Valley and didn’t go any further east.

“I got here and said: ‘Wow. This is the nicest place I’ve ever been to in my whole life’ and I stayed.

“There were hundreds of other Americans here. And we were accepted even though we looked a little weird back then, being hippies.”

Many of the young Americans were helped by the descendants of an earlier wave of war resisters drawn to the Kootenays in the early 1900s — the Doukhobors, a sect of Christian pacifists who left Russia to avoid serving in the czar’s army.

Among the other Americans in the Slocan Valley were the parents of Aubrey Nealon, who wrote and directed A Simple Curve, a movie released earlier this year that tells a coming-of-age story about the son of hippie, draft-dodging American parents living in the valley.

“There were a lot of Americans here and they formed the largest subgroup in my little community of New Denver,” recalled Nealon.

He said that this well-educated, middle-class group of newcomers “not only fit in but they took charge in many ways. Many of them were trying to build a new and better way of living.”

Among the Americans Nealon knew growing up was Gary Wright, now the mayor of New Denver and chair of the Regional District of Central Kootenay.

Corky Evans, the MLA for Nelson-Creston, is another prominent American refugee. Evans has said that he came to Canada in 1969 with his wife and two step-children to give them a better life.

Evans, who settled in the Slocan Valley, described himself as a war resister but said he did not dodge the draft as his draft board would not have forced someone with a family to enlist. Indeed, he was granted deferment status a month after arriving here.

Nealon said that Wright and Evans are examples of how the war resisters brought new ideas and energy into the area.

“It’s made for an interesting cultural mix. You go to these small Kootenay towns and they don’t seem like your average tiny town in the middle of nowhere, which is what they are.

“There are three places on the main street of New Denver where you can get a delicious cup of cappuccino. It’s been like that for years and this is a town of only 600 people.”

The idea came to Issac Romano one day while he was sitting in a cafe on funky Baker Street in Nelson. There should be an event and a monument, he thought, to remind Canadians of the presence of Vietnam War resisters in Canada.

Romano, 57, was a family counsellor and longtime peace activist from Seattle with the touchy-feely, earnest air of a new-age therapist.

He’d been granted a deferment during the Vietnam War. He’d developed a strong respect for Canadian life through his connection with Or Shalom, the Vancouver synagogue attended by many left-wing Jews.

Romano came to Nelson from Seattle in 2001, drawn by a new job, and he became impressed by the numbers of American war resisters in the Kootenays. He decided something had to done to honour their contribution to the region and to the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Romano held a news conference in 2004 to announce his idea for a large bronze monument in the form of a man and a woman greeted by a Canadian with outstretched arms.

All hell broke lose.

A small story about the event in the Nelson Daily News made its way over the wire services to the right-wing TV network Fox News. The conservative base of the Republican party, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, was incensed by Romano’s idea. The City of Nelson website was bombarded with e-mails from angry Americans.

The local council and chamber of commerce freaked out about the potential loss of American tourist dollars.

Many of the draft dodgers and war resisters living in the area were disappointed by the reaction of Nelson’s business class. Not so much because they wanted a monument — more because they didn’t like to see their community cave into fear of right-wing Americans.

Nelson resident Ernest Hekkanen, 59, left his Seattle home in 1969 and crossed the border at Blaine. He doesn’t mince words when talking about how many in Nelson turned against Romano’s plan for a monument.

“This is a little cloistered, parochial community that feels as though international difficulties should not impinge upon its middle-class existence,” said Hekkanen. “Most of them have about as much spine as a hunk of Jell-O.”

Under pressure, Romano withdrew the suggestion, but didn’t give up his idea of a gathering to recall the draft-dodger phenomenon.

The event is called the Our Way Home Reunion and it is set for July 6-9 at the Brilliant Cultural Centre in Castlegar. Romano has lined up an impressive list of speakers, including George McGovern, the former senator who was the presidential candidate for the Democrats in the 1972 U.S. election. Tom Hayden, the Sixties protest leader, is expected to attend. So are singers Buffy Saint-Marie and Holly Near.

Romano isn’t worried that Fox News will use the reunion to agitate its viewers — he’s happy to spark debate about the Vietnam War and the current Iraq war.

He said the furore over his efforts to honour draft dodgers living around Nelson has forced many Americans to reconsider the Vietnam War “by asking the question: ‘Why did good people leave?’ ”

Romano does not expect the Our Way Home Reunion will spark much opposition in the Kootenays. He said that local businessmen and politicians came to realize that the tumult over the monument “generated far more publicity for Nelson than all of the city’s paid-for advertising.”

The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story about the draft dodgers in Nelson and the New York Times ran a feature article with the headline: “Greetings from Resisterville.”

Hekkanen, the Nelson-based artist and writer of a long list of self-published books, is one American refugee helping Romano with the Our Way Home project.

Hekkanen, who says that “I describe myself as a draft dodger with pride,” feels a duty to continue his opposition to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

“My feeling, even now, is that if you are not contributing to bringing down the Republican White House, then you are probably culpable of war crimes being committed in the Iraq.”

Earl Hamilton, a Nelson school teacher who moved to Canada from Michigan in 1970, is more ambivalent about the Our Way Home Reunion.

“Reunion? I’m not sure we were ever unified,” said Hamilton, sipping coffee at the Oso Negro Cafe, a landmark of Nelson’s alternative subculture.

Hamilton, 58, said he considers himself fully Canadian, not American, adding that he had little interest in seeing a monument erected to honour draft dodgers.

“It’s not something I want to memorialize. It’s like: I’m in my life. I don’t have a great feeling of camaraderie for American expatriates. It’s not my peer group.”

Not that Hamilton has lost his anti-war bent. Hamilton was given a draft deferment in 1969 and allowed to work in a university hospital as a janitor. But he decided to leave America when some other janitors responded to the deaths of four anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University by writing on a blackboard: National Guard 4, Kent State 0.

“I just told my supervisor that I’m not working here anymore,” recalled Hamilton. “I realized that I had had enough of the political culture of the U.S.”

Now Hamilton wonders whether Canada will welcome new American war resisters avoiding service in the Iraq war.

He believes the new Conservative government is too willing to please the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that Canada is now a haven for pacifists and conscientious objectors. It’s become a place where whatever America says goes.”

Hagan, the University of Toronto professor who has researched the Vietnam War resisters, plans to attend the Our Way Home Reunion.

Hagan, also a draft dodger, said that many resisters are now in their late middle-age — “a time when people might naturally think back about what happened.”

But the focus of many of these Vietnam War resisters isn’t just on the past. He knows many in Toronto who have helped spearhead efforts to give sanctuary to young Americans avoiding service in Iraq.

“When we came in the Sixties, we were able to settle in because there was a lot of support for us. There is a memory of that and a desire to provide it for a new set of arrivals.”

dward@png.canwest.com

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COUNTING BODIES

More than 58,000 U.S. military personnel died in the Vietnam War, with about 300,000 wounded, according to World Book Encyclopedia.

According to the website Vietnam War, one million Vietnamese combatants and four million civilians were killed in the war.

The U.S. casualty number in Iraq, according to the Washington Post, as of March 17 stood at 2,310 (1,808 in hostile actions, 502 in non-hostile actions).

According to Iraqbodycount.net, Iraqi civilian deaths since March 20, 2003 are between 33,773 and 37,895.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

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