Gone To Canada. Be Back: Never?
I knew two guys who deserted from the Marine Corps.
Though, let me clarify that for a second. I also knew quite a few guys who, in the Reserves, just sort of stopped coming to drill. Thanks to the legal intricacies of the military and reserve system, these dudes didn't actually, you know, desert... they just stopped coming into work. If the Reserves couldn't convince them to attend drill again, command would just shuffle them out with an Other Than Honorable Discharge. If you happened to be in the middle of one of these beard-growing, pot-smoking fits of pique when the unit got activated, then you could be declared a deserter, but I'm not entirely sure if this ever happened or not.
But before that, before the Reserves, I knew two guys who deserted.
One was my best friend through Boot Camp, a 27 year old plumber from Colorado whose dad had been an officer in the Army. He and I had been late additions to our boot camp platoon--me because I'd spent a couple extra weeks learning how to do pull-ups, and he because he'd been within hours of getting processed out for having an unsatisfactory tattoo. The mermaid with naked breasts on his forearm had infuriated some Drill Instructor and gotten him a ticket out of Boot before it really even started for him, until his dad pulled some strings and got him cycled back in.
Two of the oldest guys in or platoon (I was 22), we became friends fast. We managed to become so indispensible to the Drill Instructors that, on one of our last full-gear hikes in Boot, when my buddy was having trouble and I was helping him, both of us lagging well back of the main body. When one of the DIs yelled at us and I said "It's Klecha and Jones" (not really my buddy's name), the DI's tone immediately softened and he said, "Alright Klecha, go catch back up. We'll help Jones."
Aye aye, sir.
But that night, along with all the rest of the trouble my buddy had had in the hikes, became his undoing. He was old for a recruit, ten years old than the youngest in our platoon, and his ankles were suffering through all of the uphill hikes. And he had elected to join the infantry, active duty. If nothing else, that meant longer and longer hikes through out infantry training, culminating in a twenty-mile monster that would take us clear across Camp Pendleton. He tried getting reclassified, with little success.
So after our first weekend of liberty from the School of Infantry, just before we were to get picked up by our training company, my friend elected not to return. They cut the lock off his locker, inventoried what personal belongings were left, and took it away.
I was pissed, at the time, but I'd also been the one to help carry him through the last couple of hikes in Boot. I knew the pain he was in, I knew infantry wasn't for him. So I was pissed, but I understood. To this day, I can look up his name in the Marine Locator on our official Personal Information Management website, and see that he's listed as a private, with no known contact information.
Still gone, still over the fence.
The other guy I didn't know so well, and he disappeared Thanksgiving weekend, the last liberty we would get from the School of Infantry before graduating two weeks later. I remember that he had been a reservist, too, heading for Oklahoma where he was going to be a TOW Missile Gunner--a guy that rides around in the open hatch of a Humm-vee with the wickedest tank-killer available in a tube next to him. According to the guys who had gone out with him that weekend, he had decided that he just couldn't do it. He couldn't kill.
This had been in 1999, and I understood far, far less than in my buddy's case.
We had joined the Marines, after all. Those of us together in that barracks in November had joined the infantry. I don't know that you could have gotten throgh Boot Camp without reconciling yourself to the notion. I mean, what were those two weeks on the rifle range for? Not just to add more spangly bits to our uniforms, that's for sure.
And, in 1999 it seemed like we'd never have to fight. Oh, sure, the active duty guys might find themselves covering a withdrawal from Somalia, or rescuing a downed pilot in Serbia or something like that, but when would the next war come along?
So, I read this article (culled from rhesagirl) with not a little sympathy. Especially those of us who joined before 9/11, the whole idea of facing an actual grond war (in Asia!) came as an unpleasant shock. Not that we didn't spend all our time in uniform--and quite a bit of it not in uniform--preparing for war, but there's preparing for it in the abstract and there's the concrete inevitability that struck home in 2001.
That said... well, we were all afraid. Except for the delusional oddballs, none of us wanted to go to war, wanted to risk getting killed, risk making our loved ones widows and orphans, risk having to live with the accidental killing of civilians and the deliberate killing of the enemy. If you go, there's a small chance that you'll die or get wounded, but if you run to Canada, there's a 100% chance that your life, as you knew it, is over. When even the San Francisco Chronicle, which otherwise seems like a sympathetic outlet, still labels a guy who went north in the 1960s a "draft dodger," well... you know you're going to carry "deserter" around for a while.
Just as it is apparent that not everyone weighed the consequences of joining when they made that decision, so too I think not everyone who has gone north has weighed the consequences of that move, either. More to the point, they're not going to be able to keep running from their bad decisions; in a way, Canada is the end of the line for them. There are precious few other places they'll be able to go if they muck up what they got there, and each step they take away from the lives they had in the US, the less support they're going to be able to find. The war's not always going to be there, for example, and when the war goes away so does much of the resolve and resources of the peace movement.
But then again, so does some of the pressure of life in the military.
Though, let me clarify that for a second. I also knew quite a few guys who, in the Reserves, just sort of stopped coming to drill. Thanks to the legal intricacies of the military and reserve system, these dudes didn't actually, you know, desert... they just stopped coming into work. If the Reserves couldn't convince them to attend drill again, command would just shuffle them out with an Other Than Honorable Discharge. If you happened to be in the middle of one of these beard-growing, pot-smoking fits of pique when the unit got activated, then you could be declared a deserter, but I'm not entirely sure if this ever happened or not.
But before that, before the Reserves, I knew two guys who deserted.
One was my best friend through Boot Camp, a 27 year old plumber from Colorado whose dad had been an officer in the Army. He and I had been late additions to our boot camp platoon--me because I'd spent a couple extra weeks learning how to do pull-ups, and he because he'd been within hours of getting processed out for having an unsatisfactory tattoo. The mermaid with naked breasts on his forearm had infuriated some Drill Instructor and gotten him a ticket out of Boot before it really even started for him, until his dad pulled some strings and got him cycled back in.
Two of the oldest guys in or platoon (I was 22), we became friends fast. We managed to become so indispensible to the Drill Instructors that, on one of our last full-gear hikes in Boot, when my buddy was having trouble and I was helping him, both of us lagging well back of the main body. When one of the DIs yelled at us and I said "It's Klecha and Jones" (not really my buddy's name), the DI's tone immediately softened and he said, "Alright Klecha, go catch back up. We'll help Jones."
Aye aye, sir.
But that night, along with all the rest of the trouble my buddy had had in the hikes, became his undoing. He was old for a recruit, ten years old than the youngest in our platoon, and his ankles were suffering through all of the uphill hikes. And he had elected to join the infantry, active duty. If nothing else, that meant longer and longer hikes through out infantry training, culminating in a twenty-mile monster that would take us clear across Camp Pendleton. He tried getting reclassified, with little success.
So after our first weekend of liberty from the School of Infantry, just before we were to get picked up by our training company, my friend elected not to return. They cut the lock off his locker, inventoried what personal belongings were left, and took it away.
I was pissed, at the time, but I'd also been the one to help carry him through the last couple of hikes in Boot. I knew the pain he was in, I knew infantry wasn't for him. So I was pissed, but I understood. To this day, I can look up his name in the Marine Locator on our official Personal Information Management website, and see that he's listed as a private, with no known contact information.
Still gone, still over the fence.
The other guy I didn't know so well, and he disappeared Thanksgiving weekend, the last liberty we would get from the School of Infantry before graduating two weeks later. I remember that he had been a reservist, too, heading for Oklahoma where he was going to be a TOW Missile Gunner--a guy that rides around in the open hatch of a Humm-vee with the wickedest tank-killer available in a tube next to him. According to the guys who had gone out with him that weekend, he had decided that he just couldn't do it. He couldn't kill.
This had been in 1999, and I understood far, far less than in my buddy's case.
We had joined the Marines, after all. Those of us together in that barracks in November had joined the infantry. I don't know that you could have gotten throgh Boot Camp without reconciling yourself to the notion. I mean, what were those two weeks on the rifle range for? Not just to add more spangly bits to our uniforms, that's for sure.
And, in 1999 it seemed like we'd never have to fight. Oh, sure, the active duty guys might find themselves covering a withdrawal from Somalia, or rescuing a downed pilot in Serbia or something like that, but when would the next war come along?
So, I read this article (culled from rhesagirl) with not a little sympathy. Especially those of us who joined before 9/11, the whole idea of facing an actual grond war (in Asia!) came as an unpleasant shock. Not that we didn't spend all our time in uniform--and quite a bit of it not in uniform--preparing for war, but there's preparing for it in the abstract and there's the concrete inevitability that struck home in 2001.
That said... well, we were all afraid. Except for the delusional oddballs, none of us wanted to go to war, wanted to risk getting killed, risk making our loved ones widows and orphans, risk having to live with the accidental killing of civilians and the deliberate killing of the enemy. If you go, there's a small chance that you'll die or get wounded, but if you run to Canada, there's a 100% chance that your life, as you knew it, is over. When even the San Francisco Chronicle, which otherwise seems like a sympathetic outlet, still labels a guy who went north in the 1960s a "draft dodger," well... you know you're going to carry "deserter" around for a while.
Just as it is apparent that not everyone weighed the consequences of joining when they made that decision, so too I think not everyone who has gone north has weighed the consequences of that move, either. More to the point, they're not going to be able to keep running from their bad decisions; in a way, Canada is the end of the line for them. There are precious few other places they'll be able to go if they muck up what they got there, and each step they take away from the lives they had in the US, the less support they're going to be able to find. The war's not always going to be there, for example, and when the war goes away so does much of the resolve and resources of the peace movement.
But then again, so does some of the pressure of life in the military.