Beyond the Border of War

Jeffry House is one of the key links between the two generations. A draft dodger who came to Canada in a VW Beetle with flower-power decals, the prominent Toronto attorney represents many of the Iraq deserters pro bono. More keep coming, including "people with three tours already" in the war zone.

He is not surprised that Vietnam-era exiles form the heart of the grass-roots network supporting the new arrivals -- organizing protests, finding housing, lobbying the government, providing pocket money and even baking cookies.

And the young deserters, House believes, have offered the old ones something in return, something they surrendered so long ago: an identity.

"This movement," he says hopefully, "has actually crystallized a community that didn't know it even existed."

From Generation to Generation

The rally is two days away, and Zaslofsky thinks this could be their moment. The War Resisters Support Campaign has events planned across Canada to raise awareness and gather petitions to send to Parliament, asking for a "yes" vote on the motion to let the deserters stay.

Twenty or so volunteers are gathered in a borrowed room at the steelworkers' union for this weekly meeting. Jeremy Hinzman huddles with a couple of other deserters about the speeches they'll give at Toronto's gathering, in a Methodist church downtown. Tom Riley, who came here to avoid the draft in 1969, passes around homemade cookies. The need to nurture is clear enough; his own father, 39 years later, still considers him a coward. "I don't think we've reconciled it," Riley says, and the hurt feels permanent now.

Zaslofsky and Riley never even knew each other before this movement, and both feel frustrated that more Vietnam-era settlers haven't come forward. Don't they owe that much? "Ancient history," they hear again and again from the weary grandfathers who want to forget that they were once angry young men. Plans are being made to develop a Web site, do some documentaries, organize more events to draw out the graying Vietnam generation. Thousands, not a few hundred, should be rising up again for this fight, Zaslofsky fumes.

Now the volunteers are labeling 800 envelopes for the letters they'll urge rallygoers to send to Ottawa. In her pink hoodie and ponytail, Phil McDowell's wife, Jamime Aponte, 28, runs the meeting with the precision and enthusiasm of a majorette. She wants to know: Who's been putting up posters where? Are there enough pens to hand out at the church?

Zaslofsky is grateful for her energy. He is weary and not a little disgruntled, himself. He thought he would be easing into a comfortable retirement by now after a career in public health, but here he is working himself ragged for $200 a week as the WRSC director, which just covers his rent, and why is the adopted country he has grown to love making this so damn hard?

"I feel so lucky that my generation of war resisters had it far easier than they do, and probably had a much easier time of it emotionally because there were so many more of us, and because so many more Americans were actively opposing the war than do so now," Zaslofsky says. "They don't have a widespread social movement backing them up."

Zaslofsky has fond memories of "my time," joining campus protests and cheering the Chicago Seven while studying history at Northeastern University. He opened his mail one day shortly after graduation in 1969 to see the dreaded salutation: "From the President of the United States, Greetings." He was being drafted.

He was inducted into the Army and sent to Fort Jackson, S.C., where he applied for status as a conscientious objector but was denied. When his orders for Vietnam came, he packed up his used Impala and left.