Beyond the Border of War

"I think Americans are stunned and shocked when someone rejects America. They assume everyone wants to be in America, or like them. When they don't, America is like a macho, jilted husband."

After the WRSC meeting, some of the younger ones consider walking a few blocks to Grossman's Tavern, but it's too late for cheap, happy-hour beer. Just as well, Zaslofsky thinks. The dingy blues club was a favorite watering hole for the draft dodgers in their day, too. He's tired of the place.

Moments of Truth

The smells, the flavors, the noise, the chaos, the life. Linjamin Mull feels displaced, disconnected. "I always miss home. I miss New York. I miss my friends. I don't really consider this home," the 32-year-old deserter admits. "If another soldier called me up, thinking of coming to Canada, I'd tell him to think twice."

People have been kind, and Mull is appreciative, but there's a reserve that seems aloof to the outgoing Harlem native. "My New York energy is quite different than Toronto's," he surmises. He's gone through a couple of girlfriends already. Connecting with people just seems harder here.

Mull was a New York City social worker who joined the service for the education benefits: He wanted to pursue a graduate degree in psychology or sociology. His childhood had been rough, and Mull landed in foster care at 14 after his mother died. He's proud that he pulled himself out of that stinking hole, went to college. But he was still saddled with student debts and just scraping by, terrified to see that he wasn't that many steps away from the homeless he helped as a city caseworker: no family, no means, no safety net.

He signed up with the Army, choosing avionics as his field "because I didn't want to be kicking down doors, raiding houses. I didn't want that blood on my hands." But once posted to Fort Eustis, Va., Mull concluded his chances of avoiding that scenario evaporated. "Everybody knew Fort Eustis was straight-to-Iraq." He went to the library and Googled "desertion," then called Zaslofsky's office. Not long after, he walked out of his barracks and caught a bus north.

"When you live all your life marginalized, there's no other choice but the military. It preys on people that are less fortunate, and that's how it functions," Mull charges. "You don't see recruiting stations in New York in well-to-do areas or schools. They're in poor areas." He tried to explain this to the Canadian immigration judge who asked him why he signed up for the military during wartime if he was opposed to combat. The judge, he remembers, was sympathetic, but had to follow the letter of the law, and rejected Mull's petition to be considered a political refugee. Much as he misses America, Mull doesn't feel ready to take his chances and come home.

"I feel angry for a lot of different reasons," he says. "There's no social responsibility, and there's no social justice, and that's always angered me.

"I'm not anti-American," he stresses. "I'm anti . . . " He searches for a description, finds none, and holds out his empty hands. "Something."

Patrick Hart is at a loss, too, to neatly label his discontent.

He served in the Army from 1992 until 1995, straight out of high school. His grandfather had been a mess sergeant in World War II, and his father was a Vietnam veteran who didn't talk much about the war. "I got taught how to drive a forklift and shine boots," Hart laughs. He hoped to worked for General Motors after his discharge, but ended up driving a forklift for $8 an hour. He married his longtime girlfriend, Jill, in 2000 and enlisted again, "basically to have job security, benefits, dental."

Jill became the ultimate military wife, decorating the entire house in red, white and blue, with star-shaped pillows on the sofa and wallpaper borders stamped with hearts and flags. "To me, it was a lifestyle; to him, it was a job."

After their son's birth in 2002, Pat was deployed to Kuwait, where over the next couple of years he would see buddies returning from tours in Iraq. Some, he recalls, would show off ghoulish snapshots they'd taken of burning vehicles and bullet-riddled bodies. "The stories I'd hear these guys telling," Hart says, remembering a friend standing in line with him at Burger King, eagerly talking about how he couldn't wait to see his 6-year-old daughter again, and in the next breath boasting about running over "like so many speed bumps" the Iraqi children who got in the way of convoys.

Back home, Hart's own child had been hospitalized for seizures; Rian was eventually diagnosed with epilepsy, and reluctantly, Hart reenlisted in Kuwait to ensure his son's medical care. But with deployment to Iraq looming, Hart secretly boarded a bus to Canada while on leave three summers ago, after telling Jill he was visiting his parents in Buffalo.

Jill, the daughter of a Vietnam veteran herself, couldn't fathom the decision at first. She fielded calls and e-mails from Pat's chain of command pressuring her to coax him back before his AWOL status became desertion: Jill would lose her own civilian job on base, their housing allowance and the insurance that paid for Rian's medicine. She packed up her red, white and blue decorations and made her own reluctant decision.

She would leave America for good, too.

It's Home Now

Barely 200 people turn out for the Toronto rally, and Lee Zaslofsky can't decide whether to be grateful or annoyed that a trio of elderly women called the Raging Grannies has crashed the event to belt out antiwar songs set to Broadway tunes in the vestibule.

Jeremy Hinzman is the first deserter to take the podium, to a standing ovation. He is thin and intense in a blue sweat shirt; his little boy is flopped on his tummy in a side aisle, coloring, while his father talks about how the Army teaches a man incrementally to kill.

"You start out by shooting at circles," he says, "and then a week later, the circles have shoulders, and then after that, the shoulders have torsos and limbs, and before you know it, you're just firing away and it's reflexive."

He began practicing Buddhism and applied unsuccessfully for conscientious-objector status. He came to Canada, he says bitterly, "because there was no other option."

Pat Hart speaks, too, saying he enlisted "for pretty much one reason, because door after door slammed in my face looking for jobs." His folks come up from nearby Buffalo to visit often, and Rian has good subsidized medical care and is going to school in Toronto now. "I love being here. I hope to stay here," Hart says.

Phil McDowell talks about being misled about the reasons for the war he went off to fight as a patriot.

The young Americans declare their eagerness to get work permits, or enroll in college, to get off Canada's welfare rolls quickly and make the same kinds of positive contributions to society that the Vietnam-era immigrants did.

Politicians and academics take to the podium too, recalling the earlier exodus with righteous pride, hoping the embers from that distant fire might spark something big and important now. A samba band waits to lead the protesters in a conga line through the snowy streets to the post office, where they can all mail their letters to Parliament.

Before they go, though, a man with a silver ponytail brushing his black velvet jacket sits down at the old grand piano in front of the empty altar. Bill King dodged the draft in '69, and he tells them all he would do it again, for humanity's sake. His fingers ripple across the keyboard, summoning Dylan, and there is an ache in his voice as he begins the familiar verse:

How many roads must a man walk down. . .