The stories of five members of the American military who have chosen to seek asylum in Canada rather than continuing to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
INTERVIEWED BY ROCCO CASTORO, PHOTOS BY RYAN FOERSTER
As soon as I started high school, in a small town in Florida called Live Oak, I signed up for the ROTC. I had a pretty big misconception of what the military was really like. Those John Wayne movies and the history books made it look like there was all this camaraderie and everything they did was right. At the time I thought it was OK to kill people, too. A lot of it came from my dad, who was in the Air Force, and he would always tell stories about hanging out with his buddies and his experiences in Vietnam. But it never shed any light on how horrifying war really is.
At 17 my dad encouraged me to join the Coast Guard as a reservist. This was a bit after 9/11 and we were angry, believing everything that was told to us on the news about bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s connection to Iraq. We would’ve been pretty disappointed if there hadn’t been a war.
A few years passed, the situation was escalating in the Middle East, and I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I moved to Gainesville where I was working at a supermarket deli, getting frustrated at making only $7.50 an hour. I didn’t want to take out massive loans for school. I didn’t even know what kind of schooling I wanted to do. I was pretty familiar with the military so I figured I could go to a recruiter and convince him to give me a better deal than some 18-year-old fresh out of high school.
I visited a recruiter and tried to work out a deal to get as much money for school as possible. I didn’t want to be in the fight and was looking for some type of communications job so I could get a similar gig afterward as a civilian. I was assured that I would not be in any sort of combat role after training. They stationed me at Fort Gordon in Georgia. It was a fucking nightmare.
Our barracks were built in the early 60s and formerly condemned. They were deteriorating and I knew of at least 30 people who had upper-respiratory infections from living there. The entire chain of command was made up of progressively bigger assholes, and for whatever reason our superiors got off on making our lives miserable. My platoon was ordered to have at least eight formations a day just to make sure no one had gone AWOL. They had us doing all this ridiculous shit just to “justify our paychecks.” Every day we’d be doing some menial labor just to keep us busy: picking up cigarette butts and cutting the lawn even though it was already too short to mow. They even forced us to rake lines in a patch of dirt where grass used to grow.
There was really low morale and lots of discontent. Most of the people there had combat patches and were being treated like they had just got out of basic training. It was like I had somehow ended up at Leavenworth; we were basically treated like a prison company. The whole time I was thinking, “Are people like this going to be in charge of me if I go to Iraq?”
About six weeks into my job training, my position was canceled Army-wide. It was kind of an old field—a network-switching-systems operator-maintainer—and newer technology had made us superfluous. I was technically jobless and that meant if we went to Iraq I would be forced to take on a combat role. Rumors about the war and who was going were kicking into overdrive. But nothing official was said, and I wouldn’t have even known that we were being deployed until the last minute if I hadn’t been talking to the right people.
I realized the danger of the situation and was petrified. It was the first time I really looked past what the media was saying about the political situation in the Middle East and Iraq’s association with 9/11. Nothing the Army told me had been straightforward and honest, and I came to the realization that I needed to get out or I would be fighting a war for nothing. They were deploying everyone around me. People on both sides were fighting and dying over there for no good reason other than geopolitical hegemony. I did not want to contribute to it even if I was in a support role loading convoys instead of on the front lines.
A lot of people were going AWOL, but nobody was talking about leaving the country or anything like that. I had a buddy who was stationed in Germany and came back unexpectedly, telling me his father died and he was going to the funeral. But then two weeks later I’m looking on MySpace and it says he and his wife are in Canada. It was the first time I ever considered something like that to be a possibility and for the next few weeks I read up on it. I had been trying to get a discharge by failing and skipping physical-training tests, but that wasn’t happening. There’s an Army regulation that says any new recruit who fails three PT tests has to be reevaluated to see if they’re fit to serve. I purposely failed well over 50 of them and skipped out of 37 more. I was also eating a whole pizza and lots of Chinese food every night to gain weight, trying to make it look like I was a useless slob. But none of it worked. All they did was give me counseling and tell me to get back to work. I was going to go to Iraq unless I made a serious move.
There was a Greyhound station on the base and, without telling anyone, I bought a ticket to Toronto on Thanksgiving weekend. I crossed the border with no problems and met up with some friends, who came with me to see some people who were war resisters. I eventually called my mom to let her know where I was. A few days later my executive officer called her to tell her I was AWOL and that he wanted her to convince me to come back. Thirty days later they sent her a letter saying there was a federal warrant out for me for desertion. She started freaking out because she thought the FBI would come up north and arrest me, but I’m pretty much untouchable while my application for refugee status is pending.
I started working nights at a medical-records department, after waiting three months for a permit. I have a girlfriend. It’s going great. The reset button has been hit and I’ve started over to basically right before I signed up. The only thing I’m scared of is that if I get deported I think they’ll send me over there instead of to jail because they need anyone they can get their hands on.
Everything I learned about patriotism growing up was totally flawed. I’d like to believe that there’s hope for America, but I really don’t believe there is. Making this decision has given me a permanent brand of betrayal in the States. But hopefully I won’t ever have to deal with it. There seems to be a better understanding of humanity in Canada. I wouldn’t mind spending the rest of my days here.
I grew up in Fairmount, Indiana. It’s a town of maybe 7,000 people, famous for being the birthplace of James Dean and where Garfield was created. Every year they have this Garfield-themed marathon run. It’s pretty lame.
My parents split up when I was young, and I stayed mostly with my mom until I was around 14 and wanted to see what Dad’s house was like. He’s a real Republican, pro-military type of guy—always talking about the Army like he should have never got out. After a couple years I left his place and did my own thing. I dropped out of high school and started working in factories for a while. I tried trade school for a year but it wasn’t for me. All of a sudden I hit 20 and was like, “Whatever, I’ll just give the military a go.” They pay for food, they give you a place to stay—they take care of everything I didn’t have. This was around 2002, when the first rumblings of war were happening. I decided to join the army as a reservist.
Boot camp sucked. It’s like waiting in one big fucking long line, forever. Everybody was asking, “Are we going to Iraq?” but our drill sergeant was telling us we wouldn’t because Saddam was keeping that area crazy to the point where people couldn’t band together and threaten America. But then some people were saying the exact opposite: “Oh yeah, we’re going to bomb the shit out of them.”
If we got deployed, I wanted nothing to do with it. I’ve always thought war was stupid, and the only way I would get involved is if my country was being invaded. Eventually my unit was scheduled for deployment. I quit the full-time job I had then at the cable company to train for the mission. For whatever reason, I soon developed severe insomnia where I’d be hallucinating and just all screwed up. I had to go to the doctor for medication and thought it would be enough for them to boot me off the mission, but they told me I’d have to go back to the doctor a second time to get officially cleared. I couldn’t pay my initial bill because as a reservist you don’t get health insurance, so when I returned for the prognosis I wasn’t able to get the paperwork I needed for a discharge. I was completely fed up and just said, “Fuck it,” and went AWOL.
They eventually found me and locked me up for about a week, then let me know they were going to proceed with a dishonorable discharge. My dad tried to help and talked me into asking the Army National Guard if they could do anything. The local office told me that if I transferred to a different state I wouldn’t have to worry about a warrant and everything would be OK. I decided on Los Angeles, figuring people on the West Coast are more open-minded and would be against fighting an illegal war. After a week of collecting my thoughts and sleeping on the beach I called the Guard and they picked me up.
It was a lot better than Indiana. Everybody was very cool and they didn’t seem to be going to Iraq anytime soon. But then two weeks later they said, “You might be on a deployment roster.” After that it was a sure thing; I was on the list. I sat around for a few months, this heavy shit bearing down on me every second of my existence. There was no way to get out of it because of the repercussions from the first time I bailed. I didn’t want to rot in jail.
I finally got to Iraq and they had me working in military intelligence even though I had no fucking clue what I was doing. My job was based on test scores from when I was in school. I was also promoted to sergeant. I’m a high school dropout. I could barely take care of myself and now they have me taking care of a bunch of delinquents—the guys who got in trouble for drinking on duty and other shit. One guy even raped a female soldier. And I felt like a hypocrite because I’d have to bust them even though I was probably out boozing with them earlier. It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.
I tried to quit my job and told everybody I was getting out, that it was bullshit. But my superiors were like, “That’s impossible. It doesn’t work like that. You’re just getting stressed out. We’ll send you home on leave, and then you’ll get all this out of your system.” But I was honest with them and told them I wasn’t coming back. They were like, “You’ll be back. Desertion is punishable by death, especially in a war zone.” I looked into trying to file as a conscientious objector, but it seemed like so much work and took too long and other people were telling me it was impossible. There was really only one choice left if I wanted out.
I came back to Indiana on leave and told my mom I was over it. She was worried about me but knew I had made up my mind. I hid out in the States for eight months, staying at people’s house, sleeping in the woods, going from place to place, and working odd jobs. One day I was searching around the internet and somehow found the lawyer representing Jeremy Hinzman and the other resisters who went to Canada. I got ahold of him and he got me in touch with the War Resisters Support Campaign. They told me to come up for a visit to see if they could offer me anything and that everything would be fine at the border.
At that point I had 400 bucks to my name and just went for it. I paid two girlfriends of mine to drive me up. When we got to the border I told them, “Hey, I’m coming up here to see some friends.” And they did a half-assed search of the car. I had mistakenly left this notebook with information about an immigration lawyer in my bag. They found it and were like, “What’s this? Why do you need an immigration lawyer? Are you planning on staying up here?” I started to shit my pants but tried to play it cool by being like, “Whatever, that’s a poem. Leave me alone. It’s a fucking diary!” They just waved me through.
I settled in and then went out to eat and have a few beers with some people from the campaign. At that point I hadn’t actually planned on moving. I specifically had the girls I was with hang out for four extra days in case what the campaign told me was bogus. I was going to have them drop me off close to Maine or something and just walk back across the border through the woods if it didn’t pan out. But a few days passed and I decided on staying even though I was flat broke.
In the beginning I crashed with a campaign supporter and they fed me and gave me beers. They had a tomato garden out back. It was awesome. I even found a gig for a little bit to make some change. I finally got my working papers and got a proper job selling advertising space on a search engine. I make decent money. I’ve got my own place. I’ll be getting a car soon and I’ve made a lot of friends. My application for refugee status was denied, but I can legally stay as long as I’m appealing it. I think I have a good shot. Things are getting better every day.
I think what I did is patriotic in a sense, because America is all about standing up for what you believe and not putting up with bullshit just because the rules were created before you. It’s a fucking shame that I can’t sit in my own country and fight against the war because they’ll throw me in jail for 40 years. I’m 25 years old now, so fuck that. They can kiss my ass. But if the Canadians tell me to leave, I’ll leave the next day. There are ways to get back to the US without dealing with Customs. I would move to a place where nobody knew me. Probably California, where I could be anybody I wanted to be.
My stepfather worked for General Dynamics as a contractor for the navy. In a sense I was a military brat because we moved to wherever they needed him, but we were politically neutral. The first time I felt settled was when I enrolled at South Glens Falls High School near Saratoga, New York. It’s a rural, laid-back place—like every other Podunk town in America.
In 2000, during my senior year, I joined the delayed-entry program for the Marines and was sent to boot camp two or three days after graduation. Even though my sister was a year younger, we graduated at the same time, and my parents were struggling to make enough money just to submit the college applications. My grades were never that good and I was working at a grocery store, running the bottle-return machines, so I wanted to find my own way of paying for college to take the pressure off of them.
At the time the biggest things happening with the Marine Corps were just a couple of humanitarian-aid missions that didn’t get much media coverage. They threw a $5,000 bonus at me because the training for the job I wanted—electronic repair—was really long. Looking back, the recruiter was a pretty decent guy. It was before anything with the war was going on and they had no problem making their quotas. I actually helped them talk to other candidates. They were very, very selective at the time. People would come in with bad backs or bad lungs and they’d turn them down.
My first command was in Japan, right after I got out of training in California. A few months after I arrived 9/11 happened and at the end of my term they sent me to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Every once in a while the Marines get a wild hair up their ass, and out of nowhere they decided we were going to go to the Mediterranean to patrol for a while. But then Bush announced we were going to Iraq in early 2003. Just because of that speech they canceled the mission we had been training five months for.
Once plans became finalized they transferred me to military police. Friends were going to Iraq and it all became real. We started doing field training with weapons and convoy inspections. They won’t tell you any kind of date for deployment so people don’t have a chance to flee—you don’t really stay out of their sight very much.
The day came soon enough and they flew us to Kuwait. It wasn’t a true military flight but it was a commercial flight with all military personnel. It had a surreal quality to it—we’re going into war, getting security briefings, being fed meat loaf, and we’re watching What Women Want and Shrek.
There wasn’t much going on this early in the game so we left Iraq for whatever reason and I came back to North Carolina and waited for the end of my term. A year before you get out you’re supposed to decide whether or not you want to stay. The career planner gives you a piece of paper to take around to your command to see if they recommend reenlisting.
I went to the first person and he said I shouldn’t reenlist, and I asked him why. He said he didn’t think I had it in me. Then I took it to everybody else and they all said no. I busted my ass off for these fuckers and they said no, and I reached a point where I decided to come back just to give them the middle finger. They ended up giving me a bonus and the paper was stamped: “Reenlist at any cost.”
About a month later I was ordered to Germany to work at a liaison office in an Army hospital where we made sure injured Marines got to appointments and called their families and did paperwork. It was there that the wheels came off the wagon for me.
We started seeing people coming in severely burned and missing arms and legs. There was a bombing at a chow hall in Mosul sometime in 2004 and a lot of people were blown apart. The tent caught fire and in addition to the blast victims we had a second wave of people with burn wounds—it was late at night so a lot of people were sleeping and got trapped inside. You had to take it on faith that the guys coming in were human beings because they were completely charred and had no faces, you couldn’t tell head from feet. And all of them were screaming bloody murder because the morphine wasn’t working. It was nonstop like that for a good two or three days. A couple of guys even begged us to kill them. It really fucked me up.
Within six months I got called back early because they needed people for Iraq. I started to realize that the whole reenlistment thing was a pretty big mistake. There was no way out. Under Marine Corps orders and regulations you have to be against war in all its forms to be considered for conscientious-objector status. I’m not. I don’t think all wars are bad—people have the right to defend themselves, and I was vocal about it so it wasn’t an option.
This time I stayed in Iraq for seven months, mostly doing maintenance on base, again nothing too crazy happened. Toward the end of my cycle I received an email from my command saying I had orders to go to Japan again once I got back, but I really wanted to stay Stateside and stop deploying for a while until the end of my time.
When I returned I requested to be transferred to a nondeploying unit. It was the only time I ever got what I asked for and they sent me to a base in Greensboro to teach reservists how to repair electronics. Since it was a small base I actually got to see a civilian psychiatrist who was properly trained and things were starting to look up.
Then a couple months later we started activating reservists to full-time status and sending them to pick up body parts on the side of the road in Iraq. The first month they asked for four guys and the next month they wanted four more. We asked them why and they said, “Well, you know. They’re dead.” These guys should never have been sent in the first place—they weren’t trained for job. A lot of them were kids in college, and some had families and normal jobs. It made things worse for me because, rather than me going to Iraq and possibly getting killed, now I was safe in a nondeploying unit sending children to war.
At this point I started looking into leaving early. I tried to get myself removed because of my psychological condition but the shrink said she didn’t see any reason I should be let out. I found out about the War Resisters Support Campaign and started talking with them for a couple of weeks.
One day in the beginning of December I was getting ready for work, drinking coffee, and staring at my reflection in the toaster. All of a sudden the decision was made. I had a friend of mine drop me off at the base at about 4:30 in the morning. From there I walked through the woods to the bank. I had recently changed banks and didn’t have an ATM card, so I camped out for about four hours at the front door. It was incredibly close to where I worked, so if someone looked out the window they would have seen me. Finally it opened and I pulled out all my money. Then I went to the bus station, but the next ride to Toronto didn’t leave until 4:30 PM. I bought the ticket using my military discount and went to the bar to wait it out.
I got back to the station and on the bus, but every time I got off to pee I expected somebody to pop out and arrest me. My parents managed to figure out what was going on and called me, worried. But I crossed over from Detroit into Windsor without incident; I even showed the customs lady my military ID. The bus had a few more stops and we arrived in Toronto. I immediately went to a meeting with other resisters, and some sympathizers let me stay at their house where I slept harder than I ever remember sleeping.
Now I’m living with a few other guys. The people here are a lot nicer than Americans in general. They’ll strike up a conversation with you for no particular reason. What I did is probably one step above being a rapist to most Americans. But I didn’t have a voice about these things there, whereas up here I’m encouraged to talk about it. I’d like to become a Canadian citizen. The only complaint I have is the price of cigarettes, but it goes toward taxes that let me pay only $2 for Zoloft so I can’t bitch that much.
I was born in Texas and grew up in a little suburb called Mesquite right outside of Dallas. We were a lower-middle-class family that didn’t have too much, just a two-bedroom house for my parents, two younger sisters, and me. There really weren’t any professional fields that you could get into—a lot of retail and food chains, things like that. When I was in high school I worked at Wal-Mart and didn’t think too much about what I was going to do with my life. I just knew I needed an education.
My mom had to take out a second mortgage to pay off some credit cards and ended up in even more debt, so my family had absolutely no money for college. I never even thought about joining the service, but there was very heavy recruiting at school. They were allowed to set up tables at lunch and hand out brochures. One day I spoke with them and they told me they’d pay for college, so I signed up for the Army Reserve and was in basic training a few weeks after graduation. But I never actually made it to my permanent-duty station because I found out I was pregnant with my son and was allowed to leave. It was back to Wal-Mart full-time.
My husband and I had been in and out of apartments; we were struggling to pay for rent and food. There was a lot of commotion going on within my family as far as what we were planning to do. My parents said we could stay with them until we saved a little bit of money for a down payment on a house, but that never worked out. We were forced to leave a lot sooner than we expected.
I was 23, had a second child, and was like, “I’ve got to do something with my life. I have two babies, a husband, and I’m not making enough to live.” If I went back to the Army full-time they’d give us all of this and health insurance. But when I returned, things were different. The war had started and they raised the weight limit and lowered the test scores, so pretty much anyone could get in. I asked them about a couple concerns I had, and they said, “Don’t bring that up, they don’t need to know that. You’re already in.”
Things were also different this time because I had a whole bunch of other needs I didn’t have while I was in the reserves. They were playing right to those. They stressed how family-oriented the Army was and told me they’d help my husband get a job. What they didn’t tell me, though, was that I would be doing infantry things. They were training all the support companies in infantry-style tactics, because eventually they would run out of people and have to use them to do raids and things like that. I thought it was just procedure.
At this point Bush was already like, “Yeah, we won. We’re victorious.” So I thought all I’d be doing was helping to rebuild all these shattered lives in Iraq. In the beginning they even told me that because I was a female there was little chance I would be serving in Iraq.
I got to my duty station in Colorado and almost immediately my first sergeant told me that we would probably be leaving for Iraq in three months. They didn’t actually tell us that we had orders until after a couple of soldiers saw that they were deploying troops on CNN. Only then did they finally confirm we were going. I was told I was going to be a gunner. It dropped my heart into the pit of my stomach. It was like, “Great, I know I’m not coming home,” because snipers take out gunners, roadside bombs take out gunners; your fate is almost sealed.
At the time I was recruited I was one of those big gung-ho, proud Americans. I believed everything I saw on TV—Saddam Hussein was connected to the terrorist attacks and Iraq was associated with Osama bin Laden. All those things. It’s easy to be angry because you’ve lost people from your own nation, but then you get there and see what the Iraqis are going through isn’t much different. It broke my heart, especially the Iraqi women I worked with at the front gate in Baghdad. Their lives were terribly, terribly changed, and there was absolutely nothing I could do.
When we arrived in Kuwait we had a whole bunch of other training, and once we got to Iraq they assigned us our jobs. They changed mine and told me I wasn’t going to be a gunner because they needed people to guard the gate of the base and keep an eye on the city. I didn’t see any combat but noticed soldiers that worked with me no longer showing up. And I’d ask, “What happened to so-and-so?” “Oh, he got his arm blown off and they sent him to Germany.” After that, I stopped asking.
Any free time I had I spent on the phone with my husband. There was such a big piece of me missing. I didn’t eat or sleep much. Three months in I was sent home on leave during January. I was in a state of turmoil. I didn’t know where to turn, but I did know that it wasn’t what I should be doing. There was no way that I was going to confront any of my superiors about leaving, but my team sergeant and his assistant were already thinking that I might not come back because I had been talking so much with my husband. They told me that because there was a war I could be put to death if I deserted.
When I got home my husband and I had a bunch of sleepless nights talking about what I was going to do, and eventually I was due at the airport in a few days. We started looking on the internet to see if there was anything the Army wasn’t telling us. He found the war-resisters campaign and talked to their lawyer. He told us about filing for conscientious-objector status, but it was a little too late for me to put in an objector case, being that I was going back in less than a week.
I didn’t tell my family because they already had a feeling that I wasn’t going back. My mom even contacted the recruiting center and told them I was thinking of running. They called me up and chewed me out. At this point I had emailed my chain of command, asking them for an extension because I thought I could be pregnant again. But they said the only way to get officially cleared was to go to my base in Colorado to get a test. It was winter and there had been reports of avalanches in the area so we went a really long way around.
The further west we drove, the more dread we felt. So we started moving east and north, up the Mississippi River, until we got close to Canada and notified the campaign we were coming through. It felt like the right decision. We didn’t have any problems crossing the border. It was snowing heavily all through Pennsylvania and New York, and the clouds were dark and thick. But close to the border—it was so surreal—the clouds disappeared, the sky turned to the prettiest blue you’ve ever seen, there were birds, there was even a rainbow. We took it as a sign that we did the right thing.
The first couple of days were overwhelming. I couldn’t believe there were so many strangers willing to help us. I didn’t expect people to let us stay in their homes or to help us with basic needs. About three months after arriving we found a place of our own and we’ve been here since. We’re not able to legally work in Canada yet, but our applications are pending.
I’ve applied for refugee status and my board is coming up in a few weeks. I’m anxious and nervous—a whole bunch of different emotions are coming over me. I don’t want them to tell me I have to leave but I’m prepared if they do. I’m very hopeful that they will be open to letting me stay and, eventually, become a citizen. I try to follow the politics—Prime Minister Harper seems to agree with Bush a lot and it worries me. But hopefully it won’t affect my ability to stay. I love it here. I wouldn’t trade my position for the world. We don’t have much, but the sense of having a clear conscience is well worth everything I’ve been through.
I grew up in Arizona and Kansas before settling in Tampa, Florida, when I was about 12 or 13. My family has a lot of military history; my brother served in the Navy for seven years, my grandfather fought in WWI and WWII, and my dad served in Nam. He never really talked much about the war but thought what’s going on in Iraq was not a good thing. “It’s not worth us going out there and fighting for the oil,” he’d say. We were a normal family, more or less.
During my teens I went to Northeast High School in St. Petersburg. I wanted to go to college but I wasn’t making much doing odd jobs and stuff. After graduation in 2000 I started working for a waterproofing place, trying to make enough money to go to community college at least part-time to further my education. I did the waterproofing stuff for three and a half years, and one day I was walking past my old high school when an Army recruiter stopped me and explained how much money they could give me for school. He never mentioned anything about Afghanistan or Iraq.
Before I joined I believed everything that the media was saying, like al-Qaeda was involved in 9/11 and Saddam was involved. I was also thinking, “It’s right for us to go over there.” But I guess you could say I had a little feeling in the back of my mind that maybe this wasn’t right, because we went over there in Desert Storm and didn’t go get him. Then Clinton came into office and nothing happened, everything was nice and peaceful, but Bush got in office and everything started to kick off again.
I thought about it for a few days and decided to give it a shot. This was in 2003, around when the war was starting—it crossed my mind that I might have to fight but I didn’t think about it too much. I mostly thought about the money I could get for college. My dad was totally against me signing up for infantry, but I didn’t listen and went through basic training, then airborne school afterward.
Boot camp was tough. I was in Georgia, it was 14 weeks long, and I finally came to the realization I was going overseas. Our first sergeant major would always be like, “All you guys are going to wind up going over there fighting for your country, and there’s no way to get out of it now because you belong to the military.” All the new recruits had the attitude of, “Yay, I get to serve my country.” There were a few people saying it was all bullshit and wanting to get out, but not many.
They stationed me at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. I was with the 82nd Airborne and, again, training was rough. It was basically just a bunch of running, learning how to fall, and then jumping out of the back of a plane two or three times a day. I had skydived once before joining the military and thought it would be a cool thing to do. Not many people can say that they’ve done it.
I was at Fort Bragg for approximately ten months until one morning we finally got orders that we were being deployed to Afghanistan in two months. We got a month off and then we had a month of everydays from six in the morning to nine. It was nothing but going through different drills of stuff we’d be doing over there. People were starting to get worried, like, “What happens if I get shot?” and wondering if they would come back in a body bag.
I didn’t really know what we’d be doing. I hadn’t been watching that much news because of all the training we were getting. All they were telling us was that we’d be on patrol in the cities and villages—we’d just be walking around to make sure stuff was all right up there, nothing too major.
We flew out of North Carolina into Germany before coming to Afghanistan. When we got off the plane we were called to formation, and then our company commander told us that we’d be going into the Kandahar area. He told us once we got there we would get further instruction on what exactly our jobs were going to be for the next 14 months. When we arrived they let us know we’d be patrolling in Humvees into the small foothills—just walking around making sure that no one was up there that wasn’t supposed to be there.
We had a couple of firefights while on patrol—nothing extreme, though. One that comes to mind happened while we were sitting on top of a three-story building and heard small-arms fire come from somewhere close. It lasted 15 minutes. No one was hurt, but I was scared shitless. The only thing running through my mind was, “I have to make sure that I’m safe and all my buddies are safe and we all make it home, because we have family and friends waiting for us.”
The one thing I did that has really stayed with me was this house raid. There was a guy inside that didn’t want to come out. We breached the front door but came upon fire from inside, so we backed off really quick. At the back of the house there was a stairway, so four of us went up to make our way down from the top. But we couldn’t because there was someone on the second level and they were shooting at our only entrance point. We didn’t capture him—one of our guys threw a grenade in the entrance and that was the last of him. When we got back to base I broke down and didn’t talk to anyone for the rest of the night or the next morning. I was trying to figure out what the hell had happened. Was it an insurgent or just some guy trying to protect his home? I still get nightmares.
My tour finally came to an end and on the plane ride back I talked with my buddies about what we could possibly do to get out. No one had any good ideas besides filing as conscientious objectors. But our first sergeant had said that the form wouldn’t go past his desk. It would just get ripped up and thrown in the garbage.
When I returned I was counting down the time that I had left, hoping I could wait it out and not have to go back. About two months after returning to Fort Bragg I was hanging out at a bar on Friday night with everyone, and my ex-girlfriend called me. She said, “I want to come up and hang out with you for the weekend.” I told her to drive up Sunday and take me back to Florida, and then I told her a few days later that I wasn’t going back. I laid low at my buddy’s house for a few months, trying to figure out what my next move was going to be—if I was going to go back, or stay underground in Florida. I didn’t know if that was going to work. My dad was telling me, “Go back. They’re going to throw you in jail.” I told him that they could kiss my ass.
After about a month in Florida I was searching all over the web, looking for different outlets I might have. I was getting desperate and went to YouTube and did a search for “AWOL.” Some videos of Ryan Johnson and Joshua Key—deserters who had fled to Canada—came up and it finalized my decision in a second. I called the War Resisters office.
My first sergeant has called a few times since I’ve been up here, asking where I’m at, when am I coming back, if I’m ever coming back. I told him straight up that I’m staying here for good. I just wish that a lot more soldiers would make the same decision and tell their command that they’re not going over there and the war’s illegal. Hopefully, the government will allow all of us to become permanent residents. I wouldn’t mind spending the rest of my life here.
My attitude has changed completely. Before, I was like, “OK, we’re at war. It’s the right thing to do.” But now I’ve been over there and done all that stupid crap. Then I came up here, and it’s like, “Yeah, the war’s wrong. It’s immoral, it’s illegal.” I just wish that the American people would actually sit back and realize it’s totally fucked.
War Resistant
