From AWOL to Exile

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Only a few months after Army Specialist Darrell Anderson received a Purple Heart last summer for his service in Iraq, his heart wasn't in it anymore. By Christmas, while on leave at his parents' home in Lexington, Ky., Anderson, 22, was dead set against the war. Haunted by memories of civilian casualties, he had become a nervous wreck. So early last month, a few days before he was due to return to his unit's base in Germany and prepare for a redeployment to Iraq later this year, Anderson rented a car and drove to Toronto. Since arriving, Anderson has joined several like-minded U.S. soldiers fighting an uphill battle to gain refugee status in Canada. "I joined the Army to get money and defend my country, not to kill innocent people and fight for a war that is unjust," says Anderson, who earned his medal for the minor injuries he sustained April 11, when a homemade explosive device sprayed shrapnel all over his armored vehicle during a patrol in Baghdad.

Anderson thinks of himself and others like him as war resisters. His critics, who have no sympathy for volunteer soldiers suddenly opposed to combat, prefer terms like coward and traitor. But now that Anderson has been AWOL for more than 30 days, he is known in the U.S. military as a deserter, facing the possibility of years in jail. (No deserter during wartime has received the stiffest punishment, execution, since the last days of World War II.)

Although the American public remains sharply divided over the Iraq war, the number of soldiers like Anderson who are going to great lengths to get out of their service is actually smaller than it has been in many years. Still, for the first time since the Vietnam War, when Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau made his country a "refuge from militarism" for tens of thousands of U.S. draft dodgers, some disaffected young Americans are seeking sanctuary up north, risking permanent exile from their native land--or jail time back in it. A newfangled underground railroad has even sprung up, started by a group of religious, union and peace activists to help American soldiers get settled in Canada.