The year 1969 was a confusing time, said author Mary Burns at a Gibsons Public Library event last Saturday, Jan. 17.
She read a section from her book Centre/Center, a series of three novellas thematically linked by the Vietnam War and the subsequent escape of draft evaders to Canada.
Burns’ book is fiction, though based on her own experiences as a young student in California, but the three men who joined her for the presentation at the library told their own true stories in resisting the Vietnam War.
Gibsons resident Dan Bouman walked out of a Detroit induction centre in 1971 determined not to go to war. He headed to Vancouver and a hostel set up for draft dodgers and deserters.
“Strangers had compassion for war resisters,” he recalled.
He felt welcomed and found Canada to be a refuge. The Unitarian Church helped him and 50 others in the hostel at the time with job search and documentation. While Bouman thrived in Canada, his father, a U.S. veteran who had remained in the States, was harassed after he spoke against the war.
Ken Dalgleish told a similar story of being welcomed in Canada. In his case he sought a legal deferment on a medical basis, and like many of the drafted teens at the time, he exaggerated his health problems to obtain it.
Michael Klein of Roberts Creek received a more intense pressure from Uncle Sam. As a doctor he would go to the head of the line to be drafted.
“A military doctor’s role was to return soldiers to combat,” he said.
Klein considered that practice tantamount to killing them; he applied as a conscientious objector, but was turned down. He and his wife quietly moved to Canada where they were greeted effusively by a Quebec border officer and where he continued to field missives from American authorities asking him to return for duty. His story is told in a brief video now accessible through the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
“But what’s important here is not what happened to me then,” Klein said, “but what’s still happening now.”
He referred to the American war resister Rodney Watson, after five years still living in sanctuary at the First United Church in Vancouver after deserting from his service in Iraq.
Some of the overflow audience at the library were stimulated to tell personal and powerful stories of their own experiences.
One called his move to Canada “a hugely widening experience.”
Another recalled the sad aspect of recruits in a boot camp slipping across the nearby Canadian border simply because they didn’t want to kill.
Canadian immigration laws in effect in the late 1960s were equitable and employed a points system, but the laws have changed over the years. Would Iraqi war resisters be given the same warm welcome in Canada today? Protesting veterans stopped the Vietnam War, one person pointed out, but would they be able to stop Canada’s involvement in Iraq?
The audience took away these and other questions to ponder.
