No comments about Great Canadian Lives: Portraits in Heroism to 1867.

No comments about Brass Buttons and Silver Horseshoes: Stories from Canada's British War Brides.

5 comments about Desertion: In the Time of Vietnam.

1. Toward the end of his treacly memoir, Jack Todd lists all the things he lost when he deserted the Army and fled the country during the Vietnam War, or as he so euphemistically moans, was "forced into exile". Country. Citizenship. Profession. Family. Love. He acknowledges that he will be called a coward and perhaps "... the people who say that are right". Well, if the shoe fits, wear it.

   Todd aspired to be a Marine Corps officer but couldn't handle the training and washed out within weeks. Like so many spurned lovers his ardor turns to hatred. He makes an obscene parody of the Marine Corps hymn and describees perfect Marine material as "muscular nineteen-year olds with low foreheads and thick shoulders. Dumb and strong". He tries to ward off the draft by waving his unqualified separation papers from the Corps like a talisman but has no luck; he was inducted into the Army but fled to Canada before he was finished recruit training, motivated less by principle than by the fact that his girlfriend had broken up with him.

   Excuses, excuses, excuses. His mother, his girlfriend, his best friend all told him to flee to Canada (Mr. Todd, much later, was afraid to return to the United States for his mother's funeral for fear of being arrested) so he went. Even when he renounces his American citizenship and becomes a Canadian he finds someone to blame-Richard Nixon. Mr. Nixon can be blamed for many things but causing a deserter to swear allegiance to a foreign country is not one of them.




2. If you're not afraid of ideas and opinions that may differ from your own, read this book.

   Is it cowardly, or un-American, to avoid a war if you truly feel it is wrong? The U.S. government does not rule by divine right. Our country was formed as a direct result of Americans revolting against what they considered to be unjust government. If it is our obligation, today, to blindly follow our government's "authority", then it was equally the obligation of our fore-fathers to do so in the 1700's. How many Americans think the Fathers of the Revolution were traitors for not submitting to the authority of their government?

   After WWII, many Germans said, "we were just following orders...". It was not a legitimate excuse then, no has it ever been. We each have the power of reason, the power to judge right from wrong, and it is our moral and ethical obligation to exercise that power. It is NEVER right to turn that power over to someone else - not to the government, not to Ronald Reagan or to Bill Clinton, not to religious "authority" - not to anyone! "Desertion" is an account of one young man, an average American, exercising this power. Jack Todd's account of his stuggle in determining what his duty was is well worth reading!

   If you want to read a tremendous account of soldiers selflessly answering the call to arms for what they knew was a just cause, read "We Were Soldiers Once...And Young". Whether you thought the war was right or wrong, these men were laying their lives on the line, doing their duty as they saw it, no matter what the personal consequences. That in and of itself deserves respect.

   On the other hand, if you want to read a great story about an American avoiding a war he knew to be unjust, read "Desertion". That action, when motivated by a desire to do the right thing, is also deserving of respect. It is possible for people to hold opposing opinions about the same issues. We shouldn't feel the need to ridicule or persecute those that hold beliefs different than our own (although, unfortunately, THAT seems to be the American Way).

   JFK said, "War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today." Apparently, from reading some of the reactions to this book, that day still lies in the distant future.




3. Between 50,000 and 100,000 young men and women fled northward to Canada during the Vietnam War era. Yet, their voices have remained largely silent during the past three decades while a significant body of literature concerning the war experience has been evolving. Jack Todd has broken that silence with the publication of Desertion: In the Time of Vietnam, a moving memoir of a young man who followed his conscience to Canada in 1970 and waged his own private "war" as an exile in search of himself in an unknown land.

   This intensely personal account follows Todd from childhood growing up in a small Nebraska town to a promising career at the Miami Herald to basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington. Six weeks into basic training, Todd begins to contemplate flight northward as the dehumanization of the military experience and a growing antiwar conviction convince him to reluctantly leave his country. The decision is not made without Todd's painful acknowledgement of loss ("family, country, career, the woman I love") and moral agonizing over leaving his homeland of 23 years ("It's not that I live in America or that I am American. We are indistinguishable. You grow up the way I did, you don't know where your country leaves off and you start."). Ambivalence haunts him ("One instant I'm leaning one way, the next moment I've swung in the opposite direction. It's like watching a compass needle waver back and froth, back and forth, until it settles on true north.") until the morning early in 1970 when a friend escorts him over the Canadian border to freedom, and there is no turning back.

   The memoir concentrates primarily on Todd's life as an exile in a country "that is so much like home that every morning when you get up you have to remind yourself that this is not home, that home is now a place where you can no longer go." Starting in Vancouver he drifts from city to city, on the verge of homelessness much of the time, never staying in any one place long enough to make lasting relationships or discover the security of stability. "The only constant seems to be this endless flight, running on and on and getting no place at all," he writes.

   Even as Todd attempts to create a new life in this strange territory, he struggles to write about the exile experience in prose that is both poetic and poignant. "I worry at the theme of exile," he writes, "the meaning of existence on what is, for me in this endless winter, the wrong side of a three thousand-mile border."

   By the time the war ends in 1975 Todd feels as if he has been "fighting it one way or another" for the past eight years since becoming a "late convert to the antiwar movement in 1967." Although draft dodgers and deserters are granted amnesty after the war, "it is too late for me," writes a deeply regretful Todd, who earlier made the "absurd decision" to renounce his American citizenship during a period of deep disillusionment. "I have given up my country, my citizenship, my profession, my family, my belief in myself, my true love, everything but my life. For this I will be called a coward," he writes, "and perhaps the people who say that are right. I feel it's the hardest, bravest thing I ever did, but it's not for me to judge." Todd stops short of claiming to be a casualty of war, but does place himself among many others of his generation who were "very different people after we had passed through that fire."
   
   Today Todd is an award-winning journalist for the Montreal Gazette who has "spent half a life on each side of the border" and feels both American and Canadian "in roughly equal parts," although the Wildcat Hills of Nebraska, where he returns to visit as an outsider, will always be considered home "even if there aren't too many people out here who would care to claim me."

   Todd's compelling story has waited more than a quarter of a century to be told and undoubtedly took much courage to write. Desertion is a different kind of war story than many that are included in the Vietnam War literary canon, but it is nevertheless a war story. Breaking the silence of desertion, Todd has created a story of conscience, bravery, remorse, and ultimately, hope.




4. Why books like this continue to get published is beyond me. The author is a not very interesting sad case. Having washed out of Marine Corps OCS he turns against the entire United States and its armed forces. The story is one of personal cowardice in search of a moral justification which the author is pathetically unable to provide. Why publishers remain obsessed with deserters and antiwar protestors remains a mystery to me; I'd rather read about the heroism of the men who served in Vietnam. I'd like to invite the author to come to any of the many military unit reunions held every year in the US to celebrate the brotherhood and comradeship of those of us who answered our country's call in its hour of need, some reluctantly but all did their duty. Come and see what you missed; the hollow sense of shame that pervades your book will be easier to understand.



5. Todd is a coward and his self-serving mea culpa an affront to the memory of my friends and comrades who placed duty, honor, and country ahead of themselves.

   May he live out his life north of the border surrounded by thousands of unsold books.

No comments about Raincoast Chronicles 20: Lilies and Fireweed: Frontier Women of British Columbia (Raincoast Chronicles).

No comments about Canada's Queen: Elizabeth II: A Celebration of Her Majestys Friendship with the People of Canada.

No comments about The Judge's Wife: Memoirs of a British Columbia Pioneer.

No comments about Memories are made of this: What it was like to grow up in the Fifties.

1 comments about Shades of Black: Conrad Black - His Rise and Fall.

1. Mr. Siklos' biography, for those who want to get the measure of Conrad Black, is close to definitive. He not only corrects minor inaccuracies in Peter Newman's THE ESTABLISHMENT MAN, but he also extends the story right up to the 2004 ouster.
   
   As you read through it, you'll see certain parallels in Black's life emerging. Conrad Black was the younger son of a businessman who retired early, at a time when retirement at forty-eight was considered odd. As a child, Conrad had a capacious memory, honed into perfection by his father's training of him. He was mentored by Bud MacDougald, the top boss of a dividend company named Argus. It was there that Conrad Black hit upon the idea of accumulating cash flow to use for takeovers, and where he developed an inclination for asset shuffles and corporate reorganizations. Previous to Black being ushered into the Argus world, he and his long-time partner, David Radler, had built up a chain of newspapers, Sterling, almost from the ground up. The secret behind their success was, essentially, cost-cutting. Black had found some notoriety as well as fame from his writings, but it was his takeover of Argus, a true coup, that brought him fame as a businessperson in 1978. Notoreity followed fame when two of the companies controlled by Argus began to founder; he also encountered some legal trouble in the early 1980s.
   
   Conrad Black does have a law degree, and is comfortable following precedent or custom, but is also comfortable with grey areas in the law, and in pushing the envelope of custom or tradition. (An example of this last trait would be his supplementation of Mr. MacDougald's strategy, of using the accumulated surpluses in Argus plus some borrowed money to acquire more shares of companies he thought were undervalued, by borrowing copiously instead of sparingly.) These traits are evident throughout Mr. Siklos' book. Those who want to get the measure of Conrad Black would do well to pay close attention to part 1 of the book, as it describes Black's return to the station of a newspaper proprietor after learning much about financing and asset management at Argus, later folded into Hollinger Inc.
   
   I read the original version when it first came out, and can vouch for the claim that it is "expanded and updated." If you're interested in Conrad Black, you may wind up reading this book a few times, not only once.

No comments about Kenneth George McKenzie: And the Founding of Neurosurgery in Canada.

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