By Wil S. Hylton 

Photographer Christopher Anderson

Aritcle from New York Magazine

Sometimes Dean Walcott disappears. He’ll be sitting on the sofa, watching his boys play, their shouts and giggles slicing the air, when the scent of blood washes over him and the day goes black.

“All of a sudden, I’m gone,” he said quietly. “And I’m on the floor, crying.”

Dean’s wife, Vanessa, turned to face him. She studied his eyes and frowned. “I just go and cuddle him,” she said. “Hugging him, rubbing his shoulders, reassuring, pointing at the boys and saying, ‘Look, they’re okay.’ One time I tried to get him to touch them, but he didn’t want to put his hand anywhere near their faces.”

“I was afraid their skin would fall off,” Walcott said. “When you’re burned like that, you can lose the skin.”

It was a crisp autumn afternoon, and we were in the Walcott living room in Peterborough, Ontario, a small city in eastern Canada. Outside, the banks of the Otonabee River burst with orange sugar maple and crimson staghorn sumac. Inside, the apartment was in shambles. A dozen cats and kittens tumbled across the carpet, mewling and clawing at drapes and cushions, while a plump dog waddled among heaps of clothing and sniffed at plates of crumbs. The Walcotts had bigger worries. Early that morning, Vanessa had been rushed to the hospital with a flare-up of her heart condition; Dean had just gone to pick her up, but as soon as they got home, they realized they didn’t have enough money to buy a birthday cake for their son Drake, who was turning 6 that day. Vanessa spent the next half-hour calling relatives for help, and just as she hung up with her stepfather, the elementary school called to report that their other son, Aidan, had fallen from the jungle gym and smashed the back of his head. Both the Walcott boys have behavioral issues and have to be medicated with anti-psychotic drugs. As if all this weren’t enough, Dean was about to be deported. He had just received a rejection notice from the Canadian immigration office. His application for political asylum was denied, which meant that any day, he might be ordered to the American border, taken into custody by the U.S. military, and prosecuted as a deserter.

Walcott is 33 years old, with a stocky build and down-turned eyes. He was raised in upstate New York and enlisted in the Marine Corps as a high-school senior in 1999. For his military occupation, Walcott chose electronic repair. After training, he spent a year fixing equipment on a base in Japan; by the time he returned home, the Twin Towers were in ashes and the Iraq War loomed on the horizon. Every Marine, regardless of his specialty, is considered a combat rifleman. Within six months of his return from Japan, Walcott received orders to deploy to Iraq as a member of the military police. He spent five months in southern Iraq, then he returned to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and resumed electronic repair. In 2004, he received orders for a third deployment: This time, he was assigned to work at a hospital in western Germany.

The Landstuhl Regional Medical Center is the largest American health facility outside the United States. During the Iraq War, it provided urgent care to severely injured U.S. troops. Walcott’s job was to greet and comfort new arrivals. This meant daily exposure to the kind of horrific injuries for which doctors and nurses must be trained in the emotional distancing known as aequanimitas. Walcott received no such training and maintained no such distance. He spent his days racing down the hallways with stretchers bearing mutilated bodies, their legs and arms shorn by bomb blasts, their faces melted by fire. At night, the gruesome sights haunted him, but he believed he was managing the pressure until one morning, when the children arrived. An errant mortar round in northern Iraq had set fire to a civilian neighborhood of tents, and the military was evacuating local families. “It was mothers and kids coming in, all burned and bloody to hell, screaming this horrible noise,” Walcott said. Some of the children were so badly charred and glistening with ointment that he didn’t realize they were people. “A few times, I thought they were trash bags on the stretcher,” he said, “and it turned out to be a little toddler.”

That’s when Walcott’s nightmares began. He would settle into bed, only to wake a few hours later, stumbling around in a daze. “I was walking around the apartment, looking for people that weren’t there,” he said. “For injured people that I heard crying.”

Walcott returned to North Carolina in 2006, but the nightmares and flashbacks followed him. He could be anywhere—at work, at home, even at the grocery store—when the memories flooded down. It began with the scent of death. “I smell blood, I smell burned flesh,” he said. “There’s a weird taste and smell to hospitals. It’s a whole building that smells like somebody just opened a fresh pack of Band-Aids. I can feel it on my tongue, the bandages, the gauze, the Vaseline.” After a flashback, Walcott would snap back to reality and discover that he was crumpled on the ground, gasping for air. “He gets scared when I go to touch him,” Vanessa said. “He jumps, and then he looks at me, then looks away and starts crying and says, ‘What are you doing here?’?”

Walcott made appointments to see a psychiatrist, but he told me his commanders wouldn’t grant him leave. Eventually, he did see a doctor and was diagnosed with PTSD. He began to fantasize about leaving the military altogether, imagining himself somewhere quiet, working a normal job, learning to shunt aside the memories. He was standing beside his toaster one morning, preparing for a run, when he decided to desert instead. Within two hours, he was at the local bus station. Within two days, he was in Canada. Within a week, he had found his way into a growing community of American deserters that stretched from Newfoundland to British Columbia, through Winnipeg, London, and Nelson. No one knew how many there were or how long they could stay.

It is difficult to remember, and tempting to forget, the American enthusiasm for war in 2003—the fervid certainty of the Bush administration, the whooping consent of Congress, and the ready endorsement of an American majority long divorced from combat. Six weeks into the Iraq invasion, public support hovered near 80 percent. For the men and women tasked with fighting, those were galvanizing times. Many hardened in their commitment to service; others accepted their redeployments with grim resignation. Still others, returning home from a first or second tour damaged and disillusioned, felt compelled to desert. Between 2003 and 2006, more than 20,000 American soldiers and Marines abandoned their posts.

To desert in a time of war carries a maximum penalty of death. The military has not actually executed a soldier for desertion since 1945, but for the young men and women preparing to go AWOL in the early aughts, it was difficult to gauge what the true penalty might be. In a country gripped by renewed enthusiasm for military action, words like coward and traitor enjoyed a currency unseen in decades. It seemed easy to believe that the penalty for desertion might be years of imprisonment or worse.

Desertion is always a solitary choice, but it can be especially so for those who seek refuge in other countries. The deserter in exile is cut off from community, family, and country, knowing there may never be a safe way home. For the alienated troops who fled to Canada in the early years of the Iraq War, the decision seemed to offer solace. The northern border has always welcomed disaffected Americans, from the British Union Loyalists who opposed the Revolutionary War to the draft dodgers and deserters avoiding Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1975, roughly 50,000 U.S. citizens took shelter in Canada, where the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau quietly embraced them. In the first three years of the Iraq War, at least 200 new American troops joined them, believing they would find the same open arms. Most of the new deserters chose to live and work in cities like Toronto and Montreal without revealing their military past; only about two dozen stepped forward publicly to request political amnesty as “war resisters.”

Whatever else one thinks of these men and women, it is difficult to brand them cowards. They have chosen to spend the last ten years exposed to public scrutiny, with their lives and choices picked over by critics and no way to return home. These are people like Chuck Wiley, who served 17 years in the military before deploying to the Persian Gulf in 2006 as a nuclear engineer on an aircraft carrier, where he became concerned by the tactics used by the ship’s aircraft in civilian areas of Iraq. Over the past eight years, Wiley has steadfastly refused to reveal the classified details of what he saw, which could lead to an even greater penalty than desertion itself. But he was sufficiently distressed—and sufficiently thwarted in his efforts to change the system—that in 2007, he walked away from his Navy career, three years shy of a full retirement package. He says that his parents haven’t spoken to him since.

The U.S. deserters in Canada are a varied group. Some were highly successful in the military and completed multiple tours like Wiley; others were young, enlisted in haste, and became disillusioned as their political ideas shifted. Military service occupies an awkward intersection in American life. Most of the things a person can get into at 18, he or she can get out of a few years later. The American military defines itself as a “volunteer service,” but that’s only until the ink on the contract is dry. After that, it can be nearly impossible to get out. The soldier’s job is the only service contract a person can be imprisoned for refusing to complete. Anyone but the most committed ideologue can understand why this is so. Military discipline is essential to any national defense. But it is equally easy to sympathize with men like Wiley and Walcott, who enlisted in good faith but came to believe they could not continue in good conscience and good health. It can be difficult to reconcile the military demands of a free state with the individual values of a free society.

For all their differences in age and experience, the deserters in Canada share at least one trait: They were extraordinarily unlucky. As the years have passed and the wars wound down, they have become trapped in a shifting cultural landscape. By 2008, two-thirds of Americans believed the Iraq War was a mistake, and President Obama was elected in large part because of his early opposition to it. Canada, meanwhile, drifted in an alternate political current: Although two-thirds of its citizens supported the U.S. deserters in a 2008 poll, and the legislature has voted twice to grant them permanent residence, the election of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party in 2006 altered the country’s political foundations. Harper, who supported the invasion of Iraq, has consistently opposed the American deserters and his immigration department has worked assiduously to deport them. In 2009, immigration minister Jason Kenney explained the administration’s position like this: “We’re talking about people who volunteer to serve in the armed forces of a democratic country and simply change their mind to desert. And that’s fine, that’s the decision they have made, but they are not refugees.” This leaves the American deserters in a grotesque bind: At a time when most Americans can agree that the decision to invade Iraq was disastrous, the only U.S. troops still fighting over the invasion are those who took a firm stand against it.

Many of them have already been deported from Canada and imprisoned in the United States. The first was Robin Long, who enlisted in 2003, became disillusioned by the Abu Ghraib scandal, and deserted in 2005. The Harper administration deported Long in 2008. At his court-martial, prosecutors appeared more incensed by his public statements against the war than by his decision to leave the service. The primary evidence against him was a six-minute interview he completed with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in which he spoke out against the Iraq invasion. After a plea deal, Long received a dishonorable discharge and spent 15 months in military prison. The judge expressed disappointment that prosecutors did not insist on a longer sentence.

The following year, the Harper administration attempted to deport another U.S. deserter, Rodney Watson, who was living in Vancouver after a deployment to Mosul where he says he watched American soldiers physically assault Iraqi civilians. When the Harper administration ordered Watson to leave Canada, he walked into a downtown church and claimed sanctuary. Five years later, he is still there—unable even to step outside.

Another deserter, Kim Rivera, was deported from Canada in 2012. Rivera completed a tour in 2006 as a driver with the Fourth Infantry Brigade Combat Team, but she came to believe the long-term occupation of Iraq was excessive and immoral. In 2007, she left her post in Texas and moved to Toronto with her husband and their two children. Over the next five years, they had two more children and Rivera became pregnant with another. At her court-martial, Rivera’s supporters included Amnesty International, the archbishop Desmond Tutu, and several veterans organizations, but she lost the case and was sentenced to 14 months in military prison. When her pregnancy came to term, she was escorted to a hospital by military police, who waited for her to deliver the baby and then returned Rivera to her cell.

Today, fewer than a dozen outspoken U.S. deserters remain in Canada. The Harper administration has denied many of them permits to work, cut off their access to the national health-care system, and rejected their applications for asylum at every stage—even as they file appeals and plead for protection in the federal courts. To survive, they have formed an insular community of mutual support—sharing apartments and tending to one another’s illnesses, heartbreaks, and depression. After a decade, their hellish limbo may be coming to an end: With a federal election scheduled this year, Prime Minister Harper spent the fall trailing in the polls to Liberal candidate Justin Trudeau, whose father was pivotal to the American draft dodgers and deserters from Vietnam. Cheri DiNovo, a member of the Ontario assembly from the New Democratic Party, told me that if anyone other than Harper wins the election, the deserters will be allowed to stay in Canada. “Neither the Liberals nor the New Democrats are willing to deport resisters,” she said. But as the election approaches, Harper has begun a final purge. Nearly all of the deserters who remain in Canada have received a deportation order in the past four months. Many of them could be in American prisons by the time a new Canadian government offers them relief. Michelle Robidoux, a prominent activist in Toronto who leads the War Resister Support Campaign, told me that after more than a decade of battle, the deserters have reached the “critical moment.”

As I sat with the Walcotts in Peterborough, Robidoux was organizing a strategy meeting for the deserters, so I drove into Toronto that afternoon. Since 2005, Robidoux’s group has kept an office on the third floor of a steelworkers’ hall downtown. The building sits at the edge of a neighborhood known as Baldwin Village, which became a locus of American war resisters in the Vietnam era. I took a walk through the neighborhood with a draft dodger named Jeffry House, who left the U.S. in 1970, studied law in Toronto, and eventually represented the new generation of deserters. As we wandered past the gentrified storefronts of Baldwin Village, he recalled the neighborhood’s bohemian past. “It was a nice carnival atmosphere of the hippie world,” he said. “On a summer day, there’d be people out on all the stoops, and there’d be dope smoking, and people with balloons.”

The young men and women gathered in the hall that evening were a different breed: no more countercultural than the workaday parents at my daughter’s school. Chuck Wiley was there, in a gray polo shirt tucked into belted pants with a cell-phone holster at the hip; next to him sat Jenna Johnson, who came to Canada after her husband, Ryan, discovered that the “non-deployable support position,” for which he volunteered, did not exist. At the center of the table, Robidoux’s laptop was open to a Skype window, with Dean and Vanessa Walcott patched in from Peterborough on the left and, to the right, Josh and Alexina Key at home in Manitoba. Josh has been among the most prominent American deserters in Canada. In 2007, he published a book in which he confessed to stealing from Iraqi civilians with members of his unit and watching one day as a 10-year-old girl was shot by a sniper round that he believed was fired by an American soldier. The Deserter’s Tale describes a slow moral awakening. At home on leave in 2005, he decided to desert, throwing his belongings into an old Dodge Caravan and driving north.

At the head of the table, Robidoux stood before a large sheet of paper attached to the wall. She is a wiry woman in her early 50s with a strong jaw and cropped gray hair. After a few minutes of small talk, she cleared her throat to begin the meeting. “Okay,” she said. “Are we ready to roll, kids?” She gestured toward the paper behind her, covered with pink and yellow sticky notes and scribbled with green and purple writing. “I took the liberty to do this up because I was trying to organize what’s going on,” she said. “Can we just do updates first?”

One by one, the deserters around the table reported their latest news—receiving a deportation order, or giving notice at work, or else packing their bags and selling or donating their belongings in preparation for prison. Robidoux listened in silence; when everyone had spoken, she provided an update for one of the deserters who wasn’t there. Over the course of combat in Iraq, he had developed extreme traumatic stress and still suffered frequent dissociative breaks. Now the immigration authorities had instructed him to leave Canada within two weeks; his wife was hoping to follow him to the U.S. border and to live with their children near the military prison where he would be sentenced—but the strain of their daily life was already overwhelming and the logistics of packing and moving seemed unbearable. Robidoux was trying to help.

“We need a strong person who can actually take things in hand,” she said. She glanced back to the chart on the wall. “The critical things. Doing a garage sale: When would that happen? How would that happen?”

A few of the Canadian activists shifted uncomfortably in their seats. It was difficult to accept that, after years of fighting, this family was finally facing the prospect of leaving. Many of the activists were still hoping for a last-minute legal reprieve.

“It’s so hard,” someone said. “They don’t know if they’ll have to go.”

Robidoux sighed. “Well,” she said. “They have to plan like they do.”

As the conversation turned toward the logistics of surrendering at the border, I noticed the name COREY written in marker on the paper behind Robidoux. This was a reference to an Army deserter who had left the country a few days earlier to avoid deportation. But rather than surrender at the U.S. border, Corey Glass headed east, across the ocean. Even as the meeting in Toronto wrapped up and everyone filed down the street to Grossman’s Tavern, Glass was making his way down the canals of Holland on a sailboat with a broken mast. He still had no idea where he was going, or what legal options he had—but everyone in Canada was hoping he would find a safe harbor where he, and they, could live.