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Desertion: In the Time of Vietnam

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Jack Todd had always assumed he would have to fight in the Vietnam War - all the men in his family had fought in WWII or Korea - except that he was getting more & more troubled by America's role in this one.

When Jack's oldest school friend returns from the jungle & urges him to dodge the draft, Jack stuffs down his disquiet & enters the army. He almost completes basic training when the love of his life does a long-distant rejection that sends him into a tailspin out of which he makes a fateful decision.

It has taken this writer 30 years to come to terms with the guilt & shame of his desertion, to break his silence & tell his controversial, important & profoundly American story. Perhaps becoming one of Canada's most successful journalists & remarkable writers has given him the perspective & strength to tell this most difficult of tales.

If you are at all interested in how a deserter made his decision & then went along with it - read this book!

If, on the other hand, you have an aversion to anyone who deserted during the Viet Nam War - you had better avoid it!

Not an "easy" read although this author does have a way with words & scoops you along for the ride of a lifetime. It's like seeing inside of a man's mind - how he saw the world then & what he did about it.

If you want to read a master storyteller - then grab a copy - it is one disturbingly powerful memoir of a strange & dangerous time.

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.

Anyone who wants to know what the Vietnam War did to those who reached draft age during its duration -- and anyone who has forgotten -- should read this memoir. Sad, angry, sometimes funny, finally forgiving. Very well written too.

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.

Jack Todd has hit the nail on the head with Desertion: In the Time of Viet Nam. Anyone who was between the ages of 15 and 90 at that time had mixed emotions about Viet Nam. We thought we knew why we were there, but were not entirely certain. Nothing was black and white any more. Todd has a way of depicting the landscape of Western Nebraska so that one can literally smell the yucca plants of the Great Plains and see the buffalo running wild. Yet, behind the glorious picture is an emotional upheaval going on and Jack, a brilliant young writer in his prime is suddenly drafted to the Army. His parents are elderly, his father a gruff, tough retired featherweight boxer who was in the Balloon Corps in WWI. His mother, a strong-minded woman trying to hold down a house with a wild man as the head. They are dirt poor yet somehow each child in the family learns to read, write, and play the piano, and go on to college. Jack gets a job on the Miami Herald....his first big job as a journalist and is forced into an environment as foreign to his soul as his body. His descriptions of the emotions he felt as well as those of his family and friends are so gripping, one must read on, even though the reading is so sad one thinks it must have been a nightmare. Viet Nam caused every family in America to rethink where their moral fiber. Todd's memoir is riveting. Whether you were close to someone in Viet Nam, knew someone who died there, or knew someone who chose the desertion or far easier, the dodger route, you will want to read this book and pass it onto your children as a history not to be repeated.

On one hand, Jack Todd's story is a good one. He tells it well. While I respect (and was stirred) by his apparent honesty and bearing of some stupid decisions, I can't say I really liked him. His vagaries and depression and struggles were moving, but for some reason I wasn't entirely convinced of his desertion-on-moral grounds rationale. He justifies it with a series of rants that seem to ring a little hollow. I wish they didn't.

Although the war was wrong, I have a hard time accepting the notion that it's better to desert than to sell-out behind a desk in a comfortable army post in Germany.

Like the rest of us, Jack Todd is both courageous and cowardly. At times I felt as conflicted as he was . . . wanting to second-guess him. I felt sorry for him on one page and got angry at him the next.

One more thing: I felt a chapter was missing that explained how he got from low-rent writing to Montreal columnist.

This autobiography concentrates on the aftermath of fleeing the United States for Canada by the author during the Viet Nam debacle. Todd provides quite a different perspective when he deserts the Army and his country. That decision which worked out well for Todd as he is a highly regarded journalist still effects him deeply with regrets and sorrow when he chose the exile path at a critical crossroad in his life. Well written, though at times quite maudlin, DESERTION IN THE TIME OF VIET NAM brings home an era when everyone seem to know someone fleeing the draft or the war. However, the uniqueness of his personal story is what happened to him and others after they left home.

Harriet Klausner

Jack Todds book "Desertion" set off memories long for gotten during the most troubled time of our nations history. I can not recomend this book highly enough. His love for western Nebraska, his wit, and the troulbe times he faced while in Canada makes this book a great read.

Todd's depiction of Western Nebraska is picture-perfect reminding me of Stephen King's use of this same area in "The Stand", God's country. His impressions of the volatile and conflicting emotions everyone had about the Vietnam War are more than accurate!

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.