Word: anderson
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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...
...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...
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...
Even though everybody who enlists swears that he or she is not a conscientious objector, annual C.O. applications to the military, while still very rare, have nearly tripled since 2002, to 61 in 2003 and 67 last year. Anderson's attorney, Jeffry House, 58, says he gets a few inquiries every day from U.S. soldiers interested in fleeing to Canada. A Wisconsin native who went to Canada in 1970 as a draft dodger, House says he has five American clients applying to be refugees. Extrapolating from those and additional cases he knows about, he estimates there...
...incident that eventually spurred Anderson to seek House's counsel took place just before he earned his Purple Heart. While trying to quell a disturbance outside a police station one night, his unit came under heavy attack. Anderson says he saw a car that appeared to be emitting sparks drive into the middle of the melee. Instructed to start shooting, Anderson held his fire--and the car turned out to be carrying only a startled family. Afterward, Anderson claims, his sergeants told him, "'Next time, you open fire, just in case.' Basically they have a standard procedure that...