JANUARY 14, 1972
You Can't Go Home Again
Will the title of this famous book by Thomas Wolfe serve as an epitaph on a symbolic tombstone under which we will bury the lives of some 70,000 Americans now living in exile on foreign soil?
I am referring, of course, to the question of whether American deserters and draft evaders will be granted amnesty or pardon, as I believe they should.
Although many resisters and deserters have gone underground in the United States, most reside in either Canada or Sweden, the latter having had a predominance of deserters enter since 1967 when four sailors off the aircraft carrier Intrepid were granted asylum.
But only a handful of the deserters and resisters do end up in Sweden. Most simply cross the border to an uneasy asylum in Canada, where last winter they were entering at the rate of 50 a week.
What kind of people are these individuals? In 1969 Army Lieutenant General A. 0. Connor summed up one of these groups of deserters simply as "kooks."
The facts are that the draft evaders are mainly middleclass, college-educated kids, while the deserters are usually poorer and
One of the reasons I favor amnesty is that many of the deserters today are being discharged simply because their superiors don't want to bother with involved prosecution procedures, while other deserters suffer the consequences of their deed. This is certainly unjust.
According to the polls, a majority of Americans find our involvement in Viet Nam immoral. Even those people who favor continuing the war regret our involvement. Therefore, I can't see any reason for these men, who recognized the futility and immorality of the war before most people did, to suffer for having the courage of their convictions.
The chances for amnesty coming eventually look fairly good. Last month Senator Robert Taft Jr., an Ohio Republican, introduced a bill to grant amnesty for draft resisters under the condition they must serve the military or federal government for three years.
Hopefully, if amnesty is granted, it will re-instill some of the faith in the government that has been lost with the war.