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News :: Miscellaneous |
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US media stonewall Canadian journalist's story of Vietnam desertion |
Current rating: 0 |
by Mick Lowe
(No verified email address) |
28 May 2001
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Editor's Note: On Memorial Day, it is important to not only honor the dead, but to reflect on the price our country pays for its involvement in unjust and illegal wars. The following excerpt (follow link to whole article) begins to tell the story of a man who gave up everything to do the right thing by deserting the US Army and going to Canada. He has written a book about his experience, "Desertion: In the Time of Vietnam", which has been ignored by the US media. ML |
SCOTTSBLUFF, NEBRASKA: Last week on Monday around midday a pronghorn antelope paused from grazing on the tender spring grass of the Nebraska Panhandle to gaze upon a passing scene: a tall man, no longer young, hunches over the wheel of a rented car, lead-footing it up the arrow-straight highway that runs north out of Kimball.
The man's name is Jack Todd. Todd is about to complete, not without some trepidation, a journey that began 32years earlier, when he left his home and family here and boarded a bus for a U.S. Army Induction Center in Denver, Colorado. Although he swore an oath to his country and its military two days later, Todd did the unthinkable just before Christmas, 1969: he deserted from the Army in wartime and hitchhiked to Vancouver rather than serve his country in Vietnam.
Like an estimated 100,000 other young Americans who became draft dodgers (including this writer) and deserters, Todd chose Canada, where he remains to this day, over the prosecution of what he considered an unjust war in Vietnam.
Now a National Newspaper Award winning sportswriter with the Montreal Gazette, Todd has also done something that none of the rest of us has ever done: he has written, and just published, a moving memoir of the days and years both before and after he became a deserter from the U. S. Army and a fugitive from American justice.
Published simultaneously in Canada and the United States, the book's Canadian name is The Taste of Metal, while its American edition is titled Desertion: In the Time of Vietnam. The Taste of Metal was warmly received by most critics and was a featured excerpt in the Globe and Mail's Book section, and in the Gazette.Desertion, on the other hand, has been studiously ignored by most American reviewers and the media at large.
A gifted schoolboy, scholar, athlete, the six foot seven inch Todd set a state high jump record that remained on the books long after he left the country, and attended the University of Nebraska on an athletic scholarship. Tonight Todd will realize a long-standing dream: he will read from the book - his first - before a hometown crowd at Scottsbluff's Copperfield bookstore. What is far less clear - and this fills him with anxiety bordering on foreboding as he drives across the gently rolling, treeless hills of the Panhandle - is the kind of reception he will receive. |
See also:
http://www.straightgoods.com/Lowe/010528.asp
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