Desertion: In the Time of Vietnam - Hardcover

Todd, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618091556 ISBN 13: 9780618091553

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2001

Synopsis

In 1969, Jack Todd was twenty-three and happy beyond his dreams. He had left behind a hardscrabble youth in a small Nebraska town, had an exciting and enviable job as a reporter for the Miami Herald, and was wildly in love with his beautiful Cuban-American girlfriend. As the war in Vietnam drew closer, he assumed that he would fight, as the men in his family had always fought, though he was increasingly troubled by America's role there. His oldest friend had just returned from Vietnam and was already showing signs of the war-caused trauma that would destroy him; he had seen and done things too terrible to describe. He pleaded with Jack to dodge the draft, to go to Canada. Nevertheless, Jack entered the army. He had almost completed his basic training when, on Christmas leave, he made an agonizing decision. By now deeply opposed to the war, he crossed the border into Canada, leaving behind his family, the girl he loved - and his beloved homeland.
Now one of Canada's most successful journalists, Jack Todd is a remarkable writer of great power and vibrancy. It has taken him thirty years to come to terms with the guilt and shame of desertion, to break the silence, to tell this controversial, important, profoundly American story. In a dark century, when many "only obeyed orders," he chose not to. This is an intensely moving personal story told with searing honesty, passion, and literary verve, as well as an eloquent account of a tortured time in our nation's history. It is hard to put down, and impossible to forget.

About this title

Review

Jack Todd made a fateful decision in 1969. A farm boy from a time and place where the obligation to serve in the military was taken for granted, Todd had just completed basic training at an army post near Seattle when he opted to take a Vietnam-veteran friend's advice and slip across the border into British Columbia rather than risk his life fighting in an unpopular war. His life in Canada was by no means easy; he spent time on Skid Row among fellow deserters and draft evaders, many of them parasitical criminals, and, although he was a veteran journalist, he had to start from scratch at a Vancouver paper, slowly winning the acceptance of his colleagues.

Todd renounced his American citizenship, which made him one of a handful of Vietnam-era deserters to have been ineligible for the general amnesty offered during Jimmy Carter's presidency--he could not even return to the United States for his mother's funeral. In this graceful memoir, Todd revisits what he calls his "absurd decision" to leave his country. Absurd, in part, because he later discovered he would not have been sent to Vietnam at all, but was instead slated to serve as a military journalist in Germany. For that decision he has many regrets, although he has clearly made a good life for himself in his adopted country. The cost was perhaps too great, though: "The effect of forced exile is felt not in any sudden tearing away but in the corrosive loss, over a period of time, of too many of the things that make you who you are." --Gregory McNamee

From the Back Cover

"America lost some of its best men in the Vietnam war - including those who chose exile. Desertion mitigates that loss by bringing back a voice, long missing, to finish the story. Jack Todd's is a clear, brave, truthful rendition of the other experience this nation had, and we need it now more than ever." -- James Carroll, author of An American Requiem and Constantine's Sword

"Jack Todd has written a deeply personal, wholly compelling memoir about a time in American history that haunts us all. We can only be grateful for the power and straightforward honesty of his writing. This book will live." --Robert Kotlowitz, author of Before Their Time

"Desertion is an intensely moving, unique war story. In a voice that captures both the moral stalwartness and impetuousness of youth, Jack Todd delineates the hidden costs of the Vietnam war, how it not only tore apart the lives of the men who served, but equally derailed the life on one man who refused to serve." --Jill Ciment, author of Half a Life and Teeth of the Dog

"Jack Todd, in his remarkable, harrowing tale, shines light on an all too easy forgotten aspect of the Vietnam era, with the immediacy of a journalist and the lyracism of a novelist. Desertion is a fascinating read, all the more so for its being true." --David Rakoff, author of Fraud

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0618091556
• ISBN 13: 9780618091553
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256