Desertion In the Time of Vietnam
 Jack Todd
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston
  ISBN: 0618091556


In 1969, Jack Todd is 23 & happy beyond his dreams. He has left behind a hardscrabble youth in Nebraska & now has an exciting job as a reporter on a topnotch Florida newspaper & a passionate Cuban-American girlfriend with whom he is wildly in love.

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

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 Jack Todd 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.

I know of a couple of young men who fled north during that decade, to start new lives among strangers, forever separated by honor & shame, guilt & law from their families, friends & childhoods. A guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do!

Desertion was a tough read -- in part because it is an intensely male perspective of an intensely testosterone era & thus relies on swift & lethal language. The craziness of those years comes through full bore -- young men on the brink, testing & stumbling, groping & grasping for meaning, motive & manhood.

The actual adventure is astonishing -- a young man at the height of his potency -- a lusty sex life -- a glorious & demanding job -- in fabulous Florida! What a change from hicksville, Nebraska. Everything so lush, lurid & loaded. Jack was on a roll & yet...

In the background is the hum of a war into which he will surely be drafted. It is only a matter of time, particularly if he does not return to college. He doesn't & when his number comes up, he reports for duty.

The clouds of war overpower the brightness of his young life. In the rains of the Northwest Jack's flame begins to smolder & one miserable day, he finally gets hold of the love of his life & faces, at a rain-drenched bank of telephones, the worst whipping of his life. Dejected & coming up for air he begins to wonder why he's there at all.

I've heard many stories of how young men were so devastated by the defection of girlfriends, wives & families that they went AWOL -- both in the World & In Country -- here is a prime example of how the wind is taken out of a man's sail & what he does next.

Actually, his attempts to desert are darkly humorous -- the idiocy of bureaucracy, the innocence of intentions & the haphazard underground railroad -- dry & wry & on the fly! Strange times demand strange actions.

Jack Todd makes it safely to Canada & has a year or two of discombobulation -- neither fish nor fowl, no roots, no meaning, no goals, no lasting relationships. In his one stand for independence before the mighty war machine, this young lad lost his ability to commit, to settle down. He lived, for a time, in as pure a reactive mode as if he had indeed gone to war.

Desertion is Jack Todd's memoir of a time & a decision that would change his life & cause scars from which, only now, is he healing. Since the pardon, he has come back over the border to remember his friends who had gone off to war & returned only to spend the next 30 years trapped inside a war that never ended.

Remembering a good friend's dying, he writes: “The official cause of death was listed as hypothermia, but the truth is Sonny just crawled down inside himself and drowned. He was fifty years old, and he never got over Vietnam.”

In thinking over that time so long ago when we were so young & at the mercy of our nation's government, he writes: “We keep circling around the subject of the war, the way it knocked a hole in all our lives, the things it did to people...The war was a tragedy for two nations, one rich and one poor, the profligate expenditure of American and Vietnamese lives in pursuit of nothing...”

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 are at all interested in how a deserter made his decision & then went along with it -- Jack Todd's book is for you.

If you have an aversion to anyone who deserted during the Vietnam War -- you had better avoid it because it will raise your blood pressure.

If you want to read a master storyteller -- then grab a copy of Jack Todd's Desertion In the Time of Vietnam -- it is one disturbingly powerful memoir of a strange & dangerous time.

Jack Todd is an award-winning columnist for the Montreal Gazette where he lives.
(07/01/01)

Rebecca