On Strawberry Hill

The A-frame on Strawberry Hill is a sturdy, sprawling homestead with high, steep sides shingled in cedar and caked in moss. It has a narrow frontage — maybe five metres — but stretches closer to fifteen metres from front entry to rear wall. The interior, a series of split-level spaces linked by half-staircases, reveals water fixtures, a decaying wood stove, and windows framed in bark-covered wood. On that first visit, we found it carpeted in two decades’ worth of dead leaves interspersed with kitchen tools, mousetraps, empty rye bottles, and a cache of more subculturally specific relics. There were handscrawled notes, old handbills for community- theatre happenings, Bob Dylan songbooks, guides to hitchhiking across Canada and foraging for edible plants. A paperback biography of Che Guevara, a collection of Gary Snyder’s poetry. An empty package of guitar strings. The remnants of a lost civilization, or at least an experiment in one.

My wife and I sorted through the debris, collected the most significant artifacts, and carted it all down the hill for safe storage. We had no idea what we’d do with it, but it felt somehow necessary to try to preserve it. It sat for several years in the drawer of an end table that was eventually relegated to the old woodshed. And that’s where I found it, ripe with the smell of slow decay, when the story of the provenance of the Strawberry Hill A-frame suddenly seemed vital again. It was the fall of 2004.

America’s messy war in Vietnam — and particularly what certain young men had or hadn’t done for their country in the conflict — returned to the headlines with surprisingly divisive intensity that year, as two members of the Vietnam generation fought a nasty battle for control of the White House. Whose medals had John Kerry hurled over a fence in protest on the steps of the Capitol Building in April 1971? Had he really earned those medals in the first place? What service did George W. Bush provide, or fail to provide, to the Alabama Air National Guard in 1972? And swimming in this sea of minutiae, an unresolved question of vital importance to a nation once again embroiled in a guerilla war in a distant land: what does the Vietnam War mean?

Into this political whirlpool stepped a soft-spoken Slocan resident named Isaac Romano. During the war, Romano, then of Seattle, Washington, applied for conscientious objector status and received a deferral instead. He went on to a career as a family counsellor, relocated to Nelson, BC, in 2001 for personal reasons, and was quickly struck by the robust but largely unrecognized war-resister community he found there. As the war in Iraq raged and became more divisive, Romano began to organize an event to celebrate the achievements of the war resisters and their Canadian compatriots. The event — the Our Way Home Reunion, a four-day-long festival scheduled for the summer of 2006 — was to be accompanied by a commemorative sculpture of war resisters being welcomed by a Canadian sympathizer, which was to be paid for with private funds and erected somewhere in Nelson.

In September 2004, Romano and his co-organizers held a press conference to announce their plans. They were delighted by the prominent notice the event received in the Nelson Daily News which focused on the proposed sculpture. But the story was picked up by the Associated Press, and within days news of a “monument to cowards” being erected in Canada swept across the United States. A Fox News crew came to Nelson, and in the wake of its report, hateful emails and boycott threats poured into the Slocan from south of the border. Veterans of Foreign Wars announced that it would lobby the president to raise the issue with Paul Martin. Nelson’s nervous Chamber of Commerce chastised mayor Dave Elliot for sanctioning the monument (which he hadn’t), prompting him to issue a denial — “I wasn’t speaking as mayor when I said I liked the idea” — which in turn prompted Romano to move the monument idea to the back burner. Officials in Nelson soon received a deluge of support for the monument and a long, largely favourable feature in the New York Times that dubbed the town “Resisterville,” but still the sculpture found no public home in Nelson. In the spring of 2006, a Doukhobor museum in nearby Castlegar — which had ultimately been chosen as the venue for the war-resister festival — offered to house it, but city officials objected. Though briefly displayed at the festival that July, the monument now languishes in a private gallery in Nelson. (The festival itself was sufficiently well received that Castlegar hosted a second one this summer.)

The brief, intense notoriety of the war-resister monument exposed just how unsettled the legacy of the Vietnam War remains — particularly now that the United States finds itself mired in another unpopular and ill-defined war. What’s more, the ruckus demonstrates how far Canada remains from coming to grips with its role in Vietnam. The Canadian government at the time unambiguously endorsed the right of war resisters to evade military service. Allan MacEachen, Minister of Manpower and Immigration, May 22, 1969: “An individual’s status with regard to compulsory military service in his own country has no bearing upon his admissibility to Canada. Nor is he subject to removal from Canada because of unfulfilled military obligations in his own country.”

This commitment has clearly wavered. Consider the case of Jeremy Hinzman, an American soldier who sought refugee status in Canada to avoid being sent to fight in Iraq. Before fleeing to Canada in 2004, Hinzman made an unsuccessful petition for conscientious objector status and served in Afghanistan in a non-combat role. His refugee claim in Canada focused on the alleged illegality of the American invasion of Iraq under international law. But the Immigration and Refugee Board refused to consider it, rejecting his case on the grounds that he would not face persecution or cruel and unusual punishment before a military tribunal in the US. (Hinzman and another deserter had their appeals dismissed by the Federal Court of Appeal in 2006 and are now pursuing their case at the Supreme Court of Canada.)

Discussion of Hinzman’s case has often focused on the fact that he volunteered for military service, suggesting a distinction with the Vietnam era. (A significant portion of the thousands of deserters who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War had enlisted voluntarily.) What’s missing from this discussion, though, is the real difference between then and now: the rigidity of Canada’s current immigration policy, which has moved far from the laissez-faire approach to Vietnam-era war resisters — many of whom simply entered as visitors and then applied for (and received) landed-immigrant status once they were settled.

The present standards leave soldiers who flee the Iraq War with refugee claims as their only option. Support networks for deserters from the war in Iraq, many of them staffed by veterans of the Vietnam-era movement, estimate that more than 100 American soldiers and possibly as many as 250 have fled to Canada, but only a handful have made their cases public. The most prominent of the support groups — the Toronto-based War Resisters Support Campaign — is now lobbying the Canadian government to add a special provision to the immigration laws for American soldiers. To return, in effect, to the half-forgotten status quo of the Vietnam era — abandoned apparently without consideration for its importance to the viability of a certain kind of dissent.

It’s as if Canada has lost a critical piece of its historical memory. It was concern over this apparent amnesia that sent me back to that box of mildewed artifacts in my mother-in-law’s woodshed, to try to figure out who built the A-frame on Strawberry Hill.