No Tears

President Nixon's declaration that "those few hundred who went to Canada or Sweden or someplace else" must now "pay their price" for "deserting their country" caused little surprise among the "few hundred" themselves (actually some 68,000) who are now living outside the boundaries and the laws of the U.S. TIME correspondents interviewed American expatriates last week in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, and found them not only resigned to the prospect of no amnesty in the near future but in most cases quite content to stay in Canada indefinitely.

"There is a stereotype of the draft evader or deserter in Canada," reported TIME Correspondent Henry Muller. "He is shaggy, has no job, lurks in 'hideouts; fears the Mounties and yearns for homemade bread back in Iowa. Certainly the type exists, but one must also count the law students, bank employees, doctors, surveyors, social workers, university teachers and accountants--some of them straight, some of them not--as well as the lonely fellows who peddle the local radical sheet in front of department stores." A sampling:

> Blond, bearded and neat, Ed Starkins, 26, has lived in Vancouver for three years. He works for $100 a week at a medical clinic, writing health manuals. A graduate of San Diego State, he left for Canada after learning that the FBI had called at his home one day while he was out (he had ignored two draft notices). Starkins likes Canada so much he plans to stay. "I wouldn't go back," he says, "except to visit my family and friends. The problem is not just the Viet Nam War. It is the whole social structure that's screwed up."

> Bruce Thomas, 24, took off for Canada in 1969, after his draft board changed his classification to 1-A. He got a job as a recreation director in Slave Lake, Alta., and soon took over as editor of the weekly paper, the Lesser Slave Lake Scope. The paper keeps Thomas, his Alberta-born wife and one employee busy. A self-confessed "disturber of the social scene," he goes after conflicts of interest in the local council and finds frequent opportunity to warn his readers against the "rat race of U.S. life." Amnesty, he says, does not matter to him. "Some time in the future, when there is a different President--never under Nixon--I might go back for a visit. If I can go back, why not? But I plan to make my home in Canada."

> Larry Johnson, 26, married a Canadian girl the week before he graduated from Antioch College, and shortly thereafter took a job in Cornwall, Ont. He returned to the U.S. for his Army physical and a reexamination, but never showed up for his induction. Now he is a librarian in Toronto, where he plans to settle. "I still believe in the textbook ideal of the waving fields of grain and the paper boy who can eventually rise to be editor or publisher or whoever the top man is. I think it's a wonderful ideal. But the country that spread that ideal got very old very fast. Now it's in a kind of menopause. Who knows if it will be fatal? If amnesty were declared in the next five years, I don't think I'd go back." In fact, Johnson says, the only reason he would want to go back would be to attend his grandmother's funeral when she dies.

> Donald Burke, 31, a doctor who left the U.S. in 1969, is now a pathologist at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. "We aren't asking for amnesty--at least I'm not," he says, claiming that he will only feel able to return to the U.S. when "there is a general recognition that the war was an immoral and illegal exercise."

There are, of course, many other deserters and draft dodgers who want to come home now that the war has ended, but they do not dare face the risks. One Green Beret medic who deserted Army training at Fort Bragg, N.C., four years ago was arrested and was being court-martialed when he escaped and made his way to Sweden. Last summer he arrived in Canada with another American expatriate whom he had married in Stockholm. Now he wants to return to the U.S. "I have a feeling for the U.S. and the future," he says. "I'm not cynical. I hope things go better." Yet he realizes that as a deserter who escaped while under arrest, he faces even stiffer penalties than most of his fellow exiles.

The problems and realities of trying to go home were discovered by Michael Pieffer, 22, a refugee from the Selective Service who had been living and working in Vancouver for two years. Shortly after the cease-fire was an nounced, Pieffer set off for his home town of Seattle, in the words of his lawyer, "to settle things up with the Government one way or another." By a quirk of chance, a federal grand jury had finally got around to indicting him for draft evasion, and FBI agents were making a routine check of his sister's home when they encountered--and summarily arrested--Pieffer himself. He is now in Seattle's King County jail, with bail set at $3,000.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of Americans still in Canada and elsewhere who are anxious to settle up with their Government, but not at the price Nixon wants them to pay. For those, at least for the time being, Nixon has had the final word: "If they don't want to return, they are certainly welcome to stay in any country that welcomes them."

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