PATRIOT DIRGE: Last Refuge

Repentant Warrior
Volunteers for Exile
Wiping the Slate Clean

The decision by the Canadian Supreme Court not to provide refuge to the growing number of disaffected American soldiers was a crushing defeat. The nation that served as a safe haven for draft resisters in the Vietnam era served notice they will not play a similar role for those who misguidedly volunteered for the war on terrorism.

Sent to Iraq and Afghanistan they found themselves cast not as heroes and liberators but as villains, hated and despised by both sides in a civil war. With a judiciary tilted so far to the militant right it barely upheld the principle of habeas corpus – without which there would be no concept of justice save social and personal vengeance – what options were left to the soldier of conscience?

That was the question that Sara Kent asked of the nine justices as they denied refugee status to her client and scores of others. She vowed to press on with their cause in any way she could. She and a team of attorneys from both Canada and America were preparing a new case in the lower courts based on the widely acknowledged war crimes of American forces. Any nation that was a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations Charter was prohibited by statute from knowingly sending or returning an individual to a military force that would likely commit such crimes.

It was the kind of legal argument that Sara had grown to despise. Why not say what we mean and rest on the judgment of right and wrong? But that was not how the legal system worked. It required legalese and statutory analysis and case studies and real lives were in the balance. During the Vietnam War, Sara had helped many escape to Canada which was then a willing refuge for all who suffered from conscientious awakening.

The first step was to put a roadblock in the way of Canadian deportation. As all legal processes, it required time and time was not something that all their clients had. For some they bought time. Others they referred to an underground organization.

The organization that Amy and Roy served was suddenly inundated with applicants for safe refuge. The vast majority of clients they had served were dissidents from countries where words alone were sufficient to risk loss of employment, detention, torture and death – consequences that were not confined to the individual but to their families and friends. They came mostly from war torn nations in Africa, Chechnya and the former Soviet Union nations, the Middle East and other nations lacking freedom of speech, freedom of belief and the principles of justice embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Amy and Roy ran a safe house where clients could be held until their papers were in order and arrangements were made for integration in another country. Host nations were generally aware of the organization’s affairs and quietly approved but this was new territory. Until now their clients were intellectuals, professors and professionals that were welcome additions to most civilized nations.

American and coalition soldiers were another story. Most were unskilled workers and many came home from the war with deep emotional scars. Some would require long term care, the kind of care America no longer believed in.

Miguel Estrada was such a man. Amy and Roy spent long hours talking to him, digging into his past, his experience in Iraq, his reasons for wanting out, the depth of his commitment to the cause: Was he willing to go to jail? Was he willing to start a new life in another country? Was he willing to give up contact with his own family for years if not a lifetime?

Miguel was not a simple man. He did not answer questions without fully understanding the meaning, without taking it in and pushing it around, like a new kid in the neighborhood, just to see what it was made of. His family worked in the fields of plenty in the southwestern states that for so many years welcomed his kind: the Mexican migrant labor force with roots both south and north of the border.

He spoke of the two nations in those terms: north and south. Both were America and both were more or less united states. As a child he believed in both. He had pride in both. He was grateful to the old country for taking care of his familia, for nurturing his parents and treating his grandparents with the kind of dignity that elders deserved. He was grateful to his new country for welcoming him, giving him an opportunity for higher education and offering him a way to move forward, to make a better life for himself and the family he expected to have.

As an adult he felt betrayed by both countries. He understood that both countries cared only for money. Corporate green he called it. Both exploited workers with substandard wages and working conditions. The south suppressed organized labor and the north, after enticing and using migrant workers, blamed them for everything that was wrong with their faltering economy.

Miguel understood little of this when he was forced to volunteer for service just before the September 11 attack. He served one tour in Afghanistan and two more in Iraq before he went AWOL.

He would not talk about what happened in the war beyond saying that he knew death from both sides. They sat in the living room of their Seattle home probing for more, tapping his emotions, watching the sweat build on the lines of his brow until they ran down his cheeks, joining his tears. They listened to his voice quiver and break as he struggled to release the demons that possessed him.

He would not go back. He would go underground. He would go to Guanajuato and disappear. He would go to jail but he would not go back.

Another evening of grinding, penetrating interrogation gave way to revelation. Amy looked at Roy and they both acknowledged a simple truth: they believed him. He was no longer a client; he was a friend. They would press him no further. They would search for the right answer to his dilemma.

Roy explained why it was necessary to treat him as they had but Miguel shrugged. He understood. You can’t trust anyone or anything. A smile is not what it used to be. An outstretched hand may be the last you hold.

As a cool northern Pacific breeze filtered through an unseasonably warm Seattle evening, Miguel told a story of Marine revenge in a village outside Haditha. There was a report of collusion with the enemy, a safe haven where weapons and explosives were stored. Three homes were identified and his squadron was assigned to investigate.

Miguel bowed his head, closed his eyes and allowed his mind to retrieve the pictures, the sounds and senses he had fought so long to block out. His face revealed the terror he summoned from dark memories and his hands began to shake like an old alcoholic reaching for his last whiskey.

The others pressed him to lead. He was the most experienced. They pushed and prodded: Kill the kid. The rest will be easy.

He felt a charge of adrenaline that he mistook for the hand of justice, raised his pistol and sighted the boy’s face. He saw his eyes widen and contract when disbelief gave way to the realization that the man before him was capable of such an act. They were dark eyes, prominent eyes, searching, seeking, and pleading eyes, the eyes of innocence, and the eyes of his people. They could have been his eyes or the eyes of his future son.

Amy’s cell phone sounded Janis Joplin’s Ball and Chain and the spell was broken. Miguel tried to resume his story, tried to retrieve the image, the crying, a mother’s pleading in a foreign tongue, the smell of piss and fear, the sting of sweat in his swollen eyes, but he could not continue. He stammered and stopped, struggled and failed.

It was a place he could not go. It was a placed that stripped him of his humanity, his dignity, his strength and confidence. He could not return there. Not now. Not again. He gasped for air like a marathon runner at the end of the road. Amy went to him, apologized again and again, cradled him until the waves of involuntary quivering released and gave him what comfort she could.

Roy, poised on a loveseat opposite them, every muscle in his body taut with the desire to act and knotted by the futility of that desire, watched and tried to put himself inside another man’s soul. Was it even possible to imagine what he had seen? Was it even possible to imagine how he felt? The wound he carried was so much more penetrating than anything he was ever likely to experience that it left him breathless. How do you care for such a being? How do you treat that deep a wound?

And what of the child? Could he imagine the sight of the gun pointed at his head, the cries of his mother, the soldiers barking for blood vengeance? It was beyond imagining how he felt. Still, in the back of his mind, he knew he would write the story much as Miguel had told it, leaving the barrel of the gun hanging, balanced on the threshold of life and death, the eyes of a child inviting visions of a different path, a path of peace and mutual respect. It would fit well in a series of commentaries under the heading: The Untold Casualties of War. He would use an assumed name of course.

He shook himself to break free of the writer’s mode. Amy had warned him, at quiet times of introspection when he was open to criticism, that it could make him seem aloof, as if he only cared in the abstract, as if he was observing real, breathing, sometimes bleeding human beings from a distance. Like a movie. It could make him seem insensitive, uncaring, cold…

At times like these Roy felt perfectly inadequate, an impotent being. His thoughts were pushed to the irrational conclusion: If only I can help this one… But for every one there were literally millions of others. The victims we are trained to care about like those of Iraq and Afghanistan and those we are conditioned to place beyond our emotions like the accursed of Myanmar, East Timor or the Congo.

They would do what they could and move on. It was a struggle with no end. They would do what they could do to help this man find refuge, a place to heal and begin again, and then they would move on to the next and the next and the next.

They waited until the convulsions of raw emotion subsided before explaining the options they could provide. They could give him a new identity and set him up in any major city in America other than San Diego where he last resided. He could move to Europe – London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona – or Latin America – Caracas, Buenos Aires or Mexico City. Whatever he decided, wherever he went, he could not contact family or friends for at least two years.

Miguel took a deep breath and asked for time to think. It was a quiet night filled with agony and reflection. In his own way, he was freeing his mind of everything and everyone that bound him to his life. In the morning over coffee he told them he wanted to move to Chicago.

As a university student, he took a trip there once. If he had to start over at least he would begin with pleasant memories. It was place a man could lose himself in the crowd. It was a place where people had open minds and good schools. He wanted to resume his education. He wanted to become a teacher or a social worker. He wanted to help people like himself.

Amy and Roy nodded in agreement and promised to do everything in their power to make it so.