Shelley Dennis
A nervous, skinny soldier named Alonzo slides into a booth at a cafe near Fort Lewis and orders water. "I'm too uptight to eat," he says. "At 13:00, they're going to start calling my cell phone." That's the hour when soldiers line up after lunch to report for duty, and Alonzo (who requests to be identified by first name only) has no intention of going back. In his car outside is a hastily packed suitcase. He turns off his cell phone.
One o'clock comes and goes, at which point Alonzo is officially absent without leave—for the third time. The Army's response to the first two incidents, which included a year-long stay in Canada, led him to this point. When he voluntarily returned to Fort Lewis last summer, tired of the matter hanging over his head, he says his superiors "didn't really know what to do with me." Since then, he's heard different stories. Sometimes his sergeant told him he was going to be court-martialed. Other times he was informed that he would instead be "chaptered out," military slang for receiving a discharge according to one of the chapters of Army regulations. This morning it was back to court-martial, and this time he heard it from a major.
When it comes to the military's handling of deserters, there is little consistency. Some, like outspoken war opponent Lt. Ehren Watada, face courts-martial and potential jail sentences, while others are allowed to quietly leave with an "other than honorable discharge"—the military's term for a discharge that falls somewhere between honorable and dishonorable. And frequently the military drags its feet while deciding what to do.
"They seem to be making rules up as they go along," says Eric Seitz, a Hawaii lawyer who represented Watada through his Fort Lewis court-martial, which ended last year in a mistrial. (A federal court in November issued a preliminary injunction stopping the Army from a second court-martial.)
Major Nathan Banks, an Army spokesperson, counters that the disciplinary system "isn't built to be a cookie cutter," but operates on a "case-by-case" basis, adding that "it's entirely up to the [unit] commander." While the Army's stated priority is rehabilitating soldiers so they can continue to serve, a commander might say, according to Banks, "Hey, I want to make an example out of this person."
As a whole, the military treats deserters more leniently than it could—and than it would like new recruits to believe. Still on the books is a regulation stipulating the maximum punishment for desertion in time of war, one drill sergeants like to impress upon wavering soldiers: death. "And we're at war," Banks emphasizes, quickly adding that the Army doesn't really impose this harsh a penalty.
In the 2004 fiscal year, the Army court-martialed 176 deserters, just 7 percent of the total who fled for civilian life. Courts-martial, or military trials, must be held for prison sentences to be handed out. When they are, the standard ranges from three to five months, according to Bill Galvin, who has counseled hundreds of AWOL soldiers in his work for the Center on Conscience and War in Washington, D.C.
"The Army doesn't have enough jail cells to accommodate all the people who go AWOL," says James M. Branum, an Oklahoma lawyer nationally known for his work with deserters. Nearly 7,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, according to figures from each branch of the military. (The military counts soldiers as deserters once they've been AWOL for more than 30 days.)
While some branches, most notably the Navy, have seen the number of deserters drop since the beginning of the Iraq War, the total number has risen, largely in the Army, where roughly 4,700 people deserted in the last fiscal year—an 80 percent jump since the beginning of the war—amounting to just under one percent of the Army's total manpower.
Alonzo, a private first class, went AWOL after he traveled to Vancouver, B.C., to run a marathon in the summer of 2006. "I was depressed," he says.
Like the majority of AWOL soldiers, according to counselors who work with them, Alonzo's main motivation was not opposition to the war, although he says that came later. Rather, he says he found out that he "really wasn't into shooting and driving a Humvee."
Furthermore, he was having a hard time with a sergeant who he says was always screaming at him. Still, he called this superior after a day in Vancouver and agreed to return. At that point, he says he was reprimanded and had some pay docked.
Shortly thereafter, his unit was called up for deployment, at which point they traveled to a Yakima training facility to prepare. There more bad times ensued. "I can't do this," he thought. So three months after his first Canadian foray, Alonzo drove himself across the border again, helped by antiwar activists in Vancouver, who let him stay in their homes and put him in touch with a lawyer who submitted an application on his behalf for refugee status.
"He became like part of the family," says Valerie Raoul, a retired University of British Columbia professor who hosted Alonzo in her home. While in Vancouver, Alonzo worked as a barista at a Starbucks on Commercial Drive. But about five months later, when that job soured and his refugee application dragged on (Canadian authorities have been reluctant to grant American war resisters permanent residency), he decided to head back to the States, traveling all the way down to Fort Sill, Okla., to turn himself in.
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