The New Exiles

An exiled war resister himself, Roger Neville Williams tells how and why this country has lost so many of its most talented, intelligent, and aware young men and women to Canada. And thirteen of these draft dodgers and deserters report their own highly individual experiences in a series of sometimes startling, often frightening, always candid interviews.

Lindy Blake of the Presidio 27 relates in horrifying details his life in the military stockades. Jerry Samuels, a Vietnam veteran, describes with brutal honesty how he and his friends shot Vietnamese girls after raping them and why he then deserted from combat. Jesse Winchester, the folk-rock singer, recalls his decision to resist the draft. They, and the others interviewed, discuss how they made the agonizing decision to go, their new lives in exile, and the Canadian reaction to them, in this comprehensive account of an unprecedented phenomenon of mass self-exile.