The year was 1967 and I was going to college in Miami, Florida. Since the war in Vietnam had started in 1965, my student deferment had kept me from getting drafted. Everyone had told me that it would be over soon. Without any warning, I was drafted, and forced into a conflict I neither understood or believed in. While my friends went off to be slaughtered, I was drafted, and trained to kill in eight short weeks. After receiving orders for Vietnam, I went to Oakland, California to await my flight to Vietnam. Instead of getting on that plane, I went AWOL. What followed was a two year journey of love, despair, murder, incarceration, covering the US from coast to coast.
I finally entered Canada in a most unusual way... My next book, Desering To Canada, Living Underground, tells the story of how I lived and worked in a country that did not know I existed., and how I dealt with the Canadian Immigration system, a system that saw four "Ministers of Manpower and Immigration", in less than five years.