Resisters united

War Resisters: Standing Against the Vietnam War
by Joline Martin

Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025
$26 /  9781773861685

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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Many of us who came of age in British Columbia during the Vietnam War knew and often befriended young men and women who escaped the fighting by migrating, often clandestinely, to Canada. In this intimate account, Comox Valley writer Joline Martin uniquely focuses on the draft resisters who came to Vancouver Island and became Canadians.    

Most of Martin’s resisters came in fear, were welcomed for the most part, and contributed to their new country. They shaped their new communities, built houses, learned a trade, started businesses, worked in local industry, and did charity work.

Many of the resisters came from middle class families. Some of their parents had military careers and supported the war. The resisters were often well educated, managing to get draft deferments to complete degrees. Some were talented musicians. One is pictured with folk legend Pete Seeger. Some were teachers, artists, pilots, or mechanics. One was listed as a “lovechild.” Another was a Unitarian Chaplin.  

Jeff Harbrower’s military father tried to talk him out of it. “Jeff’s father demanded to know ‘what would you do if it was Hitler’.” Jeff didn’t answer. Then his father tried the domino effect argument where American foreign policy claimed communism would spread once Vietnam fell. Jeff didn’t buy it.

Norm Reynolds’s father was a former Marine and a fundamentalist Christian. His father also encouraged him to fight in Vietnam. “It’s just how it is,” he advised his son, “you have to kill someone whose eyes differ from yours.” Norm soured on religion at that point.

Steve Horel’s father was worried but lent him the family car to drive to the Canadian border. He crossed over and dedicated himself to writing poetry and growing vegetables. His poem about a friend whose name appears on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, forms Chapter 6.

Manny Meyer, a musician, remembers using his skills as a pilot to drop anti-war leaflets on San Francisco. He succeeded and a local newspaper called him the “Mad Bomber.” The publicity scared Manny and he eventually headed for the border.     

Martin includes several women, who are sometimes excluded from other published accounts. They are girlfriends, spouses, and mothers of resister children. The relationships didn’t always last, but the women played a big role in getting resisters to safety and setting up homes in various island towns.

Steph Nathan crossed the border with her husband John and they built a new life first in a commune where they lived under a flatbed truck. With the average life expectancy of a recruit estimated at six weeks, she knew they had made the correct decision. “Strange to think that in 12 weeks, a person could go from home to a coffin,” Martin observed.

The chapter on sex, drugs, and rock and roll brings back Woodstock, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and the Summer of Love. I could almost hear Joan Baez, The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix’s squealing guitar version of the American national anthem. And few could forget Country Joe and the Fish singing “One, Two, Three, What Are We Fighting For?”

The book also documents the role of resister organizations in Canada, especially in Vancouver and Toronto. Also noted are faith groups like the Quakers and the Doukhobors, the Russian immigrant sect with its strong tradition of resistance to war. All played a significant role in assisting resisters.         

Before-and-after photos help convey a sense of their journey to Canada and their new lives far from the draft board. The images give the book a family-album quality with the resisters standing next to their vehicles, at the doorway to their self-built homes or in their studios and workplaces.

We learn what it was like to escape to Canada using a new underground railroad and guided by a network of underground newspapers, including Vancouver’s Georgia Straight in its heyday. They “saved the lives of people, both Americans and Vietnamese,” Martin writes. “Underground networks conducted non-violent resistance to a violent war that historians have judged as immoral.”

These sometimes harrowing stories are complimented by Martin’s solid recording of related events. She includes the historical highlights associated with the war, including the American-backed French war with the Vietnamese in the 1950s, the McCarthyism that fueled the cold war, and the fall of Saigon and the war’s end in 1975.

Note: Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of books and documentary films on this subject have emerged in the post-Vietnam War decades. Eli Greenbaum’s excellent Hell No, We Didn’t Go (University of Kansas Press, 2024) includes frightening memories of facing a draft board and the opprobrium of fellow Americans. Kathleen Rodgers beat Martin to the punch with Welcome to Resisterville: American Dissidents in British Columbia (UBC Press, 2014). In it she offers memories from the Canadian side of the border but not exclusively from Vancouver Island.

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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron Verzuh recently wrote about Tom McGauley and has recently reviewed books by Patricia E. Roy, Lisa Anne Smith, Charles Demers, Graeme Menzies, Angie Ellis, and Mark Waddell for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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