As Rick said, we talked about this in true Mudcat form last night. I was a teenage Canadian on an Air Force base in a small Missouri town in the late 60's, and I watched all this happening from my safe perch, watched my friends just beginning to sign up or agonise, and we argued it out, about when the arguing hit the Middle West. And some went, including my best friend, who got himself killed, the stupid bastard (I am coming around to forgiving him for getting himself killed). And then I came back to Canada, and about the first people I met were the early draft dodgers, and I met lots over the next few years, and all I can think about now is how young and ignorant everyone was, and (as Rick says) how little everyone had to go on to make such terrifying choices for their lives. I remember being impressed by the gravity of their situation, and thinking that all of those caught up in the decision-making process were being pushed into being grownups. In some ways, reflecting on the history of the subsequent 30 plus years, we can see that the image of the late 60s is completely misleading -- all that childlike flowerpower stuff. If adulthood is the result of making serious decisions and living with them, then they were adults, and their masters, children. In fact, they were the last adults we have seen since. America has returned into being the usual pack of careless juvenile delinquents (check out the outgoing and incoming administrations).

I think it is also important to say (as a Canadian) that for Americans to give up living in America was a terrible thing to have to do. America is a dream, everyone is inoculated with it early on, and to turn your back on it requires immense courage and heartache. My experience with draft dodgers was that (except for a druggie or two) they were haunted by their own supposed betrayal of their deepest dream, and could only live with it by saying that their country had betrayed them first. That may have been a cheap argument, but the sentiment betrayed their terrible sense of loss. For many Americans, being exiled is at least as bad as being locked in a jail. I don't trivialize being locked in a jail.

yours, PeterT.