"This is a criminal war, and I'm not
going to be part of it," says Hinzman, 24, a rail-thin native of South
Dakota with close-cropped hair and a purposeful expression on his
angular face. "My wife and I wrestled with what to do -- go the martyr
route and go to prison, or leave the country. Prison could have meant a
long sentence, and I've already spent enough time away from my family."
So the Hinzmans now live in a basement apartment in central Toronto,
surviving off their savings and waiting for the Canadian government to
decide what to do with them. It may be premature at this point to call Iraq America's new Vietnam,
but it's also getting harder to ignore the symptoms of that ill-fated
conflict that are presenting themselves anew. One of the least noticed
is the growing numbers of GIs who are either refusing to fight or who
are having increasing doubts about doing so. Some are acting out of
principle, others perhaps out of fear, many undoubtedly out of a
combination of both. But they seem to agree with Hinzman on one thing:
The war the Bush administration started in Iraq is not worth dying for. [more ]
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