By Helen Jardine
Nineteen-year-old Ross Spears joined the U.S. Army to drive trucks and get a college degree.
He says it wasn’t long before he realized he’d been “duped.”
“I signed up without hesitation when they told me I could drive the supply trucks and that they would pay for my education to become a doctor or a nurse,” Spears says.
“I first started noticing it was all a big mistake when I got to my duty station and they told me, ‘Private, you’re not driving trucks anymore. You qualified ‘expert’ during weapons training, so we’re putting you on guns.’ ”
Despite Spears’s protests that this wasn’t what he had signed up to do, no one listened. The last straw for Spears came when he confronted an officer about his concerns.
“This officer told me, ‘Once you’re over there, you’ll see how much fun it is picking people off in the street from the roof.’ I was in complete disgust,” Spears says. “He totally disgusted me with that one sentence and that was it. I signed up to drive trucks, not to sit and shoot at targets, which I knew would quickly become live human beings.”
Spears decided to leave the army and, fearing imprisonment, fled to Canada.
“I didn’t have the money to get to Canada, so I started fundraising myself,” said Spears. “I was like, ‘If you really want to stick it to Bush, give me some money, help me out.’ I made $150, enough to get me to Buffalo, New York.”
Spears arrived in Ottawa in June and lives in Chinatown. But he says he has not given up on the idea of eventually returning to his native country.
“I will never give up the fact that I am American, even if the whole country deems me a fugitive,” he said.
Ross Spears is just one of several American soldiers who are seeking refuge in Centretown.
Others include James Burmeister, 22, who says that it wasn’t until he arrived in Iraq that he “realized what war was really like.”
“It was a totally different picture to what you see on TV,” said Burmeister.
“They told me I’d be handing out food and building schools. But I started to get a feel for what it would really be like when I started basic training and they were showing us the best places to shoot somebody and to blow up cars.”
Burmeister was in Iraq for six months and made the decision to desert when he became injured and was sent to Germany to recover. He never went back to Iraq.
Instead, he moved to Ottawa where he says he hopes to build a life for himself, his wife and their two-year-old son.
Jeremy Allen Daniel, 21, is from Dallas, Georgia and says he joined the army on the hopes of becoming a chaplain.
“I originally signed up wanting to be a chaplain, but I didn’t meet the qualifications,” Daniel says. “So they stuck me in artillery and I needed the money so I just did it. I didn’t really know what was going on in Iraq. I thought the more Americans that signed up, the quicker we would all be out.”
But soon after he got to his unit, Daniel said he began to have second thoughts.
“Three to four months after I got to my unit I heard about this seven-year-old Iraqi girl who was raped and her whole family was killed and the crime was covered up,” he said. “I didn’t want to fight or kill anybody.”
Daniel said his decision to leave the army hit his family hard back in Georgia.
“My entire family was so proud when I joined because I had always been the black sheep,” Daniel says.
“Everybody was always pushing me to greatness. Now I am only in contact with my mother. I was a huge disappointment to them because my entire family is in the military. If I went back to the States, American officials would take me off in handcuffs back to my unit.”
Daniel drove for two days with no sleep to get to Canada.
He has been living in Chinatown for the past two months with another U.S. deserter.
“I love Canada. Everybody is nice and a lot less belligerent than down in the States,” he says. “I especially like Ottawa, it still has this small-town feel, which makes me feel really comfortable as I come from a small town.”
All three soldiers spoke at a fundraiser for war resisters earlier this month held at Mercury Lounge.
Event organizers Joel Harden and Sonia Vani said they organized the event to raise awareness to the plight of these soldiers.
“We are doing this because we believe in freedom of expression for American and Canadian minds, and rights that you should be able to express like anyone else, without fear of persecution,” Harden says.
“If you changed your mind about going to Iraq to fight in a war, you shouldn’t be thrown into jail for having second thoughts. Me and you can quit a job without fear of persecution, why can’t they?”