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Episode 2678 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature an interview with Andy Pham, a good friend of this podcast as he talks with Canadian Bob Waller. In the interview, Waller describes how American deserters were treated by Canada during the Vietnam War years. The book Unguarded Border by Donald W. Maxwell established the basis for the discussion.

It seems that numerous yellow belly America pussies that were too cowardly to serve their country in Vietnam hid behind their skirts of false idealism and ran off to Canada to avoid serving. The official policy of the Canadian government was to accept all American émigrés who wanted to avoid service in the American military.

A fly in the ointment arose when it was discovered the Canadian border guards were returning American military deserters. This was against official Canadian government policy. In this interview Waller describes the situation in depth because he became personally involved in an attempt to expose the wrongdoings of the Canadian border guards,

Listen to episode 2678 and discover more about what Canadian, Bob Waller had to say about how Canada dealt with American deserters during the Vietnam War.

A description of Unguarded Border by Donald W. Maxwell includes this:

The United States is accustomed to accepting waves of migrants who are fleeing oppressive conditions and political persecution in their home countries. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the flow of migration reversed as over fifty thousand Americans fled across the border to Canada to resist military service during the Vietnam War or to escape their homeland’s hawkish society.

Unguarded Border tells their stories and, in the process, describes a migrant experience that does not fit the usual paradigms. Rather than treating these American refugees as unwelcome foreigners, Canada embraced them, refusing to extradite draft resisters or military deserters and not even requiring passports for the border crossing. And instead of forming close-knit migrant communities, most of these émigrés sought to integrate themselves within Canadian society.

Historian Donald W. Maxwell explores how these Americans in exile forged cosmopolitan identities, coming to regard themselves as global citizens, a status complicated by the Canadian government’s attempts to claim them and the U.S. government’s eventual efforts to reclaim them. Unguarded Border offers a new perspective on a movement that permanently changed perceptions of compulsory military service, migration, and national identity.