Hell No, We Won't Go: Vietnam Draft Resisters in Canada

Sara Stratton holds a PhD in American history from York University.

Alan Haig-Brown has spent several years collecting the life stories of
Americans who came to Canada in the 1960s and early 1970s to avoid the
draft or otherwise protest against U.S. military action in Vietnam. In
this book, he reproduces and comments on 20 of those interviews.

The stories are sometimes compelling, if occasionally bogged down in
minor detail—a problem of any self-history. Haig-Brown’s own prose
is awkward in places, and this detracts from the power that could have
come from his subjects’ stories if they had been rendered as pure oral
history from which readers could draw their own conclusions.

A chronology of events is provided at the end of the book, but no real
explanation of how and why the United States became involved in a series
of wars in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a long and complicated
historical event that was rooted in 19th- and 20th-century imperialisms
and in the social, political, and military dislocations that accompanied
the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It virtually
destroyed Vietnam, and nearly tore apart the United States in the 1960s.
A brief examination of the historical context would have strengthened
the point that Haig-Brown and his subjects make: that the American
intervention in Vietnam represented arrogance and folly of the highest
order, and that resistance was therefore an honorable option.