The Taste of Metal: A Deserter’s Story

Jack Todd

Harper Flamingo Canada

254 pages, hardcover

ISBN 0002000555

“Ok, go on.”

The Canadian Customs Officer had probably said those words a thousand times a day as cars passed back and forth between Canada and the U.S.A. Little did he realize that with those three single syllable yawns, he changed the course of a man’s life.  The passenger in the car that January 4, 1970 was twenty-three year old Jack Todd. Todd was deserting the American Army.

At the same time “Ok, go on” almost seems taken from a Beckett play.  Throughout the course of Todd’s life in Canada, the Beckett paradox, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” resonates through the young man’s exile as he confronts the loss of family, career, and friends, but also typical existential angst. He carries a copy of The Idiot, he goes on romantic drinking binges, and women are little more than motherly playthings he can either find solace in or fuck.  Most of us have a hard enough time dealing with adolescent crap let alone exile.  Yet, through it all, Todd goes on. 

A Taste of Metal is Montreal Gazette journalist Jack Todd’s memoir about deserting the U.S army in the middle of the Vietnam War and fleeing to Canada. Todd’s takes us from his early years in Nebraska to his first newspaper job in Miami, and military training to his years in Canada wandering between Vancouver and Quebec.

Given that approximately 100,000 Americans fled to Canada (about 20,000 stayed) during the Vietnam War, it’s surprising that The Taste of Metal is among the first to document these experiences. Maybe it’s not so surprising when you consider the emotional and existential consequences of leaving your country, family and in many ways, yourself. It’s taken Todd over thirty years to come to terms with his exile.

The Vietnam War

It probably says more about the war than me, but like many of my generation born in the mid-late 60s, I didn’t have a clue how or why the Vietnam War started. My history of the Vietnam War has been fed through the nipples of the media. Assaulted with sound and video bites and Vietnam vet mythologies courtesy of Hollywood (egg. The Deer Hunter, Good Morning Vietnam, Born on The Fourth of July). I heard about protests. I knew (because that’s what the movies told me) that guys who went to Vietnam came back totally fucked up, crippled or drunk. I knew they played Russian roulette and that the Vietnamese were sneaky little bastards. And I knew that a lot of Americans ran to Canada to escape the war.  But how did it begin? Not a clue. Not surprisingly, I don’t think this predicament is limited to my generation.  You get the sense, especially after reading Todd’s book, that no one really knew why the Americans were involved in this war.

In short, here’s Todd’s take on the roots of the war: “Ho Chi Minh had risked everything to reach a moderate agreement with the French in 1946, accepting what was to be limited independence. …[F]rench promises were broken, beginning a bloody war that would cost France $5 billion, along with the blood of her best young professional soldiers.  Because Ho and his guerillas fought with the American OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) against the Japanese in World War II, Ho thought America would back him against the French. Ho gave the Americans too much credit, America supported the colonialist French instead, pushing Ho Chi Minh closer to the Chinese, traditional enemies of the Vietnamese people.”

Afraid to be called a wimp, Lyndon Johnson went along with the Pentagon and State Department’s desire to go to War. By 1964, as Todd notes, “we were all thoroughly familiar with Vietnam, even out in the Nebraska panhandle.” Americans believed this was just another war against the evils of communism. Not unlike World War II, public support for the war was earned through an incident between a Vietnamese gunboat and an American destroyer. For a short time, Americans trusted Johnson and believed in the War. By 1967, however, many, including Jack Todd, began to question Johnson’s decision.  “If I am a reluctant and heartsick draftee now, it is because of the things that happened here, at this university in the heartland, and the people who finally made me see that the war was wrong.” But that was later.

MASCULINITY IN CRISIS

“I believed in it once. We all did.”

A Taste of Metal opens in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. 1958. Eleven year old Todd, and his best friend Sonny Walter are preparing to kill the notorious murderer Charlie Starkweather (inspiration for Oliver Stones’ Natural Born Killers).  Rumour has it that Starkweather is being sent to the Scottsbluff jail. The boys are determined to protect their community and family. They will get hold of a rifle and kill Starkweather. Of course they never do, but as Todd says in the final line of the prologue: “…we were ready to fight”. In this single phrase Todd captures the almost obsessively patriotic tendencies of his nation and with it the inheritance of masculinity. 

With echoes of Philip Roth’s American Trilogy, Todd contextualizes the war within the framework of his life and his family’s past. Todd grew up in Nebraska. His parents were poor (as Todd beautifully notes, “We have been hurled into the world on the force of her dreams”. We are introduced to the many men who came face to face with Kennedy’s “what you can do for your country” line and specifically a generation whose fathers, uncles, and grandfathers had all known the stench of war. From the prologue through to his exile, Todd’s subtly hints at the pressures to be a man inherited from his family.

As he says early on, “I thought all my heroes should look like Audie Murphy or John Wayne…” Todd’s father we learn was a doughboy in World War 1. “He taught me the full rifle drill by the time I was ten, practicing with my .22 in the backyard.”  His Uncle Jimmy was an anti-aircraft gunner and was at Pearl Harbour.  “I saw them all as heroes…” As a child, Todd spent most nights reading, writing and dreaming about war.

“That was what I wanted, so fiercely I could almost taste it: to march in starched combat fatigues, with my combat boots spitshined and my rifle gleaming in the sun. After the war, my war, a war even greater than World War II, I would come home and parade down Broadway in Scottsbluff with my tank unit, pretty girls and little old ladies waving and blowing kisses and thanking me for saving the world from the communists.”

Todd’s childhood friend, Sonny Walter is a pivotal character in the book.  He is Todd’s link to the past and a foreshadower of the dark possibilities that life, let alone war, brings.  As Todd recounts their childhoods together, images of violence, aggression, and blood dominate:

“I’d find Sonny hard to forget even if I wanted to. I have a scar on my right forearm where I ran into the back of a pickup truck…”

 “Sonny threw a dirt clod at me and found out too late there was a rock inside…”

 “We took my .22 rifle and his .410 shotgun and blasted at everything that moved in the woods…”

“We made up Robin Hood games and fired real arrows…”

 “We played World War II…”

There are those who say that this is what boys do, that this is normal. That’s nonsense. It’s an inherited system of beliefs that motivate the boy’s activities.  The boys play with guns because they believe that’s what will make them men. It’s what they learned from fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and John Wayne. And if shooting a rifle is comfortable by the age of ten, it’s a short road to shooting humans. So it’s really no surprise that Sonny went to Vietnam and Todd was preparing to go. Sonny, realizing too late, the horrors of war, tried to convince Todd that Vietnam was a mental mess in waiting.   “You don’t know how fucked up you’re going to be if you make it back.” For now, the breezes of the past overpowered Sonny’s whispers.

As Todd tells us it wasn’t until University that he began to doubt the war. Nevertheless, despite the voices of dissent, the on-going campus rallies and dialogues, the breathes of the past still spoke louder. In 1969, Todd went to Fort Lewis for basic training:

“Army basic in 1969 is haphazard, sloppy, lacking all conviction. From the first day it feels like the mighty U.S. Army is coming undone. One day we’ll be worked to the point of exhaustion doing pushups in the rain, then we’ll have no physical training at all for a week…. The drill sergeants, most of them Vietnam vets, don’t seem to believe in any of it…. it almost seems the army has given up.”

You would figure that Todd’s decision to desert was owing to:  the learned university voices he absorbed while attending Lincoln College in 1967, the horrendous photos that Sonny brings back from Vietnam, or his many late night conversations at Fort Wayne with fellow soldier (and pacifist) Powers, but no it all boils down again to masculinity: he got dumped by his girlfriend, Mariela. Now emotionally castrated, Todd decides to flee to Canada.

Between Ships

The second half of A Taste of Metal covers Todd’s years of exile in Canada. Here the book becomes less about Jack Todd, deserter, and arguably more about Jack Todd, typical male adolescent of his age.   The war remains ever-present, but it becomes a minor character.  Todd does volunteer work for a Committee against the war, but he doesn’t throw himself into political groups evolving at the time. Exile becomes less about a political stance and more about a young man trying to get his life back.

Almost as soon as he arrives in Vancouver, Todd’s story turns into a Bukowski world of hookers, junkies, boozers and general low lifes: 

“Walking along Hastings Street in January is like sticking your head in a sink full of cold, dirty water after the dishes are done. Winos, junkies, pimps whores, derelict screaming crazies. Everywhere you look, the sidewalks have a coating of spittle and vomit…”

For five years, Todd scampers back and forth between Vancouver and Quebec. He works briefly for The Vancouver Province, and then has turns as a dishwasher and a writer for a soft porn tabloid.  We meet junkies who shoot up in his hotel room. He goes on a drinking binge that begins when he learns that Mariela has married the geek he loathed and ends when he befriends a wino/sailor who claims he’s waiting for his ship to sail in. Todd embraces the notion of hope expressed by the man:

“For the first time in a month there’s no urge to get drunk. The weather is getting warmer. Spring is here. I’m between ships. I’m going to make it.”

Accompanying the angst are Todd’s sexual exploits including a threesome that he likens to “moonlighting in the sexual trenches.” And of course, as a young writer, he watches Bergman films, and wants to travel to Europe to write the Great American novel.

There’s nothing wrong with these tales because they reveal again the naiveté and experimental nature of youth. Besides, this is a young man with a baggage full of emotion weight: “I’m by my lonesome here. Adrift without a girlfriend, a job, a home, a bank account, friends, family, food, or enough money to last more than a month at the outside. Without a country.” Under normal circumstances this might sound like a romantic mouthing of a middle class kid, but this is a twenty something young man who really has lost everything. Here is a young man in the midst of trying to figure the adult world while living adrift from home and family as a criminal.

Todd’s youthful arrogant emotions are constantly screwing up what could have been an easy ride.  During his first month in Canada he gets a job at the Vancouver Province. Within a week, the paper is shut down by a strike. Later we he returns to work, he subsequently loses the job because he fails to kiss the ass of the ‘star’ reporter. More tragically, Todd later decides to renounce his U.S. citizenship as a stand against the U.S.A and also to go to France to write that Great American Novel (he believes that a stateless person can get travel papers to go to Europe). Ignoring many voices, Todd’s officially rejects his U.S. citizenship. Only after does he read the fine print: “the travel papers are available only for Hungarian refugees who fled after the uprising against the Soviets in 1956.” Within a year, Nixon is gone and amnesties are flowing. It is too late for Todd. He must wait until 1975 to get his Canadian citizenship.

Given the romantic tendencies of the book, it’s surprising that Todd’s eventual return home is quiet and almost matter of fact. He returns home in 1975 after getting his Canadian citizenship, but the first trip recounted in detail is 1981. While stopping to get gas, Todd finds Sonny working as a mechanic. The two embrace, reminisce, have a few drinks, watch a bar brawl, and make plans for the future. Despite suffering from alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder (common to many Vietnam Vets), a failed marriage, Sonny seems to have turned out ok. As Todd prepares to return to Montreal, the two embrace and finalize their plans.

“…I tell Sonny about my plan. He’s all for it. We’re going to sit down with a tape recorder, and he’s going to tell me the whole story, and then I’m going to write a book about it…”

Todd never sees Sonny again. In the middle of winter 1996, Sonny is found dead in his cold apartment. The windows were left open, the heat turned off and fifty empty whisky bottles are scattered around the apartment:

“The official cause of death was listed as hypothermia, but the truth is Sonny just crawled down into himself and drowned. He was fifty years old, and he never got over Vietnam.”

Sonny is unable to escape the winds of the past. This is perhaps the strength of Todd’s book, we see how not only the Vietnam War, but also American history and that bloated machismo follow and affect the lives of two people. As in Philip Roth’s The American Pastoral, we encounter a world where the personal and universal are fused.  We see how the seemingly mundane daily activities of individuals are motivated by larger political and social infrastructures. Todd was lucky enough to go on; Sonny wasn’t.

If there seem like an inordinate number of literary references here, it’s because Todd’s book often seems to have inhaled the puff of a novel and, in it’s worst moments, a Hollywood script: The childhood friend who warned him not to go to war, the woman he left behind who in turn marries a man he loathed (who later calls him to tell him she made a mistake), the drinking, the women, the young man in search of himself, foreign films (his favourite film was Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), and the quest to write the Great American novel (Roth already did that).  At times you shake your head in disbelief and suspect your reading a Hollywood adaptation of a Hemingway book.

What Todd offers is an unapologetic and frank portrait of an anguished and faulty young man who still believes he is the centre of it all.   He talks often about the communal feeling in Vancouver of the 1970s, but yet aside from Sonny, people seem simply to exist to help Jack Todd. Women come off, despite Todd’s undying love for Mariela, as little more than sperm receptacles.  Is it arrogance or just the way life is?  Faces come and go, giving and taking a moment.  Todd shows us more than the effects of War.  Consciously or otherwise, he reveals just how difficult it is to shrug off the past. Years of games and books and images all teaching him to be a MAN become so ingrained that it is impossible to simply flick a switch and turn off the past. 

Personal lives aside, A Taste of Metal reminds us of a time when Canada had the courage to take a stand against the arrogant bullying of the U.S.A. As Todd notes: “Pierre Trudeau is the reason I have my freedom. I will never denounce a man with the courage to stand up to the U.S….” Ironically (with all this stuff about masculinity), this was one of the last times Canada showed its balls. 

Canada, like Jack Todd, goes on, but it’s never quite the same.

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