In Canada, Flashback to the '70s

It was, he says, "a matter of moving on."

Life had turned tumultuous for him in the early 1970s. Gayton, who spent his childhood in Los Angeles, had received a draft notice and been denied conscientious objector status. He and his wife packed up their two kids and drove north in a '53 Chevy pickup, crossed the border near this funky town in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, and never looked back.

Like so many of the estimated 50,000 American war resisters -- draft dodgers, military deserters, pacifists -- who migrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, Gayton worked hard to blend in in his new country and that meant, in part, cutting loose from his old life and identity as a Yankee.

Border crossings in those years became points of dispersal: War resisters arrived in steady streams, but on crossing the line, scattered into their own separate lives.

Once settled, Gayton didn't seek out other draft dodgers, and they didn't seek him out.

Over three decades, Gayton became a cowboy, an ecologist, a stalwart husband and busy father of five. He became, he says, a super patriot of Canada while diligently following the news south of the border.

Then in March 2003, a lifetime removed from the trauma of the Vietnam War, the United States invaded Iraq, and something in him revived.

"It reawakened some very intense emotions," he said. "All those moral and ethical issues, about war, about patriotism -- all those questions: 'Did I do the right thing?' 'Am I a coward?' They weren't on the radar for a long time. They're back on the radar."

Gayton reached out to other American expatriates. It wasn't difficult. He'd been living around them for decades, even chatting with them at the post office or supermarket.

They knew one another as "expats" but were not interested in delving far into personal histories. They spoke as small-town neighbors, as ruralites, as Canadians.

But the conflict in Iraq tapped a common vein. Their "old country" was at war again, and the arguments over America's actions, to them, paralleled the debates over Vietnam. Their stories as war resisters became relevant again.