Reporter
First in Flight
Last March, when Army private Brandon Hughey, of San Angelo, deserted to Canada, some Texans openly called for his execution. But three months later, Hughey is very much alive—and hoping more soldiers will follow his lead.
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A year later Brandon completed boot camp, and initially, at least, he seemed to do well. His commanding officers told David that his son was a good tank driver with a lot of heart. But sometimes Brandon found himself objecting to the rigid chain of command. Occasionally he'd even respond to an order by asking, "Why?" Even though his superiors gave him a healthy dose of push-ups and stern lectures about obeying supervisors, his need for answers only persisted over time. By mid-December, when he was stationed at Fort Hood, Brandon was spending the bulk of his free time on the Internet, searching for information about weapons inspectors and U.N. resolutions and the legality of preemptive war. Operation Iraqi Freedom had been fought for nine months; there were no WMDs and little evidence of a link between Saddam and 9/11. Brandon told his father that he thought the war was illegal and that he wanted to leave the Army.
But by then he had few options. When he approached his superiors in early February of this year, he was told that if he opposed the war, he should have designated himself a "conscientious objector" on his recruitment form. His only other chances for general discharge were technicalities, and he couldn't very well pretend he was crazy—or pregnant. So with his deployment date looming, Brandon panicked. He went AWOL for three weeks in February, driving around the Hill Country and as far as Utah in a silver Mustang he'd bought with his boot camp earnings, trying to clear his head. When he finally returned, he met with the sergeant major but was again told that leaving the Army was not a possibility. He would have to rejoin his unit and prepare for Iraq.
Which was the same position he found himself on March 1. That night he was in his room surfing the Internet, trying to shake the images of violent war footage he'd seen on the nightly news, when a soldier from his unit knocked at the door. Their deployment date had been moved up, he was told; he should be ready to leave for Iraq the next day. "I'll be there," Brandon responded. But as he said the words, he knew he wasn't telling the truth. Brandon then imagined ways he might kill himself. "What would they say then?" he thought.
Instead, he sat down at his computer and typed an e-mail to a peace activist in Indiana he'd read about named Carl Rising-Moore. A Vietnam veteran, Rising-Moore had been traveling around Canada drumming up support for the Freedom Underground, a network he hoped would help sneak American deserters out of the country. Over the next few hours the two exchanged a flurry of e-mails and phone calls. Brandon ended their last conversation by telling Rising-Moore that he'd made up his mind: He wanted to go to Canada, and he had to leave Texas that night. Two days later, wearing New York Knicks caps and telling the guard they were heading to an NBA game in Toronto, the two crossed the border outside of Buffalo during rush hour.
AT THE HUGHEY HOME IN San Angelo, David Hughey sat at his kitchen table in May surrounded by paintings of bluebonnets and binders filled with documents. The pages were highlighted and footnoted and tagged as though they were being prepared for a presentation. "I've been doing a lot of reading in the past three months," he said, "and it's easy to see what my son sees now."
David's judgment of Brandon has taken a radical turn since Brandon left. He first heard about his flight not from his son but from military officials who wrote him saying that Brandon was absent without leave. A few days after Brandon had safely crossed the border, David received a phone call from Rising-Moore, who told him that if he wanted to pick up Brandon's car, he could come meet him in Indiana. Two days later, David flew up to Indianapolis, where he and Rising-Moore talked at a local Denny's. David's first thought when he was told that Brandon was in Canada was "Oh, the hippies," envisioning the kind of men who had protested the Vietnam War when he was a kid. And as he drove back to Texas, he felt deeply disappointed. He thought Rising-Moore had manipulated Brandon, and he blamed himself, for having raised his boys alone, for not having had much luck at good-paying jobs. "I always wanted the little house with the white picket fence and the wife and happy kids," he said, "and none of that seemed to work out."
When he got home, he didn't speak to Brandon right away. He had no contact number, plus he was still ashamed, afraid to go out and face his neighbors. "The very same day the paper wrote an article about Brandon," he said, his throat tightening, "there was a story on the opposite page about a man right next door who died [in Iraq]." So David became a political news junkie instead, searching the Internet for articles about his son. Some of them were hard to take. He discovered that Brandon was trying to get refugee status. If he was successful, some of the stories intimated, the landmark case might open the floodgates to other Iraq-war deserters. That notion only confirmed David's view that Brandon was being used for a liberal agenda. When the Express-News contacted him for a quote, he called him one of the harshest things he could think of: a pawn.
But despite himself, the more he read about Brandon's case, the more he came to respect him. Even if he didn't agree with Brandon about the lack of justification for war, he was proud that he'd taught him to think for himself. Soon he was downloading and footnoting copies of the U.N. joint resolution papers, excerpts from Bush's speeches, newspaper clippings, the U.S. Constitution, even the Federalist Papers, hoping to draw his own conclusions. He found Abraham Lincoln's "House Divided" speech to contain a particularly compelling argument for Brandon. "It's his logic that appeals to me," David said, tapping the pages in front of him. "'We know that a man may rightfully be wiser today than he was yesterday—that he may rightfully change when he finds himself wrong.'"
David said he's still torn by Brandon's opinion on Iraq. "Now we're confronted with a predicament," he said, referring to the fate of those soldiers who chose to fight. "You have to make sure their deaths weren't meaningless." He said that no matter what happens, his own life has changed forever. He's more cautious now when he talks on the phone, fearing that the line may be tapped. When he loses a pen or misplaces a cup, he worries that the FBI has been in his house. "I'm going to write something in defense of my son," he said. "After I send this letter from the heart of Bush country, I may have to move up to St. Catharines myself." He is energized by Brandon's plight, but the heavy sighs that punctuate his speech betray the toll it's taken on him. "There's a stigma: desertion, shame," he said. "All this leaves me shaking my head. My house is divided."
BRANDON HUGHEY IS IN LIMBO. Requests for interviews, once coming in a few times a day, now arrive only once a week or so. He applied for a work permit, but he's still waiting for it to be processed. He doesn't have a car to get around town in or know many people in his new community. Once in a while he takes a walk through the maple-tree-lined streets, but mostly he hangs out in his converted basement-bedroom in his host family's modest two-story home, watching TV and playing video games on his Sony PlayStation, talking to his attorney, waiting for the legal system to hear his case. Now and then he receives another piece of hate mail in which someone calls him a chicken or a disgrace to his country, but he said he doesn't let it get to him. "There were a lot of Nazi soldiers who went to Sweden once they realized they'd be slaughtering Jews in concentration camps," he said. "These same people speaking out against me—would they call those deserters cowards?"
Hughey hopes to have his first hearing before the immigration board in September. If he succeeds, he wants to earn some money and then finally go to college, maybe be just another student again. But in the meantime, he's pursuing a more public role. A few weeks after he first arrived in Canada, Hughey attended an anti-war rally in Toronto along with Jeremy Hinzman, of South Dakota, the first U.S. soldier to desert the Iraq war. Hinzman spoke to the crowd of six thousand, but Hughey chose to sit onstage, too shy to address the assembly. Three months later, despite all the backlash over his decision, he said that he's no longer timid. "I've been invited to Montreal in August to speak at a conference," he said. "[The attention] doesn't bother me now. I choose the publicity. I'm choosing to accept this."
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