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The price of peace
BY STEPHEN SMITH
Jack Todd; $34 cloth 0-00-200055-5, 6 [Symbol Not Transcribed] [times] 9, 256 pp., HarperFlamingo Canada, Apr. Reviewed from bound galleys
The searing stories of the Americans who went to Vietnam to fight and bleed and die are written in the novels and short stories of Tim O'Brien and in memoirs like Michael Herr's Dispatches and Philip Caputo's A Rumour of War. The broader history of American involvement you'll find elsewhere: as Caputo wrote in 1996, these are stories that have nothing to do with politics or power, influence, or national interests. They are - simply, horrifyingly - about the things men do in war and the things war does to them.
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And the men who didn't go to war? So far, there's no lasting literature of the thousands who refused to serve. Of those who burned their draft cards and went to jail. Of those who dodged to Canada. Or who, like Jack Todd, came here as deserters.
It's as a sharply personal account that Todd's memoir, The Taste of Metal, works, but it's also fascinating in its penetration of the pall of fear and doubt that prevailed over the United States in the late 1960s.
Todd, now an award-winning columnist with Montreal's Gazette, was...