The night is starry and cold. Red wooden cottages and stucco homes line the narrow cobblestone streets of the historic district in the heart of the city. Wearing jeans and clogs, Steve Kinnaman steps out on his porch to welcome a visitor. He looks younger than his 44 years. Shoes, boots and coats of all sizes fill the hallway. From upstairs come the sounds of young children being rushed to bed. Despite his tall, blond, blue-eyed Swedish appearance, Kinnaman is far from home.
Kinnaman serves tea in the living room, where exposed beams, sunny colors and rag runners on wooden floors create a cozy atmosphere. Relaxing in his armchair, speaking English with a slight Swedish accent, he says, ”I`m still an American and I always will be. I always felt that what we did here in Sweden, we did as Americans.”
Kinnaman is an American exile. He is a Vietnam War deserter, part of an outspoken group of resisters who sought asylum in Sweden.
Today, half a generation after the war, even after a presidential pardon in 1977, a handful of American war resisters remain in Sweden. They are now rooted in Swedish society, with new professional, social and political commitments. Even those who say they miss the United States or are
disenchanted with Sweden say they have been away too long and wouldn`t fit in anymore. Their opposition to the Vietnam War and the political controversy that followed changed their lives forever.
”For so many years I didn`t think it would become possible to go back,” Kinnaman says. ”I thought I would have to live in exile for the rest of my life. I could not foresee an amnesty. Besides, I have family here now,” he says, glancing at the blond brown-eyed woman who has just entered the room. Bitte is the mother of his two youngest children; two other children from his previous marriage also live with the couple.
Twenty-one years after he left his army unit in Thailand, Kinnaman, an Indianapolis native, speaks passionately of his decision. Though he initially supported the war, he became troubled by the U.S. involvement in Indochina.
”When I made the decision to leave, I was not aware of public opinion against the war, or that other people were deserting the Army,” he says.
He crossed the border to Laos, changed his name from David to Steve and passed himself off as Canadian. After learning to speak Laotian, he got odd jobs, sometimes as an interpreter, and occasionally was helped out financially by friends. He learned to like life among the Laotians but after four years decided to leave for fear that the U.S. military would find him. Hearing that Sweden granted asylum to Vietnam deserters, he went to Stockholm in 1971.
Kinnaman was never ambivalent about his decision. ”But many of the GIs who realized they didn`t want to have any part in the war and left didn`t have the facilities to express it,” he says. ”They had a guilty conscience because they could not put words to what they had done. That made them easy targets for accusations of anti-Americanism and lack of patriotism.”
Kinnaman sees himself as patriotic. ”I am proud of what I did. Because when you realize, like I did, that what was going on was wrong, then you certainly have an obligation not to participate in it.”
He says he respects Vietnam veterans. ”At that time, everyone did what he believed was right.”
The hardest part for Kinnaman was to defend his decision to those at home. He was convinced his family would never speak to him again. At the time, he thought it safest not to communicate with his family. ”It was very painful for them,” he says. His mother finally managed to find her son through contacts in the Army.
Having lived in a radically different country for years, Kinnaman was probably better prepared for exile than other war resisters. For many of the estimated 700 exiles who were living in Sweden in the early 1970s, exile was much harder than they had expected. Many had traveled very little, spoke no foreign languages and had never been exposed to a foreign culture.
Despite government-funded language training and financial aid in the asylum program, they found Sweden, which on the surface seemed similar to the U.S., to be a very different culture. Today some say they miss the diversity of the U.S. populace and a certain energy they find lacking in Swedish society.
”I think you need help being an immigrant,” Kinnaman says. ”You need to reflect a lot about what happened. The high price of exile is severing family relations and the uncertainty of when, if ever, you can go back home.” To cope, many of these Americans formed a tight-knit community in Stockholm. Some remained critical outsiders, waiting for the day when they could return home. Unable to deal with the difficulties in Sweden, many returned voluntarily to the U.S., where they faced prison or went underground. Others went to Canada. Some who remained in Sweden turned to drugs and crime. The Swedish media and public began to question the behavior of the Americans, provoking a debate over the asylum policy. Yet because the war was escalating, Sweden stuck to its policy and even expanded the asylum to include draft resisters.
The draft resisters generally were better prepared for exile than the deserters. They never were in the war. Many were college graduates with better job skills and a familiarity with the political underpinnings of the antiwar movement. The deserters were more isolated. Already in the Army, they had to deal with the conflict of deserting their comrades, plus the practical problem of getting out.
Bill Schiller, of Chicago, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru in the mid-1960s who became increasingly critical of the organization`s bureaucracy. After American military intervention in the Dominican Republic during the 1965 revolution there, he resigned from the corps to protest U.S. policy in Latin American and promptly was drafted.
He returned his draft card and began an odyssey through various Latin American and European countries. His passport about to expire, he needed asylum. While working as a journalist in Greece he read about the expanded Swedish policy in the New Yorker magazine and made his way to Sweden in 1970. Today Bill Schiller is a journalist in the English language section at the Swedish Radio Co. A poster of an Indochina landscape decorates the wall. At 45, Schiller has a touch of gray in his well-trimmed beard and dark hair.
Amid the rattling of plates in the cafeteria, over potato pancakes and lingonberries, Schiller is quick to talk and full of energy. He speaks, in a Chicago accent and a slight German intonation, of his childhood in the Clark- Diversey neighborhood. Now he rarely visits Chicago and is surprised and amused to hear how this once predominantly German working-class neighborhood has become home to young professionals, trendy boutiques and coffee shops.
After charges of draft evasion against Schiller were dropped in the mid-1970s, he was able to visit his family in the U.S. The first visit, after more than a decade, he describes as ”a great mixture of emotions.” He was pleased to see his family, found Americans friendly but was disappointed that no one wanted to discuss Vietnam. He had anticipated more curiosity and even a more hostile attitude toward a draft resister.
”I had hoped the war would lead to a different, more open attitude,” he explains. ”Instead, I found a lack of awareness and little curiosity in the world outside.”
He cites a young American he met in Sweden. This journalism student, unaware of Schiller`s background, confided that when his Swedish friends questioned him about Vietnam he did not know how to respond. He had no idea why the U.S. was in the war or on which side, and Schiller felt embarrassed by this admission in front of his well-informed Swedish friends. Such attitudes, he says, are one reason he does not wish to return to the U.S.
”In the 1970s there were mixed feelings among the veterans,” says Chip Talbot, adviser of Vietnam Veterans at Columbia College in Chicago and himself a Vietnam veteran. ”Many people were upset and thought it was not right to allow the deserters and the war resisters to return home.” Today Talbot notices no bitterness or hard feelings.
”So much time has passed since the war that it`s not an issue anymore.” Schiller, who is unmarried and has relatives in the U.S. and Austria, where his mother was born, says he feels ”rather split.” Though he is now a Swedish citizen, he says he could never truly become a Swede. ”You don`t dump your own culture. I can`t stop being an American.”
For Schiller, one price of exile has been remaining an outsider at important family moments. Schiller`s mother, suffering from cancer, spent her last months with her son in Sweden and died there last spring. Her death provoked a period of doubt and reflections.
”Exile hits you when you are in trouble, not when you`re having fun or when you`re on vacation, but in crisis time,” he says. ”Many times have I asked myself: `Should I have gone back to face prison, or to live
underground?` I expect as I grow older I will ask myself more questions.”
Despite the occasional doubts Schiller says it was a good move. A central question to all the war resisters had been whether to go back home to change opinion or to work on this from abroad. ”For what it was worth, it was good we were here,” he says. ”Nobody listens to you in prison, but here we had a forum.”
To Schiller, that forum was the European antiwar movement, in which the war resisters formed an important part. After Carter`s pardon, in 1977, Steve Kinnaman was active in Sweden informing draft resisters and deserters about the program. (Previously, in 1974, a limited clemency was introduced by President Gerald Ford, but it was not until President Carter`s broader pardon and discharge-review programs that many war resisters, including Kinnaman, could return home.)
Kinnaman laughs as he remembers the first trip back to Indiana, using the words ”anticlimax” and ”quaint” to describe the clash between his expectations and his experience. ”In a sense there was the feeling of being home,” he recalls. He appreciated seeing his family and speaking in English. But 11 years abroad had changed him.
Some time ago he noticed he was losing his English. He could no longer always find the right words. ”That made me aware of what I was losing”, he says, now with a noticeable accent in his English. ”Actually, my kids have helped me. The younger children, now 8 and 4, go to English-speaking schools, and I have to make a conscious effort to speak English with them.”
Though he has decided to stay in Sweden, he has kept his American citizenship. ”Somehow I never really gave up the thought of going back,” he says. ”Besides, giving up your nationality is a one-shot deal. It would be almost like renouncing part of yourself.”
Kinnaman is well established and politically active in Swedish society. He is supervisor at a day-care center and the father of three daughters and a son. His oldest daughter, Melinda, 17, is an aspriring actress who appeared in a recent Swedish TV-production of a Strindberg play. She is best known, however, for a lead part in the Swedish film ”My Life As A Dog.” His adoptive daughter, Marit, 16, played a small part in the film ”The Serpent`s Way.”
”I couldn`t deal with going back (to the U.S.),” he says. ”It would be to start over again, and that seems a bit much after 22 years. And when you have children, it`s better and safer here in Sweden.”
During the Vietnam war, Schiller and Kinnaman were active members of the American community in Stockholm. The war and the fight for amnesty held them together. Like others remaining in Sweden, they have since moved on in different directions, and today they rarely meet.
When asked how he feels now, 20 years later, and what he wishes to say to the people back home, Schiller lets out a long breath and leans forward over his coffee.
”I want to say: `When are you going to grow up? What do you learn? How much more money do you throw at the contras? Who are you going to invade next?` And the next generation, like my brother`s son; in a few years he will be ready for the next Vietnam. `Do you send them? Do you not send them? Is that more cannon fodder? What do you learn?` ”
