Border Incident

The predicament of one American war resister became the center of an international incident last week. The scene was the tall, marble Peace Arch just north of Elaine, Wash., which marks the border between the U.S. and Canada. One afternoon a car drove past the arch and its surrounding gardens and rolled to a halt beneath the portico of the U.S. customs building. The customs official on duty routinely noted the car's license number, then punched it into his computer--which is part of the Treasury Emergency Communication System and is tied into the Federal Bureau of Investigation's national crime computers. Almost instantaneously, the FBI told the customs official "yes": there was an arrest warrant outstanding for the owner of the car somewhere in the U.S.

Accordingly, the official briskly asked the driver to get out and instructed the woman passenger to drive the car out of the line of traffic.

Slip Across. Though the customs man did not know it at the time, the driver was Ronald J. Anderson, 31, of Spokane, Wash., who had deserted from the U.S. Army almost six years earlier, after seeking classification as a conscientious objector, by escaping from the stockade at Fort Lewis, Wash. Now a resident of Mission, B.C., where he works as a carpenter, Anderson is classified as a landed immigrant by Canadian authorities and will become eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship next month. With him in the car were his wife Marion, 33, their 10-month-old son Trevor, and her son by a previous marriage, Braaten, 11, who had been spending the summer with his mother and stepfather. As he had done successfully several times before, Anderson was attempting to slip across the border to see his mother in Poulsbo, near Seattle; he also planned to put his stepson aboard a train to Spokane, where the boy lives with his father.

Anderson knew instantly, from the customs man's request, that he was in trouble. He bolted and ran north toward the Canadian border, past hundreds of startled picnickers in the park beneath the arch. Among the spectators was Peter Trask, a reporter for the Vancouver Sun, who recalled later: "He ran right through the center of the arch, hotly pursued by about half a dozen guys in uniform and plainclothes. He must have been 50 ft. at least into Canada when they pounced on him, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him and frogmarched him back into the States."

Movie Film. The authorities took Anderson to a Bellingham, Wash., jail, then on to Fort Lewis to the very stockade from which he had escaped in 1968.

The incident might have passed without serious challenge had not Anderson's lawyers been able to produce eyewitness reports, photographs and even a movie film to back up their contention that a Canadian landed immigrant had been seized on Canadian soil. After five days, the U.S. Customs Service finally acknowledged that Anderson had indeed been captured "a few yards" across the border. At week's end, after the Ottawa government complained that the seizure had been a violation of Canadian sovereignty, the State Department returned Anderson to Canada.

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