The Guardian has discovered that two, make that twooo!!!, members of the U.S. military have gone off to Canada and are seeking refugee status: Brandon Hughey and Jeremy Hinzman. Of Hughey, there is this:

Hughey signed up for the army when he was 17, during his final year in high school. "I joined because it was the only way I was going to get a college education," he says. He went through basic training, and in his spare time began learning about the campaign in Iraq on the internet. He says he became increasingly uncomfortable about the mission, then so disturbed that he considered killing himself.

He enlisted on January 17 2001, four months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, but before it became clear that President Bush would go to war in Iraq. He joined the army shortly after he got married, hoping, like Hughey, to earn money for college.

He had dabbled in Zen, and in January 2002 he and his wife Nga Nguyen began attending church at the Quaker House. He felt at home with the Quaker philosophy of non-violence, and was uncomfortable with the idea that his basic army training seemed to be about breaking down the natural human inhibition against killing. He began preparing his application for conscientious objector status.

Do they have a lawyer? Of course they do. One Jeffry House, an American who went to Canada in 1970 to avoid the draft.

You can almost hear the desperate hopes of the Guardian:

Iraq, some say, could turn out to be Bush's Vietnam. How many more will follow the path to permanent exile blazed this time round by Hinzman and Hughey? House is not expecting many at the moment, but there are rumblings in the US media about the possibility of a draft in 2005 if defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan proves accurate. "If there is a draft," says House, "I would say the numbers could be massive."