Retired, stop loss, fugitive soldier?

How do you make sense out of something like this? How can this be right?

U.S. army fugitive illegally forced to return to Iraq: Report


By Amy Minsky, Postmedia News

An American soldier, now living in Toronto, was ordered to report to Fort Hood, Texas and then back for more duty in Iraq, even though he had been discharged.
Photograph by: Joe Raedle, Getty Images

A U.S. war resister who is facing deportation from Canada was illegally forced to do a second tour in Iraq, a U.S. magazine reports.

Phil McDowell has been on the lam since 2006, after being ordered to return to the U.S. army less than two months after retiring — and according to GQ Magazine, only a week after being formally discharged.

McDowell served one year in Iraq and finished his tour, even though his feelings about the war had changed and he no longer supported it.

He voluntarily joined the U.S. army one month after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, was sent to Iraq in 2004 and returned to the U.S. in 2005 to serve the remaining year left on his contract before being discharged.

Shortly afterward, he was served a "stop loss," a program adopted in 2002 which extended any active soldier's contract without consent, and which the U.S. government began phasing out in January 2010.



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