Just 5 feet tall, with a baby strapped to her chest and a soft, faltering voice, Kim Rivera is anything but soldierly. Yet two years ago she was a private in the War on Terror, guarding a gate with an M4 rifle and frisking Iraqi civilians at a base in eastern Baghdad.

Now, on an evening in January, the 26-year-old mother of three stands in a room in snow-covered Toronto. Her fair-skinned face is framed by auburn hair pulled back in a low ponytail as she faces some 100 people seated in folding chairs in an apartment building's community room.

"I was fighting your kind for killing my kind," she begins, reading a poem she wrote. "I was fighting for your liberty; I was fighting for peace." She pauses and takes a deep breath. "But in reality, I was fighting to destroy everything you know and love."

The audience listens in silence. Some nod. A few wipe tears. They are peace activists and professors, fellow American Iraq War deserters in their 20s and American hippies in their 60s, Vietnam draft-dodgers and Canadian mothers.

They're all rooting for Rivera, red state warrior turned peacenik deserter. They're hoping and praying that by some lucky chance, the young mother will escape the deportation order that has been issued here and the court martial that awaits back home.

Three years ago, Rivera's dreams of going to college and developing a career had faded. She'd spent five years working at Wal-Mart in her hometown of Mesquite, Texas, met her husband in the store's food court and had her first two children. After several years of living with relatives and struggling to save for their own apartment, Rivera saw the Army as the only way out. She could make more than $10.50 an hour, plus get health insurance and higher education.

She enlisted in early 2006. When she signed the contract, she thought of the war in Iraq as a remote and necessary evil. She was raised to praise the Lord and her country, and if that meant ridding the world of terrorists while allowing her and her family to get ahead, so be it. Yet after three desolate months in Iraq, consumed by homesickness, missing her children and disgusted by what she saw of the war, she deserted while on leave in 2007 and fled with her family to Canada.

Just like her decision to enlist, that gamble hasn't paid off. The Canadian government ordered her to leave or be deported to the United States, where there's a warrant for her arrest. Desertion carries penalties of up to five years in prison, a dishonorable discharge and, in wartime, a potential death sentence.

As the first known female soldier to walk away from the war in Iraq and fight for residency in Canada, Rivera has become a poster girl for a new generation of deserters.

More than 15,000 soldiers have deserted the Army since 2003. Most are thought to be living in the United States, keeping a low profile and trying to avoid a traffic ticket or anything that would alert authorities to their presence. Army spokesmen stress that just 1 percent of all soldiers desert and that the problem is not large enough to warrant pursuing them for prosecution.

Nevertheless, while desertion rates have held steady since the late '90s, military records show a crackdown since the war in Iraq began. In both 2001 and 2007, roughly 4,500 soldiers deserted each year. But while in 2001 only 29 deserters were convicted, in 2007 that figure was 108.

The War Resisters Support Campaign estimates that several hundred are living in Canada. Of those, around 40 have come forward to file asylum claims. The others, living under the radar without legal status and likely waiting to see how their peers' cases pan out, have little to stoke their hopes. While an estimated 25,000 draft-dodgers and deserters migrated from the United States to Canada during the Vietnam War, the notion that Canada will absorb today's deserters as it did their predecessors is dead wrong.

The Canadian government—led by conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper—has so far rejected all requests, and the soldiers referred to as "war resisters" by their supporters are awaiting review from the country's federal courts to determine their fate. As the cases make their way through the court system, Rivera is among the first wave to face deportation.

The case of Robin Long, a soldier from Boise, Idaho, who last summer became the first deserter to be deported from Canada, provides a preview of what lies ahead.

Long was handed over to officials at Fort Carson, Colo., last August, pleaded guilty to desertion and is serving a 15-month prison sentence at Miramar Naval Brig near San Diego. More recently, Cliff Cornell, a deserter from Arkansas who lived in British Columbia, opted to return to the United States after exhausting his legal options. He was arrested by American border agents and sent to Fort Stewart, Ga., to face charges.

Meanwhile, a former soldier from Cleveland, Ohio, named Andre Shepherd went AWOL from his base in Germany and is requesting political asylum from German authorities. His case will test a 2004 European Union measure that requires member countries to grant asylum to soldiers resisting unlawful wars and, if it succeeds, will likely result in a flood of American deserters arriving in Germany.

The War Resisters Support Campaign, led by New York-born Vietnam deserter Lee Zaslofsky, organized tonight's rally for Rivera and two other Toronto resisters. A member of parliament is here to speak, as is a city councilman. All watch, silent, as Rivera attempts to describe the emotional and philosophical about-face that led her to flee to Canada. It's a sea change she often finds difficult to articulate. So she relies on the last stanzas of her poem.

"I was becoming something that wasn't me, that I didn't stand for as a person," she says, choking up. Then she makes a plea: "Canada, I am here. Will you take the time and the heart to understand what I am now fighting for, with words and not a gun?"

In October 2006, Private First Class Rivera deployed to Iraq. She arrived at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad to find a different war than the one she expected. Instead of driving a truck, she was guarding a gate. Instead of doing "lots of rebuilding," most of the troops seemed to be dedicating their time to raids on civilian homes. She didn't like the way some acted when they returned from patrol.

"We tore their house up!" she recalls one soldier saying, jocular and triumphant.

Rivera began to imagine what it would be like if soldiers broke into her apartment in the middle of the night and dragged her and her husband, Mario, out of bed in front of their 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.

She also disliked the fact that "Hajji" was her unit's preferred term for Iraqis. She didn't know the word was a title for a Muslim who'd made the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca; all she knew was that the way they said it made it sound just as mean as "sand nigger."

Rivera missed her husband and children more than she thought she would. She had always loved them, but one thing that gnawed away at her was that on some level, her decision to enlist stemmed from a desire to escape her family situation.

She and Mario's money crunch had forced them to shuttle between their parents' homes while trying to save for their own place. This made for friction. Rivera felt that her mother resented her and felt burdened by the young family. To make matters worse, tension developed between her mother and Mario. Rivera, who is Anglo but took her husband's surname, was convinced that her mother refused to accept Mario because he's the son of first-generation Mexican and Honduran immigrants.

As she worried about money and became exhausted from juggling work and kids and family feuds, Rivera grew increasingly stressed. The more frustrated she became, the more frequently she became enraged at her husband.

If he was working, she felt unsupported at home. When he took time off, she grew angry because he wasn't making more money. But when she lost her temper, he'd just stare straight ahead and refuse to fight, which fueled her fury. She'd hurl a shoe or two at his head or fling a radio out the window.

When Rivera recalled those heated moments, she felt horrible and missed her family even more. She got in trouble with commanders for talking too much to Mario on the phone, though it may have saved her life. One evening shell after shell rocked the base while she was talking to her husband. When she returned to her bunk, a sizable piece of shrapnel lay on her pillow.

The final turning point came one day in December. An Iraqi man walked through the gate with a little girl, and Rivera moved to frisk them. She assumed the man was coming to claim reparations in exchange for damage caused by American forces.

Rivera stopped dead when she turned to the girl. The child looked to be the same age as her daughter. The toddler screamed and wailed inconsolably. Rivera felt sickened by the girl's cries and wondered what had happened to her and why her mother wasn't there.

Long after the pair disappeared, Rivera couldn't stop thinking about them. From then on, she couldn't shake the feeling that everything was wrong. The bloodshed. The loss. The fact that her children were on the other side of the world, learning and saying and doing new things each day that she was missing.

She came home in January for two weeks' leave; she and Mario took the kids to Texas to visit their families. Rivera had trouble sleeping. Every time a car door slammed, she'd flatten herself onto the floor.

Her mother-in-law, Reyna Rivera, recalls her panic attacks and crying on the floor, begging God for a way to avoid another stint in Iraq. "She wasn't stable enough to handle that, and she shouldn't have been there in the first place," Reyna says. "To think of her going back—my God."

Mario came across the website for the War Resisters Support Campaign in Toronto. He called Zaslofsky, who told him the organization would help provide legal aid and temporary housing.

The idea at first struck Rivera as ridiculous. They didn't know a soul in Canada. At the same time, she couldn't bear the thought of going back to Iraq. She let her scheduled flight back to Iraq pass.

She knew that 30 days after going AWOL she'd be listed as a deserter. She didn't want to live as a wanted criminal in her own country, so Canada began to look like a better option. While commanders called relatives and left messages on her phone recommending she return within the month and receive more lenient punishment, she and Mario loaded the kids into their Geo Prism and drove north.

On Feb. 18, 2007, they reached Niagara Falls and drove over the Rainbow Bridge. It was a gray, dreary day. Dark storm clouds gathered behind them. But as they emerged on the other side of the bridge in Ontario, the sun came out. Rivera took it as a sign.

It's late January, and the past few days have brought grim news to Lee Zaslofsky's small office. Two other deserters have been denied residency and are scheduled to be deported by the end of the month. To add insult to injury, immigration minister Jason Kenney was quoted on the news complaining that the "bogus refugee claimants" were clogging up the courts with futile petitions.

To Zaslofsky, the young men and women have become his surrogate children. He reads a recent email from a soldier at Fort Knox.

"I've been having some problems with what my military does and while I've put in for conscientious objector status, it will most likely get denied, leaving me in a real bad spot," the soldier writes. "I believe what the Army does is to commit murder...unfortunately, the Army treats anyone with my feelings poorly. I can't talk to my buddies because, well, simply put, they hate me for what I'm trying to do. I was wondering what the process of political refuge entails and whether it's advisable to do this."

Given the grim political climate, what will Zaslofsky tell the man?

"I'll advise him to call," he says. "You never give up hope. We're not discouraged; we're angry." Indeed, as he speaks, his face grows red and defiant. "We have a Rush Limbaugh government here—this isn't how Canada is supposed to be."

The political landscape was different when he deserted in 1969. Zaslofsky was drafted after graduating from the State University of New York at Stoneybrook. He reported for basic training but was disturbed by the stories he heard from soldiers returning from Southeast Asia.

When news of the My Lai Massacre broke, he asked his sergeant major for an explanation of the mayhem that led American soldiers to slaughter more than 300 unarmed civilians. "In war, bad things happen," he recalls the man telling him. "I asked myself, 'If I were in a situation like that, would I be the heroic guy who says, "Hey stop, this is terrible," or would I join in because I was experiencing the same rage and frustration they were?' I felt I couldn't be sure."

When he received orders to go to Vietnam, he filed for conscientious objector status and was denied. In January 1970 he drove into Canada. While President Richard Nixon struggled to keep a lid on the anti-war protests roiling the States, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was welcoming deserters by the thousands.

It's unclear whether today's deserters will be affected by the fact that America now has a president who campaigned on his conviction that the Iraq War was illegal, which is precisely the refrain of most war resisters, many of whom volunteered to go to Afghanistan but refused to serve in Iraq.

Wayne Hall, an Army spokesman, emphasizes that desertion constitutes a punishable crime for good reason. "AWOL and desertion are crimes that in a time of war put other soldiers' lives at risk," he says. "Not only do these crimes go against Army values, they degrade unit readiness."

Hall questions why soldiers would enlist voluntarily and only later, once receiving orders to deploy, change their minds for political or philosophical reasons. The fact that large numbers of Americans fleeing the war in Vietnam—33,000 in 1971 alone—were running from a compulsory draft, while today's deserters are turning from the consequences of their own choices, has branded them with a scarlet letter.

Rivera has been called a "parasite" and a "traitor" in comments on blogs. Zaslofsky frequently receives letters from across the United States that not only call the recent deserters "pussies" and cowards who abandoned their brothers in arms, but also fools who enlisted deliberately only to shirk their duty.

Yet Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, believes that while today's Army wasn't forcibly drafted, it isn't exactly composed of people exercising free choice.

"What we're looking at now is a poverty draft," Zunes says, "a lot of people from rural areas or inner cities who simply don't have job opportunities or money for college—and the Army promises that."

The majority of resisters at the Toronto rally, for example, had begun their journeys as eager, patriotic recruits, only to undergo wrenching changes of heart.

Take Joshua Key, who grew up in a trailer in tiny Guthrie, Okla. A burly welder with tattooed arms, Key, 30, grew up admiring his grandfather who fought in the Korean War. By age 12, he was shooting snakes with Glocks, and 10 years later he joined the Army after struggling to support his wife and two children on his earnings from KFC.

He's a country boy who recalls his wife saying, "You get 'em, Josh, before they get you. Even if it's a kid. They're terrorists too." Key never dreamed that after a tour in Iraq he'd be living in self-imposed exile, the author of a book titled The Deserter's Tale.

Ryan Johnson, a slight, bearded 25-year-old from California's Central Valley who looks more like an organic farmer than a soldier, says he enlisted because he was tired of working factory jobs and couldn't afford college. His mother, a homemaker, and his stepfather, a UPS driver, kept yellow ribbon bumper stickers on their cars and voted Republican.

Dale Landry, a 23-year-old from the Dallas area who deserted in 2007 after getting orders to Iraq, joined the Air Force his senior year of high school. He figured the military could be a good path out of low-income, red-state America. His mother was a waitress who raised him alone except for a series of husbands who came and went, and he wanted his life to look as different from hers as possible.

Joshua Key's uneasiness began in the first months of the war in 2003. His platoon would raid one to four houses each night in search of insurgents or evidence of terrorism, but night after night, all they found were tidy, middle-class homes filled with terrified families, he writes in The Deserter's Tale, his autobiography as told to Canadian writer Lawrence Hill.

Drawn from his recollections and with little or no corroboration from other soldiers, the book is a haunting chronicle of the mounting disillusionment that led him to desert. As his unit stormed through Iraqi homes, he recounts, they'd shout at the inhabitants to "Get down!" and "Shut the fuck up!" in English, then knock the men to the ground, often beating them before hauling them off for transport to a detention facility.

"We tore the hell out of those places," Key writes, "blasting apart doors, ripping up mattresses and ripping drawers from dressers. From all our ransacking, we never found anything other than the ordinary goods that ordinary people keep in their houses." He also tells how the soldiers—him included—would steal from families during the raids, making off with knives, jewelry, gold, cash and, once, a television.

Parts of the book read like scenes out of Apocalypse Now. One chapter tells of an Army specialist who liked to release aggression by body-slamming corpses in a shed, while another shows members of Key's unit coming upon the bodies of dead Iraqis near the Euphrates River and kicking their severed heads around like soccer balls.

One day, while riding through Fallujah atop an armored personnel carrier, the sergeant next to him grew annoyed when a pickup swerved in front of their vehicle. Without missing a beat, Key writes that the sergeant "let loose with his .50 caliber machine gun." The bullets tore into the truck's gas tank, transforming it into a fireball and prompting "hollers of delight" from some of the other men.

Perhaps most traumatic for Key was watching, helpless, as a young Iraqi girl he'd befriended was felled by M16 gunfire from an unknown location. All this, he writes, led him to conclude that the American military "had become a force for evil, and I could not escape the fact that I was part of the machine."

Airman Dale Landry says he began to question the war while stationed at Dyess Air Force Base near Abilene, Texas, in 2005. "I had friends who deployed and came back and said, 'I don't understand what the year I spent in the desert was for—all we did was patrol for IEDs, raid houses and guard detainees,' " he says.

At the same time, soldiers were being prosecuted for the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, and Landry says he began to read as much as he could about the case for war in Iraq, including reports revealing that much of the intelligence that the Bush administration used turned out to be shaky.

"I decided that our occupation of that country is illegal, so I made a vow to myself," Landry says. "I'm still an airman, I still have a responsibility, but I'll never take part in the occupation of that country."

The Air Force, however, has a different take. While Landry says he deserted after receiving orders to Iraq, Robert Krause, a Dyess spokesman, says Landry was never ordered to deploy to Iraq and in fact left to avoid disciplinary charges.

Questions about the legality of the Iraq War were an integral part of the initial case for deserters pursuing asylum in Canada. When they began arriving in 2004 and 2005, their lawyers filed claims for refugee status based on the Geneva Conventions and the fact that the United Nations says a deserter is entitled to asylum if he has refused to participate in a war judged to be unlawful by the international community.

But Alyssa Manning, the attorney representing at least a dozen of the deserters, explains that the Canadian courts have declined to consider the legality of the war in their rulings. Since then, she's been applying for residence based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

Last summer, Parliament passed a non-binding resolution arguing that deserters should be given residency, and polls show that 60 percent of Canadians agree. But so far, Canada seems to be reluctant to do anything official on behalf of the soldiers.

Many of the deserters are estranged from their families, who disapprove of their decision. Rivera says she hasn't spoken to her mother since she left Texas. She and Mario checked their phone messages when they arrived in Ontario to hear her mother saying that if Rivera didn't turn herself in, she'd call the police and report Mario for kidnapping Kim and the kids.

According to Mario's mother, that's just what she did. For months she received calls from Texas investigators asking about Mario and a kidnapping allegation.

For Ryan Johnson, losing his family has been the hardest part of coming to Canada. His mother is so ashamed of her son that she tells friends he's still serving in the Army. "My grandfather died last year," Johnson says. "He was one of the people who pretty much raised me, and he stopped talking to me because of the decision I made. A lot of my family has disowned me."

Jan. 23 is cold and overcast, only four days before the Riveras are scheduled to be deported. Manning, their lawyer, hasn't yet heard from the federal court about a stay of deportation, and all they can do at this point is pray.

While Kim cooks eggs in the kitchen, the phone rings. Mario picks it up. His eyes widen as he listens.

"Oh, that's great. Wait until I tell Kimberly," he says.

He listens and nods, then hangs up. He calls to his wife, who appears holding a spatula.

"So unfortunately, Alyssa called about the stay..." he tells her.

Kim's breath catches. "Uh-huh?"

"We didn't get it," he says, trying unsuccessfully to disguise his grin.

"Are you messing with me?" Kim says.

Her husband laughs. "We got it."

"For how long?"

"Maybe through June. We don't know."

Kim exhales, her shoulders relaxing a bit. "All I can say is thank God."

Mario nods. "That buys us a few months," he says. "But we're not out of the woods yet."

Email news@nashvillescene.com.