The Intrepid Four were a group of Navy seamen who deserted from the USS Intrepid as it docked in Japan during the Vietnam War. They were among the first American troops whose desertion was publicly announced during the War.
Background
Rates of desertion by American troops were high during the Vietnam War, with an estimated 92,000 deserters. This was more the double the number of deserters during World War II. By 1966, the desertion rate was 8.43 per thousand, which markedly increased to 33.9 per thousand in 1971. Desertion in Japan was considered particularly challenging due to the language barrier between US troops and Japanese citizens and the differences in appearances, which caused American troops to stand out. About 1,000 US citizens went to Sweden as draft evaders or deserters between April 1967 and March 1973.
Desertion
The four members were Craig W. Anderson, John Barilla, Richard Bailey, and Michael Lindner. Bailey and Lindner were 19, while Anderson and Barilla were 20 on October 23, 1967 when they decided not to return to their ship at the end of their day-long shore leave. They destroyed their military identification and uniforms. They eventually made contact with the Japanese civic groupBeheiren. These were the first American soldiers that Beheiren helped desert; they would later help Terry Whitmore desert in 1968. Beheiren asked the Soviet Embassy for help moving the seamen out of Japan. The Soviet Union agreed, with the intention of using the desertion for anti-Vietnam War propaganda. To pressure the Soviets to treat the four Americans well, Beheiren arranged a press conference in Tokyo in November 1967. During the press conference, they played a documentary film they created by interviewing the four sailors. They released a public statement on November 17, saying, "We four...are against all aggressive wars in general and are against the American aggression in Vietnam in particular. We oppose the continuing increase of military might of the USA in Vietnam and other countries of Southeast Asia. We consider it a crime for a technologically developed country to be engaged in the murder of civilians and to be destroying a small developing, agricultural country." They were then smuggled into the USSR, where they stayed for about a month. In December 1967, the four arrived in Sweden.
Aftermath
On January 9, 1968, Sweden granted the four Americans humanitarian asylum. They were not the first American deserters to arrive there, but were the first to receive international press coverage through doing so. Sweden's acceptance of American deserters was viewed with hostility by the US, who saw it as directly undermining the war effort. Swedish-American diplomacy was significantly damaged. In 1970, Anderson left Sweden and went to Canada, sneaking across the border into the US. In March 1972, Anderson was arrested by the FBI in San Francisco and imprisoned for eight months. He was given a bad conduct discharge from the Navy in November 1972. As of 2016, Barilla was living in Canada, and Bailey and Lindner still lived in Sweden.
