Though Sweden has long been a friend of the U.S. and is about as remote from Viet Nam as any country can be, the Vietnamese war has poisoned Swedish-American relations. In the past few months, Swedish youths have broken windows in the U.S. embassy, smeared paint on the American trade center, hurled rotten eggs at an American diplomat and burned the U.S. flag. The entire nation applauded when Premier Tage Erlander—followed shortly by his three major opposition parties —declared his Social Democratic government's opposition to the war.
The antiwar sentiment has become something of a national obsession. An anti-U.S. Swedish Committee on Viet Nam, headed by Economist Gunnar Myrdal (TIME, March 15), claims a membership of 600,000 Swedes, nearly one-tenth of the population. Last month Myrdal's group staged a torchlight parade that brought 6,000 marchers into Stockholm's snowbound streets. In a move that is highly unusual for a technically friendly government, the marchers were led by none other than Erlander's heir apparent, Olof Palme, 41, the Education Minister. Swedish-American relations have become so bad, in fact, that last week U.S. Ambassador William Heath was recalled for consultations with President Johnson on just what is going wrong.
A Notable Exception. One point of friction has been Sweden's welcome to American G.I. deserters. At last count, 79 U.S. defectors had arrived in the country, where they are taken under the wing of Myrdal's Committee on Viet Nam or the radical leftist Front for National Liberation. Their sponsors see to it that the deserters are provided with housing (usually in student dormitories) and spending money ($16 a week in government welfare pay). They have not, however, been able to make them feel at home. Few of the Americans have been able to learn enough Swedish to hold down a job, and many spend their days just drinking beer at Stockholm's Karl Marx Cafe.
One notable exception was Private
Ray Jones HI, the middle-class Detroit Negro who was the first defector to arrive. A Swedish resident since January 1967, Jones had been given an apartment in suburban Stockholm, found work for himself as a dancing teacher and for his German-born wife as a secretary, and fathered a son. Yet last week Jones let it be known that he had had his fill of Sweden. Complaining that "the Swedes have a natural prejudice against black people," he presented himself to the American embassy in Stockholm and asked for transportation back to his unit in West Germany, where he faced the possibility of a court-martial and up to five years in an Army stockade. "The biggest thing," he admitted on arrival in Frankfurt, "is I love America and I don't want to run away from its problems." Three other defectors, who apparently shared Jones's views, also turned themselves in to U.S. authorities. By week's end, the Karl Marx Cafe was humming with rumors that the "reverse defections" had only begun.