Biography
Specialist Robin Long was a U.S. Army soldier who refused deployment to Iraq in 2005 and went absent without leave. He fled to Canada and applied for refugee status, but was denied; in July 2008 he became the first U.S. Iraq War deserter to be deported from Canada to the United States. He was court-martialed at Fort Carson, Colorado, on August 22, 2008, convicted of desertion, and sentenced to 15 months in military confinement plus a dishonorable discharge. He served his sentence at the Naval Consolidated Brig at Miramar, California.
The authors report that Long was deported from Canada in 2008, received a fifteen-month military sentence in Colorado, and actually spent one year and four days in military prison in San Diego. That retrospective duration differs from the currently recorded custody endpoints; it is preserved as an attributed source statement rather than converted into a new exact release date. Mountz, Micieli-Voutsinas and Mohan, Contrapuntal histories of war resistance, The Canadian Geographer 66(4), 2022, pp741–755, original PDF page 13. Source: https://www.newday.com/sites/default/files/resource_files/2022-12/2022%20Canadian%20Geographer.pdf#page=13
A 2022 interview-based study reports that Long served one year and four days in military prison in San Diego, distinguishing actual confinement from his fifteen-month sentence. This retrospective duration does not reconcile the precise admission and release dates already recorded; it is preserved as an attributed account without conversion to an invented exact day total.
