"I started to think ... what's it really for? I was willing to die for my country. I thought I was going over there to defend my country. But that's not what I was doing," Anderson said by telephone from Toronto Monday.

"He paced the floor constantly, never once slept through the night," Anita Anderson said of her son. "He would get up in the middle of the night and go out walking. He was having nightmares; he was depressed; he couldn't even watch a movie."

Anderson might be allowed to stay in Canada, but never be able to return home again to see his parents or his 4-year-old daughter without risking arrest. His daughter now lives with her mother.

Anderson joined the U.S. Army in January 2003 to get money for college and to serve his country. He went to Iraq a year later with the Army's 1st Armored Division. Over the next seven months, mostly in Baghdad, he was in the thick of the fight against insurgents.

"This car kept coming, and the other guys were yelling, 'Why don't you shoot, why don't you shoot?' But I felt the car posed no threat. Then, the window of the car rolled down, and it was just an Iraqi family," Anderson said. "I said, 'Look it's just innocent people.' But they kept telling me, 'The next time, you open fire. We don't care."'

A few days later Anderson was wounded by a roadside bomb. He received the Purple Heart. But he says the incident at the police station, not his wounds, convinced him that the war was wrong. He said he felt he was being forced to possibly gun down innocent Iraqis.