Your impressions are accurate, a significant number of American deserters came to Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s. Though 800 were officially registered, it is estimated that in total around 1,000 deserters and draft resisters came to Sweden between 1967 and 1973 (Scott, 2015; Data om invandrare, Stockholm: SCB, 1981, 27).

To answer your questions about why this came to be, Sweden did — to an extent — encourage the practice. The Swedish government vocally opposed the war, especially under the influence of Olof Palme whom among other things marched in protest of the Vietnam war in 1968 and became prime minister the following year. Protecting deserters was a part of this general opposition. As Scott puts it: “In addition to its verbal attacks against the war, the Social Democratic administration granted sanctuary to American deserters while concomitantly providing economic and political support to Hanoi.” (Scott, 2009).

Sweden provided asylum to both deserters and draft resisters. That being said, this was no open-door policy. Deserters had to apply to be granted asylum through a complicated process which put them in some precarity as they were not allowed to work while their application was processed. In addition, the status they were provided had limitations: “Instead of being provided the legal protection enjoyed by political refugees, the status of the American exiles remained on a par with that of economic immigrants.” (Scott, 2001).

Alongside the Swedish governement’s general opposition to the war, there was also an active anti-war movement in Sweden, which participated in attracting deserters. Several Swedish activists travelled to Vietnam, reported on the war and organised in anti-war circles. One publicised instance of this was the hosting of the Russell tribunal in Stockholm (a mock trial which aimed at examining the crimes of the American war in Vietnam, and which featured the testimony of American GIs. See: Belle-Drake, 2021). This anti-war movement initially heralded the American deserters and draft resisters as heros and provided them with some support and a platform, often inviting them to anti-war meetings.

The deserters themselves rarely went straight to Sweden. They fled during leave wherever they were deployed (often in West Germany for example) and later made their way to Sweden. The first notable arrival of US deserters to Sweden concerned four US Navy sailors who came to Sweden after having escaped while on leave in Japan, spending a month in the USSR before coming to Sweden (Takata, 2017).

The reasons which pushed deserters and draft resisters to Sweden are complex, so I can only give a few pointers. Some were connected to anti-war movements, and decided to come to Sweden out of their pacifist convictions. But this concerned a minority of cases. Most deserters had enlisted in order to avoid poverty, and the reasons that motivated them to desert were less ideological. Sometimes, they were simply escaping disciplinary action. In that sense, Sweden was simply a destination of convenience, a place where they could be protected, and receive some support from fellow deserters (Davidsson, 1971; Hayes, 1971; Scott, 2015).

There were important consequences to this movement. Though Vietnam war defecters could be found in many countries, those who fled to Sweden attracted particular media attention. They were propped up as heroes by some, while receiving scathing criticism from others. This critique increased as the relationship between the US and Sweden soured over the years of Palme’s office, (Logevall speaks of a “severely strained” relationship, (Logevall, 1993)). The deserters were used as examples of cowardness by US media. Even in Sweden, conservative circles were not kind to them, and their struggles to integrate were publicised. Even some anti-war activists decried their lack of intellectual convictions towards pacifism, which futher isolated a large number of them. (Scott, 2015).

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References

-Davidsson, Ulla. (1971). Amerikanska desertörer i Sverige: ett försök till belysning av amerikanska desertörers och vapenvägrares situation i Sverige samt något om deras sociala bakgrund, Stockholm, Sociahögskolan.

-Hayes, Thomas Lee. (1971). American deserters in Sweden : the men and their challenge. New York : Association Press.

-Kim Salomon. (2003). The Anti-Vietnam War Movement in Sweden, In, La Guerre Du Vietnam et L'Europe 1963-1973, Christopher Goscha, Maurice Vaisse, Bruylyant.

-Carl-Gustaf Scott. (2009). Swedish Vietnam criticism reconsidered: Social Democratic Vietnam policy a manifestation of Swedish Ostpolitik? Cold War HistoryVol. 9, No. 2, 243–266.

-Carl-Gustaf Scott. (2015). Sweden Might Be a Haven, But It's Not Heaven’: American War Resisters in Sweden During the Vietnam War, Immigrants & Minorities, 33:3, 205

-230.-Carl-Gustaf Scott. (2010). Swedish Sanctuary of American Deserters During the Vietnam War: A Facet of Social Democratic Domestic Politics, Scandinavian Journal of History, 26:2, 123-142.

-Belle Drake L. (2021). Anti-imperial truth-telling: historian expert testimony at the 1967 Russell Tribunal, in State-Led Inquiries as Political Devices: Lessons Learned and Lost from British Interventions, 1853 to the Present Day, University of Exeter Workshop.

-Logevall, Frederik. (1993). “The Swedish-American Conflict over Vietnam.” Diplomatic History, vol. 17, no. 3, 421–45.

-Takata, Kei. (2017). "Escaping through the networks of trust: The US deserter support movement in the Japanese Global Sixties". The Sixties. 10 (2): 165–181.