For 28 years, David A. Hemler said Sunday, he has lived a secret, though rather mundane life in Sweden, far from his native Pennsylvania. Under an alias, he married and fathered three children and worked at a hamburger restaurant and a nursing home before finding a job with the Swedish government.

Before that, though, he was an airman who had enlisted straight out of high school and joined the United States Air Force’s 6913th Electronic Security Squadron based in Augsburg, Germany. But on Feb. 10, 1984, distraught over a broken relationship and angered by the foreign policies of President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Hemler, then 21, deserted and hitchhiked to Sweden. Until a month ago his family had presumed he was dead.

“I never planned on it being this long,” Mr. Hemler said by telephone from Uppsala, the university town where he has lived for nearly three decades. “Days went and weeks, and I started to realize that maybe the military police weren’t coming. I just felt so good. I had a delayed teenage rebellion, you could say.”

This month, Mr. Hemler, 49, who was born in Cleona, Pa., said he decided it was time to call the family he had left behind, first telling his story to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. He also sent an e-mail to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which still considers him a fugitive, opening up a host of legal questions that could cloud his future even as he seeks to clear up his past.