The Celeb:
Would you believe that Abraham Lincoln himself paid $300 to avoid being drafted?
Well he did. But that doesn’t really count, as he did so just as a symbolic gesture. He was really exempt from the draft because he was too old and also was President of the United States. Future president Glover Cleveland, however, had no such excuse, and yet he too went the bribery route.
And would you believe that the richest man of modern times John D. Rockefeller — a man with a net worth of perhaps $400 billion in today’s dollars — paid the fee rather than serve in the war? Uh, yeah, we imagine you’d have no trouble whatever believing that.
Moving To Sweden
The Trick:
During the Vietnam War, plenty of draft dodgers famously hopped the border to Canada, a nation of utter lawlessness. But Canada was far from the only option for those fleeing the country. A thousand Americans moved to Sweden to avoid the war. Some stayed there afterward, setting up a little Swedish-American community. One guy, who the news caught up with decades later, ended up serving in the Swedish Army, because he was never so much against the broad concept of “service” as specifically against dying in the jungle.
The Celeb:
While we have plenty of stories of people sneaking into Canada (Rick James headed north to dodge the draft), we don’t have any about celebs moving to Sweden. But we do have a story about a celeb shitting his pants, and honestly, isn’t that basically the same thing?
For a week before the draft board got a look at him, Ted Nugent shit his pants. He didn’t change clothes — he wore one pair of pants, and he shit and pissed right into them. This came on top of a whole month of skipping bathing, and then two weeks of (probably less noticeably) adopting a poor diet to further mess with any possible indicators of good health. The physical went exactly as he’d planned, and he got to sit out the war at home.
At least, that was the story Ted used to tell. Later, now a conservative icon, he walked it back, saying that whole tale was completely ridiculous. He’d actually got a student deferment. Sure, that sounds reasonable. Except, military records do say that he failed his physical, so we’ll let you choose which story to believe.
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