No idea whether it ever really happened, but I did read at least an oblique reference to the practice at the time. It was mentioned in a poem about a draft dodger that appeared in the National Lampoon’s “Canadian Corner” circa 1974. The line in question was:
Should he take off? A wife? A class?
Shove peanut butter up his ass?
Probably written by Sean Kelly. I can dig through my box of Lampoons and find it if anyone cares.
Biff, is Sean Kelly any relation to the late cartoonist Walt Kelly?
I doubt that they are related. It’s such a common name, and Sean Kelly is from Canada, while Walt was very much American.
Can’t see the article but this dodge is apparently mentioned on page 146 of Volume 28 (1972) of the New York Folklore Journal.
So, probably an UL, but it was contemporary to the Vietnam War.
If you told the doctor your boyfriend put it there, that may be a way out.
It wasn’t that easy. If a man claimed he was gay (& this was an era of extreme homophobia) he’d be sent to the psychiatrist who would then ask him all sorts of questions about his sex life (like “When was you’re first sexual experiance with another male?”, “Have you ever had sex with a woman?”, etc) and he’d be expected to answer in very, very, grahpic detail. Oh, and to add you the young man’s discomfort depending on that specific MEPS station policies he might be kept naked for the interview.
In the end the only thing that really mattered was whether the local draft board met it’s quota. One in a major city stretched to the breaking point screening scores of men wasn’t going to put much effort into verifying plausible claims by men who otherwise kept their heads down. At the other extreme a rural board desperate to meet it’s quota? They’d overlook as much as possible to get just to meet the quota.
Ha ha… I’m totally laughing out loud at this. Obfusciatrist, truer words have never been spoken.
Let’s be realistic about this… think of the mechanics of getting peanut butter up your ass. I can hardly get a suppository up there by myself. How in the HELL would you actually get peanut butter up your ass? 1) it would likely require the help of a friend, and 2) I can’t think of anyone I’m that good of a friend with.
Hmmm, if the local yokels old grumps had to decide between keeping a gay guy in the local town or shipping him overseas, I wonder what they decided? Who got to be on the draft boards? I’m thinking “This will make a man out of you” went through their minds.
I was inducted during the draft era, although I was not drafted. The Drs. at the induction center seemed very good at spotting phony crazies, everything that sounded original and wacky to the poor guys, was just another day for the examiners.
During Vietnam it was hard to get the 4F rating people were trying for. They also tended to let basic training weed out the serious nut jobs.
The only one I saw rejected was a seriously mental impaired individual that had trouble signing his name to the forms, and never filled out any other part of the form. I never knew who helped him actually get to the place to begin with.
This is based on conversations I have had with the Drs and the recruiters at the induction centers over sevral years.
… and whatever you do, don’t use the kind with jelly swirls.
I originally heard this story back in the late 1970’s, told as a joke rather than trying to imply that it really happened. The idea was, the young man in question was wanting to get marked as 4F without actually ‘technically’ deceiving anybody. So he gave himself a thorough saline enema (to make sure that he was clean & germ-free, naturally), and shoved in a couple tablespoons of Jif. When he got to the prostate exam, the doctor put his finger in, then pulled it right out again, saying, “What the hell is this?”
The protagonist then reaches his own finger back, pulls out a fingerful, and licks it off. “It tastes like peanut butter!” Whereupon he naturally got marked 4F-Psychiatric.
I’m not entirely sure that someone who would actually do this shouldn’t be waived under psychiatric. :eek:
Am I the only one who saw what you did there? It’s a regular Rembrandt.
And I suppose this magical newspaper article was supposed to fight all kinds of “ignorance”, right? Hmmph. I doubt something like that would ever work in real life.