It depends on who you ask if you want to know the truth about how Ted Nugent got out of going to Vietnam. If you ask Nugent it was apparently a student deferment, unless of course you go back to an interview that Nugent will and does now claim was staged for the benefit of the interviewers. Of course it doesn’t look too good for old Nugent if his interview was backed up by Dee Snider from Twisted Sister, who corroborates the story that Nugent did some pretty nasty stuff to get out of the draft. The whole story is kind of hard to take as reality or as a giant load if you really look at it, but for those who aren’t fans of Nugent’s you might get a kick out of this. If you are, then apologies but this what’s out there whether it’s real or not.
Nugent apparently did get drafted but was so into his music that he wasn’t about to put down his guitar and go off to war. Instead he came up with a plan to get booted out before he ever even got to boot camp. He stopped bathing, stopped brushing his teeth, and allowed his hair to grow out and his looks to deteriorate for the thirty days leading up to the time he had to go take a physical. Then he stopped eating healthy, ate only junk food and the like. And what’s even worse is that he threw the last vestige of hygiene to the wind, though it’s likely that it’d take a pretty strong wind to carry the stink of his unwashed body away at that point. He took to defecating and urinating in his pants and letting it just sit there, which as anyone should know at this point is a big problem since that kind of thing will wreck your health without fail.
So then he went to be examined, and as you can imagine he was a wreck. He’d even done a line of meth before going to make himself even more strung out than he already was, and obviously he got a 4-F not too long after one of the most disastrous showings in the history of the US armed forces. What’s confusing about this is that he claimed to be a hardworking individual that could have advanced through the ranks of the Army without much difficulty had he only wanted to do so. But hey, no one was going to make him put down his guitar right? Not even the US Army if he didn’t want it. Of course as you can imagine Nugent has denied all of this and stuck with the student deferment story, which is backed up actually. But it’s also on record that he was rejected due to failing the physical examination, so you kind of have to wonder if both stories hold water and Nugent it trying desperately to puncture the one story in favor of the other.
After all, it’s not something he could be all that proud of really, could it?
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