“They never got back to me”: Harrison Ford’s elaborate scheme to avoid the Vietnam draft
Plenty of actors, whether it was before or after they made it in Hollywood, have seen active combat during wartime, but Harrison Ford was determined that he wouldn’t become one of them.
James Stewart, Christopher Lee, Charles Bronson, Mel Brooks, Audie Murphy, and many others served their country during World War II, with Michael Caine seeing action in Korea, while Rob Riggle was deployed to Afghanistan, so it wasn’t as if industry figures were averse to the front lines.
Oliver Stone was a decorated Vietnam veteran, and used those experiences to inform his ‘Best Picture’-winning Platoon and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air‘s Uncle Phil, James Avery, served in the United States Navy during the conflict, but a pre-fame Ford had absolutely no intention of following suit.
There were several ways to evade the draft, ranging from legal deferments and medical exemptions to conscientious objection and fleeing north of the border to Canada, with the future Star Wars and Indiana Jones icon’s lawyer hiring representation to ensure that he wouldn’t be sent to fight.
“I was facing being drafted, and I hired a lawyer to represent me to the draft board,” he explained. “I had to explain why I might qualify as a conscientious objector.” To do so, he set out to intentionally confuse the draft board, devising an elaborate and long-winded explanation “that was probably so unusual that it found the edge of a desk and had a lot of things piled on top of it because it didn’t fit a niche.”
Back in 1997, Ford clarified that he wasn’t technically classified as a conscientious objector, but “he confused them so badly that they never took action on my petition.” Instead of simply objecting, it sounds as though he and his legal team tried to tie the terminology in knots, to such an extent that his paperwork would slip to the bottom of the pile.
“They never got back to me, basically,” he said. “The draft board never got back to me.” It wasn’t a straightforward case of draft-dodging, then, but at the very least, it sounds like deliberate obfuscation to make Ford one of the board’s least pressing concerns, which lessened his chances of being drafted to what amounted to zero, seeing as he was never called up.
Don’t call him a draft dodger, though, since the star sought legal action against a publication that called him such in the summer of ’97, with his lawyers releasing a statement clarifying that any claims he faked his conscientious objector status was “false and defamatory,” and that “any confusion occurred wholly on the government’s part,” all while his objections were “sincere and principled.”
Is Harrison Ford a draft dodger? By the letter of the law, no, he is not. Did he concoct a plan based on his objections that conspired to prevent him from being drafted? Technically, yes, and he was happy to spell it out.
