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The draft board's hardest job, of course, is deciding whom to defer among the 17,970,000 Americans between 18 and 36. Some 5,500,000 are removed from the draft's purview by being already in service or having already served their time. Of the remaining 12 million registrants, some 83% are deferred. Of these, 2,000,000 are students, 3,000,000 are heads of families (who fall into category 3-A), and 200,000 have "essential" jobs in industry or farming (2A and 2-C). Aliens, clergymen and divinity students are also deferred automatically. The most remarkable fact about deferrals is that by far the largest number—fully 4,600,000—have been rejected by the Army for physical or mental deficiencies. Slightly more than half of them have been classified 4-F, or unfit to serve under any circumstances, and the rest have been put into a relatively new category called 1-Y. This includes men of limited fitness (eyesight 20/70 in one eye and 20/40 in the other, for instance) who might be called for limited duty in case of a declared war or a national emergency.
The enormous number of rejects, as many critics have pointed out, is a sad commentary on the physical and mental state of much of American youth. About half of those who are turned down failed to score high enough on the Army's mental test. When it comes to physical standards, the situation is equally bleak. Most physical rejectees are turned down because of diseases or defects of the bones or the limbs (15.7%), followed by those rejected for psychiatric disorders (12.2%), for diseases of the circulatory system (10.1%), and for eye diseases and defects (9.7%). The rest are turned down for failing in one or more of the 20 general medical areas for which the Army tests inductees, ranging from chronic alcoholism to being too tall (over 78 in.) or too short (under 60 in.). Many draftees talk about tricks to win 4-F status, including staying awake for 48 hours before the physical exam, eating tons of sugar the night before to produce the symptoms of diabetes, and smoking cigarettes dipped in blue ink to cause blotches on the lung. But few actually have the nerve to try such tricks, and fewer still are able to fool the Army's sharp-eyed doctors.
A major criticism of the draft is that it tends to pass over the very poor and the very well educated, the first because they often cannot pass the Army's mental test and the second because they tend to stay in school almost indefinitely. The burden tends to fall on the average Joe who just made it through high school; two out of every three of them end up in the service v. one out of three college graduates and one out of two boys who did not earn a high-school diploma. Almost by definition, the average draftee is a series of underprivileged negatives: he is not in school, he is not employed in a critical occupation and he is supporting nobody. In short, he is expendable.