Like Wayne, many of the "Rah-rah, USA #1!" types never bothered to put on a uniform when given the opportunity.
Funny how some of the counter culture types did like Hendrix and Cash and Elvis. Though Johnny Cash hated it.
Circumstances were a bit different in Wayne's time, however. He got an easy exemption, while Hendrix, Cash, and Elvis, didn't really have that opportunity (Elvis objected to being required to serve but lost, Cash was drafted before he was famous, not sure about Hendrix). Fun fact: The only Hollywood actor with a semi-serious career to enlist before Pearl Harbor was Jimmy Stewart. Mad props to him, not only for being smart enough to recognize that the US was headed toward war but also when he was a military officer, to not ask for special treatment because he was a celebrity. Wayne had the choice of opting for military service or staying in Hollywood, and he elected to stay in Hollywood because he felt that if he joined the military, it'd hurt his acting career. I'm not going to call Wayne out for that, as the movies Hollywood churned out during WWII were good morale builders. But I'm also not going to say that he wasn't remotely near the kind of hero that Jimmy Stewart was. Stewart continued to serve in the reserves up until the 1960s.
I saw a claim (I'm sure it can be verified or debunked if anyone's interested enough) that Stewart flew a B-52 on a raid over Vietnam. But in any case he had to figure out how to put enough weight after being rejected for being undernourished when he first tried to enlist and he started off as a private. He served as a flight instructor in Boise before he talked his way into combat duty at the peak of the bombing campaign against Germany. The losses at that time we're pretty grim but he made it through and excelled as a leader. He stayed in the USAF Reserves and retired with the rank of Major General. As @Tuckerfan mentioned John Wayne and the movies that came out of Hollywood helped keep morale up. I do wonder if some of Wayne's macho persona was overcompensation for the fact that so many of his contemporaries went out of their way to serve. He did nothing illegal and as far as I know didn't have to pull any strings to get out of serving, but if he had served there were plenty of jobs for movie stars and entertainers that didn't necessarily involve getting shot at. He comes up short compared to Stewart, but then so did a lot of other people.
Oh my, the poster child for insecure white men disagrees. There is a shocker. I bet @Uncle Albert and the boy disagree too.
Stewart flew 25 missions over Germany, stayed active in the reserves after the war, and retired a General. And he retired only because of mandatory retirement age, at the time, 60. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions as Deputy Commander of the 2nd Bombardment Wing, the Distinguished Service Medal, the French Croix de Guerre, and the Air Medal with three oak leafs. Wayne absolutely knew he didn't measure up to the guys that fought in the war and was very sensitive to it. John Ford famously put him down hard on the set of They Were Expendable, a movie about PT boats in the Pacific in the dire days after Pearl Harbor. Ford and his leading man Robert Montgomery were both in the service during the filming - Montgomery had been one of the PT boat XOs himself in Guadalcanal, served onboard destroyers in combat, and prior to the war had volunteered to drive ambulances in France before being evacuated at Dunkirk. Ford and Montgomery met briefly on D-Day. They put Wayne in his place and the Duke took it.
Hendrix served because of a diversionary option to prison for accessory to auto theft convictions. They threw him out after a year for not giving a shit about soldiering.
makes perfect sense though. The marginalized, counter culture types loathe something because of how it treats them. Meanwhile privileged members of the status quo will encourage that same thing for the benefits it provides them at the latter's expense while never getting their hands dirty. That's America though...
Well, Wayne WAS 35 years old in 1942, a bit old. I know that didn't stop Gable and others. from Wiki: