"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

eaches for the rejection stamp, doesn't ask me any questions, doesn't say anything; he
just stamps my papers "REJECTED," and hands me my 4­F paper, still looking at his
desk.
So I went out and got on the bus for Schenectady, and while I was riding on the
bus I thought about the crazy thing that had happened, and I started to laugh ­­ out loud ­­
and I said to myself, "My God! If they saw me now, they would be sure!"
When I finally got back to Schenectady I went in to see Harts Bethe. He was
sitting behind his desk, and he said to me in a joking voice, "Well, Dick, did you pass?"
I made a long face and shook my head slowly. "No."
Then he suddenly felt terrible, thinking that they had discovered some serious
medical problem with me, so he said in a concerned voice, "What's the matter, Dick?"
I touched my finger to my forehead.
He said, "No!"
"Yes!"
He cried, "No­o­o­o­o­o­o!!!" and he laughed so hard that the roof of the General
Electric Company nearly came off.
I told the story to many other people, and everybody laughed, with a few
exceptions.
When I got back to New York, my father, mother, and sister called for me at the
airport, and on the way home in the car I told them all the story. At the end of it my
mother said, "Well, what should we do, Mel?"
My father said, "Don't be ridiculous, Lucille. It's absurd!"
So that was that, but my sister told me later that when we got home and they were
alone, my father said, "Now, Lucille, you shouldn't have said anything in front of him.
Now what should we do?"
By that time my mother had sobered up, and she said, "Don't be ridiculous, Mel!"
One other person was bothered by the story. It was at a Physical Society meeting
dinner, and Professor Slater, my old professor at MIT, said, "Hey, Feynman! Tell us that
story about the draft I heard."
I told the whole story to all these physicists ­­ I didn't know any of them except
Slater ­­ and they were all laughing throughout, but at the end one guy said, "Well, maybe
the psychiatrist had something in mind."
I said resolutely, "And what profession are you, sir?" Of course, that was a dumb
question, because we were all physicists at a professional meeting. But I was surprised
that a physicist would say something like that.
He said, "Well, uh, I'm really not supposed to be here, but I came as the guest of
my brother, who's a physicist. I'm a psychiatrist." I smoked him right out!
After a while I began to worry. Here's a guy who's been deferred all during the
war because he's working on the bomb, and the draft board gets letters saying he's
important, and now he gets a "D" in "Psychiatric" ­­ it turns out he's a nut! Obviously he
isn't a nut; he's just trying to make us believe he's a nut ­­ we'll get him!
The situation didn't look good to me, so I had to find a way out. After a few days,
I figured out a solution. I wrote a letter to the draft board that went something like this:
Dear Sirs:
I do not think I should be drafted because I am teaching science students, and it is