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I would like to think that it Sen Douglas did not knowingly assist Durban in receiving a deferment. Often the staff has more juice then the name.

http://www.answers.com/topic/paul-douglas?method=26&initiator=CANS

Military service
The day after losing the primary, Douglas resigned from the Chicago City Council and signed up with the United States Marine Corps as a private. Wanting to see front line duty, Douglas accepted a commission as a captain. Although he was then fifty years old, Douglas was in good physical shape and had some pull with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, the former publisher of the Chicago Daily News, who arranged for Douglas to see duty in the Pacific Theater of Operations.
On the second day of the Battle of Peleliu, Douglas finally saw action when his unit waded into the fray. He earned a Bronze Star Medal for carrying ammunition to the front lines under enemy fire and earned his first Purple Heart when he was grazed by shrapnel.
A few months later, during the Battle of Okinawa, Douglas earned his second Purple Heart. A volunteer rifleman in an infantry platoon, he was advancing on the Naha-Shuri line when a burst of machine gun fire tore through his left arm, severing the main nerve and leaving it effectively useless.
After a thirteen-month stay in the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland, Douglas was given an honorable discharge as a Lieutenant Colonel with full disability pay.