When you hear the words celebrity and serving in the same sentence, it's usually followed by -- best-case scenario -- ''sushi'' or, more likely, ''time in jail.'' But believe it or not, a lot of show-biz folks have spent time in the military. A few to keep in mind on Memorial Day weekend:

• Long before street-tough poses as a rapper or actor, Ice-T was a real bad boy: He served as an Army Ranger from 1979 to 1981. But he decided not to stick around: ``I didn't like total submission to a leader, other than myself.''

• Bea Arthur played TV's first prime-time character to get an abortion back in 1972 on Maude. Thirty years before that, she broke another cultural barrier when she was one of the first women to volunteer for the Marines, where she served as a nurse during World War II.

• After he finished fourth on the 2003 season of American Idol, Josh Gracin faced a difficult career choice: becoming a zillion-selling country megastar, or going back to work as a Marine supply clerk at Fort Pendleton, Calif. The Marines voted for the supply clerk job, and since Gracin had signed enlistment papers through 2004, they won. For a while.

• Jimi Hendrix didn't come up with the idea of joining the Army; a judge did, after Hendrix came before him for the second time on auto-theft charges. And his year as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne wasn't exactly Rambo material; Hendix was a lousy shot and often went to sleep on guard duty. But his military service left more of a mark on him than you might think. Other rock stars were constantly surprised to hear Hendrix defend the war in Vietnam: ``The Americans are fighting in Vietnam for a completely free world. As soon as they move out, [the Vietnamese] will be at the mercy of the communists.''

• Yeah, he was one of the final half-dozen contestants on the 2007 season of American Idol. But where country singer Phil Stacey really learned his chops was the Navy, where he was a musician third class (that's a rank, not a critical evaluation) singing with military bands. He even gave his buddies in uniform a shout-out in the video for his first single, If You Didn't Love Me; the main character is shown coming home, duffel bag over his shoulder, wearing a Navy T-shirt.

• Practically every man with two arms and two legs served in the military during World War II, so that's not what makes Jimmy Stewart's four years in the Army Air Force notable. What does: Stewart was first rejected for being underweight, but hired a Hollywood muscle man to pump him up. And once he got in, he rejected the USO doughnut circuit where many actors spent the war; he got himself assigned as a pilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress and completed 20 combat missions over Germany and occupied France. After the war he stayed in the Air Force reserve and even flew in a B-52 over Vietnam.

• Shaggy practiced for his reggae career during a five-year stretch in the Marines, where he perfected his sing-song vocals calling out drill cadences for his unit. Most of the other stuff he did in the Marines, like firing field artillery at the Iraqi army during the first Gulf War, was less directly applicable to show business.

• When Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army in 1958, his salary fell from $400,000 a month to $78. The consolation prizes weren't bad, though. Stationed in Germany, he hooked up with future wife Priscilla, and on a furlough to Paris conducted an anthropological investigation of French showgirls so painstaking that the manager of the Club Lido had to call his hotel one morning to demand the return of the entire chorus line in time for that night's show.

• You're not really surprised to hear that The Price is Right host Drew Carey spent a couple of years in the Marines, are you? Come on -- where'd you think he got that haircut? He liked nearly everything about the corps except the pay, which led him to do some weekend comedy-club tryouts at $10 a gig . . . and you can guess the rest of the story.

-- GLENN GARVIN

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