Disgraceful Episode When America Enlisted ‘Misfits’ And ‘Morons’ To Fight in Vietnam
For those who believe the trump administration was horrible beyond words you are right but there have been other bad people, in other times, like the war criminal Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who left a little known legacy of the Vietnam War called “Project 100,000.”
Also known as “McNamara’s 100,000” it was a new classification of 320,000 to 354,000 military men, known euphemistically as “New Standards Men.” Critics referred to them derisively as “McNamara’s Morons” and “McNamara’s Misfits” and said it represented a dumbing down of the military.
Under the new classification, “Project 100,000” soldiers were accepted though they had failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test for reasons of aptitude, and included those unable to speak English, those who had low mental aptitude, minor physical impairments and who were slightly overweight or underweight.
McNamara was faced with a war that was not going well for the U.S. and in which there were not enough members of the military to fight the war. Propping up the military by dropping student deferments would have been political suicide and calling up the reserves, those sanctuaries for the upper class, lily-white, was also out of the question.
So McNamara’s partial solution was to get more soldiers by lowering the minimum test scores to qualify for the draft. Although some of McNamara’s advisors were skeptical of the plan, the first New Standards Men entered the service in October 1966. By the time of the Tet offensive in 1968, the turning point of the war, around 150,000 had been inducted.
A 1995 story in Washington Monthly was titled “McNamara’s ‘other’ crimes: the stories you haven’t heard.” The story said that McNamara proposed Project 100,000 just a few months after he told President Lyndon Johnson that the war was unwinnable.
The recruitment program was hyped as providing “rehabilitation,” remedial education and an escape from poverty. What it really offered for many was a one-way ticket to Vietnam, where African Americans and other minorities were killed at a much higher rate than whites.
Recruiters began to sweep through urban ghettos and southern hill country, taking some youths with I.Q.s below what is considered legally retarded. The story noted that 41 percent of Project 100,000 volunteers were African American, compared to 12 percent of the rest of the armed forces.
Hamilton Gregory wrote in his 2015 book, “McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War,” that “the idea of Project 100,000 was to kill two birds with one stone by drafting recruits who were developmentally disabled, unhealthy, evil, or just too dumb to be conscripted previously: it would provide the warm bodies needed for Vietnam and use the military to educate the least fortunate and give them a leg up as part of the Great Society’s faith in education to eliminate individual differences and refute the idea that intelligence is real.” The former reason was realized, the latter was not.
In all, 354,000 people volunteered for Project 100,000. The minimum passing score on the armed forces qualification test had been 31 out of 100. Under McNamara’s Project 100,000, those who scored as low as 10 were taken if they lived in a designated “poverty area.” Typically, in 1969, out of 120 Marine Corps volunteers from Oakland, Calif., nearly 90 percent scored under 31; more than 70 percent were African American or Mexican.
The program, which continued from 1966 to 1971, worked out very poorly for those unfortunate souls who were drafted but who otherwise would not have been. Gregory wrote in “McNamara’s Folly,” that the low-IQ troops died at higher rates than other Americans serving in Vietnam and following their service had lower incomes and higher rates of divorce than their non-veteran counterparts.
Kelly M. Greenhill, an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University and a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote a Feb. 17, 2006, op-ed in the New York Times, and noted that in the program’s first three years, nearly half of the Army’s and well over 50 percent of the Marines’ New Standards Men were assigned to combat specialties. As a result, a Project 100,000 recruit who entered the Marine Corps in 1968 was two and a half times more likely to die in combat than his higher-aptitude compatriots.
Project 100,000 participants were more likely to be unemployed and to have a significantly lower level of education than military members who qualified at the higher standards. The Project 100,000 participants earned from $5,000 to $7,000 less than other veterans and they were more likely to have been divorced.
A study by Janice H. Lawrence and others looked at Project 100,000 participants and their non-veteran peers. The study, “Effects of Military Experience on the Post-Service Lives of Low-Aptitude Recruits: Project 100,000 and the ASVAB Misnorming,” confirmed that in terms of employment status, educational achievement, and income, non-veterans appeared better off. The veterans were more likely to be unemployed and to have a significantly lower level of education.
“McNamara’s Folly” was not the first time the military recruited people who measured below specific mental and medical standards. Those who scored in certain lower percentiles of mental aptitude tests were admitted into service during World War II, and the experience eventually led to a legal floor of IQ 80 to enlist. An IQ of 80 is within borderline intellectual functioning. The person has basic self care, reading, and writing skills but needs reminders to ensure safety and well-beings. A soldier who is ordered to battle should not need reminders to keep safe.
The plan was developed three years after McNamara had proclaimed in 1963 that “The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.”
By October 1966, monthly draft calls had been steadily increasing for 15 consecutive months and stood at 49,300, the highest since early 1951, the peak mobilization period of the Korean War, when 80,000 men a month were called up. In 1966, the Pentagon lowered the required score to be inducted to as low as 10 on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. The current test requires a minimum score of 36 for the Air Force; 31 for the Army; 32 for the Marines; 40 for the Coast Guard; and 35 for the Navy.
McNamara, who thought technology could solve most problems, thought draftees with lower IQs could be improved through use of technology and learning by use of video tapes.
The new conscripts under the McNamara plan had scored in Category IV of the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which placed them in the 10th to 30th percentile range. The number of soldiers reportedly recruited through the program varies, from more than 320,000 to 354,000, which included the 54 percent who voluntarily enlisted and the 46 percent who were drafted. The Army received 71 percent of recruits, followed by 10 percent by the Marines, 10 percent by the Navy and 9 percent by the Air Force.
While entrance requirements were lessened, all the Project 100,000 men were sent through the same normal training programs with other recruits, and performance standards were the same for everyone. Greenhill wrote that this was a factor in Project 100,000 recruits faring poorly outside combat.
Project 100,000 service members did not do better economically, educationally and socially after their service than their non-service peers. Greenhill wrote that one possible reason is that Project 100,000 veterans fared worse than non-veterans of similar aptitude because they also had to contend with the psychological repercussions of prolonged combat. Add to that the fact that these veterans were simply less well-equipped to readjust to civilian life.
McNamara was the chief architect for the early U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and was secretary of defense from Jan. 21, 1961 to Feb. 29, 1968, serving under presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
As early as 1962, McNamara supported a plan to spray herbicides on the rice fields in the Phu Yen mountains to starve the Viet Cong out. The plan was scuttled after a Kennedy advisor noted that the herbicides would cause a famine that would kill thousands of innocent people.
In May 1962, McNamara paid his first visit to South Vietnam, and he told the press “every quantitative measurement…shows that we are winning the war.” Seven months later, McNamara went on a fact finding mission to South Vietnam when he reported that the “current trends, unless reversed in the next two or three months, will lead to neutralization at best or more likely to a Communist-controlled state.” In March 1964, McNamara was back in South Vietnam and this time told reporters, “We shall stay for as long it takes to …win the battle against the Communist insurgents.”
Then on Aug. 2, 1964, a U.S. destroyer was involved in an alleged naval skirmish with North Vietnamese Vietnam People’s Navy torpedo boats within North Vietnamese waters. Two days later, officers claimed the Maddox and another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, were attacked by the North Vietnamese torpedo boats in international waters on a stormy night. A short time later, the Navy reported there was probably no attack.
President Johnson used the bogus attack to prompt Congress to pass a resolution giving him the authority to wage war in Vietnam. McNamara was strongly in favor of the resolution and it passed in Congress. In 1995, McNamara met with former North Vietnam Defense Minister Võ Nguyên Giáp, who said the Aug. 4 attack never happened.
McNamara later advised Johnson that by early 1966, it would take 100,000 more troops to win the war.
McNamara wrote Johnson in May 1967 that the military side of the war was going well with the Americans killing thousands of the enemy every month, but the political side was not, as South Vietnam remained dysfunctional.
McNamara left office on Feb. 29, 1968. The war did not end for seven more years, with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 966,000 to 3 million. The war claimed the lives of another 275,000 to 310,000 Cambodians and 20,000 to 62,000 Laotians.
A total of 58,220 U.S. service members died in the conflict and 1,626 remain missing in action.