A group of 13- to 23-year olds in a small town in the North East of England were accused by police last week on suspicion that they had been involved with laundering money through online gambling and drug dealing. The alleged crimes took place while McNamara’s Boys was made up of minors and two members, one aged 24, were sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment at Middlesbrough Crown Court today (Wednesday) after pleading guilty to conspiracy to launder criminal property.
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In 1966, the US military in Vietnam urgently needed additional soldiers. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had devised a strategy to apprehend them.
With the United States’ participation in the Vietnam Battle increasing, President Lyndon B. Johnson faced a major challenge in 1966: how to get enough troops to go to war. Johnson could have moved to revoke student deferments, but he would have caused himself a lot of political trouble and put his administration at odds with powerful lawmakers who were writing a new Selective Service statute that would keep 2-S deferments available to undergraduate college students in good standing. He might also have tapped into the National Guard and Reserves, which number in the millions. However, LBJ and his advisors were well aware that this course of action would be equally unpopular in the political arena.
Robert McNamara, Johnson’s secretary of defense, had a different idea: reducing the entrance requirements for the armed services to significantly increase the pool of draft-eligible Americans. There were lots of young individuals out there who weren’t shielded by student deferments but had failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test, the military’s admission test. If the test’s passing requirements could be reduced, tens of thousands of hitherto “unqualified” young men and women would suddenly be eligible for military duty, McNamara claimed.
In August 1966, McNamara presented his proposal to the annual conference of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, saying that it would “save” 40,000 draft rejections and mediocre volunteers over the next ten months, the majority of whom were from “poverty-encrusted backgrounds.” “Currently, the military rejects 600,000 young men a year for failing to fulfill basic standards,” McNamara said.
McNamara portrayed the proposal as a humanitarian rescue operation in his VFW address at the New York Hilton Hotel. He said that disadvantaged youngsters, many of whom come from urban slums and rural backwaters, will be pulled out of poverty and illiteracy. Basic abilities such as reading and math would be taught to them. Even if the soldiers had failed these courses in school, they would not fail now since the military was “the world’s greatest educator of competent manpower,” as he put it. It understood how to inspire guys and how to use a wide range of educational tools.
McNamara had established a reputation for himself as one of the “Whiz Kids” who assisted in the post-World War II rebuilding of Ford Motor Company. He thought that by using videotapes and closed-circuit TV lectures, the military might improve the intellect of people who would otherwise be rejected. “A low-aptitude student may utilize videotapes as a supplement to his official education and end up as competent as a high-aptitude student,” he said.
The Pentagon was reportedly taken aback by McNamara’s statement, since the proposal was plainly a much enlarged version of a planned three-year, $16.4 million experiment—the Special Training Enlistment Program (STEP)—that Congress had canceled the previous year. Nonetheless, on October 1, 1966, Project 100,000—named for the intended first-fiscal-year recruiting level—was formally started. It would enlist 354,000 “second-class fellows”—as President Johnson had referred to his recruits in private—by the conclusion of the war.
McNamara made no mention of combat duty while unveiling Project 100,000. He said that the trainees would acquire important skills and self-confidence, which would assist them in finding good-paying civilian employment after they left the military. To hear him explain it, one would think the guys were going to school rather than fighting.
McNamara’s opponents accused him of hiding the real goal of Project 100,000 from the start: to employ the impoverished instead of the middle class for fighting in Vietnam. The reality was a little more complicated. Two years before, McNamara suggested Project 100,000 as a means to contribute to the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. Around reality, the concept had been circulating in Washington long before McNamara arrived.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist who would be elected to the United States Senate from New York in 1976, was its main proponent. The greatest method to relieve poverty in America, according to Moynihan, would be to draft the hundreds of thousands of young men and women who are deemed unsuitable for military duty every year. Put these young guys in uniform, most of whom are inner-city blacks and impoverished rural whites. Instill discipline in your children. They should be taught to wash every day, salute, and obey instructions. Give them a marketable talent to learn. After a few years, slackers who were sluggish and unmotivated would be converted into hardworking, law-abiding citizens. Furthermore, the new generation of military recruits might then educate their children how to be good middle-class citizens, ending the cycle of poverty from generation to generation.
In 1964, two years before Project 100,000 was started, Johnson and McNamara supported Moynihan’s idea. According to secret White House tapes, Johnson expressed his desire for the military to accept the “second-class guy,” adding, “We’ll…teach him to get up at dawn and work until dark, shave and wash…. We’ll get him ready to drive a truck or a bakery cart or stand at a gate [as a guard] when we release him.”
Uniformed officers in the Defense Department were opposed to recruiting such individuals, according to McNamara, because “they don’t want to be in the business of dealing with’morons.’” Inside the [Pentagon], they are now referred to as “moron camps.” The army does not want to be associated with rehabilitation.”
In 1966, infantry trainees at Fort Polk, Louisiana, prepare for a simulated ambush. Fort Polk sent more troops to Vietnam than any other American training facility. (Getty Images/Lynn Pelham/The Life Picture Collection) )
Johnson and McNamara attempted many times in 1964 and 1965 to reduce the military service limit, only to be thwarted by higher-ups in the Pentagon and their congressional supporters. McNamara was accused of attempting to establish a “moron corps” by Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, the influential head of the Senate Armed Services Committee and LBJ’s mentor on Capitol Hill. The Army, on the other hand, was more circumspect in its criticism, stating simply that it wished to “fight with the best soldiers available.”
By 1966, however, the top brass had no choice but to acquiesce, stating that if Johnson and McNamara refused to recruit additional middle-class Americans, “second-class” soldiers would have to suffice. Military commanders went ahead with their civilian superiors’ choice despite great disappointment and severe misgivings, and Project 100,000 became a reality.
Military recruiters had a lot of success convincing men from impoverished urban areas to join Project 100,000, thanks to an intensive public relations effort (one army ad in Hot Rod Magazine said, “Vietnam: Hot, Wet, and Muddy—the Here’s Place to Make a Man!”). Even with a war in full swing, glossy brochures with exotic locales and attractive professions presented the military as a respectable career option. Recruiters were under a lot of pressure to sign up additional “volunteers” for the program. Many resorted to employing “ringers” to take exams in order to get a passing score and fill quotas.
Military recruiters would often get the names of low-scoring individuals who were suddenly acceptable to the armed services and pay them a visit to persuade them to sign three-year contracts. Recruiters would convince them that if they waited for the draft, they would only serve two years and would very definitely wind up in a Vietnam infantry unit. They would be allocated to a noncombat job if they joined up for three years. However, there was a catch: the military was not obligated to keep any oral commitment made by a recruiter. A recruiter may offer a career in helicopter repair, but when it comes time to go to a specialist school, the military may determine that their exam results aren’t good enough to qualify for helicopter maintenance. They might also be switched to infantry if they qualified but failed the training. Thousands of Project 100,000 “volunteers” wound up in infantry as a result of this.
Project 100,000 recruits, dubbed “New Standards” men, were allocated to all branches of the military: 71% to the army, 10% of the marine corps, 10% to the navy, and 9% to the air force.
The majority of the 354,000 men and women enlisted in the military as part of Project 100,000 traveled to Vietnam, with about half of them serving in combat units. Overall, 5,478 of them perished while serving in the military, the majority of them in battle. They had a threefold mortality rate compared to other GIs.
The soldiers in Project 100,000 had to go through basic training and, in certain instances, extra training. In a 2005 book, novelist Larry Heinemann, who served with the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, remembered looking across the street at McNamara’s Boys, a special training company, in his basic training quarters at Fort Polk, Louisiana. He stated, “These were the men that couldn’t hack it through basic training.” “It was excruciating to see…. Some of them couldn’t even stand at attention and seemed to be completely unsuitable to military life.”
Joseph Galloway, a war reporter who was given a Bronze Star with Valor in Vietnam for bringing injured soldiers to safety in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, later said, “The young guys of Project 100,000 couldn’t read.” “I had to teach them how to tie their boots. They often failed [basic training] and were re-evaluated until they met some arbitrary criteria and were deemed trained and ready. They couldn’t learn a more difficult profession than pulling triggers, so the majority of them went directly into battle, where the learning curve is high and deadly.”
Leslie John Shellhase, a World War II veteran who was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and later worked as a lieutenant colonel on McNamara’s Pentagon planning team in the 1960s, had cause to be alarmed by the deaths of Project 100,000 soldiers in Vietnam. “We opposed Project 100,000 because we understood that wars are won by risking, and often losing, the bloom of a nation’s young, not by employing marginal personnel as cannon fodder.” He and other Pentagon strategists lobbied McNamara to cancel Project 100,000. When that failed, they suggested changing the program to prevent military leaders from putting low-skilled troops into dangerous situations. He added, “We never imagined these guys would be employed in war.” “Instead, we planned for them to be employed in service and support roles, where their mental disabilities would not lead to their deaths.” Shellhase and his colleague commanders were unsuccessful in their attempt to keep Project 100,000 troops off the battlefield.
As an infantry platoon commander in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, Barry Romo experienced a lot of action and was awarded the Bronze Star for his bravery on the battlefield. During his service, he heard that his nephew Robert, who was just a month his junior, had been conscripted and was being trained as an infantryman at Fort Lewis, Washington, for deployment to Vietnam. Because he knew Robert had failed the army’s mental exam, Barry was concerned. However, Project 100,000 had reduced the bar, allowing him to serve. Robert’s family, Fort Lewis colleagues, sergeants, and commanders all wrote to the commanding general at Fort Lewis, requesting that Robert not be sent into battle because, as one cousin put it, “he would die.”
However, the general declined the request, and when Robert arrived in Vietnam, he was assigned to an infantry battalion near the North Vietnamese border, one of the most hazardous battlegrounds. He was shot in the neck while attempting to assist a wounded comrade on a patrol and died.
Barry Romo stated in a speech 42 years later that the family had never healed from Robert’s death. “His death almost killed us with rage and sorrow,” he added.
Military commanders regarded McNamara’s policy as a failure, from the commanding general in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, through platoon lieutenants and sergeants. Because Project 100,000 men were slow learners, they struggled to assimilate instruction. Because many of them were inept in battle, they put not only themselves but also their colleagues in jeopardy.
Colonel David Hackworth, who served in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars and became one of America’s most distinguished soldiers, stated, “Project 100,000 was launched to create additional grunts for the killing fields of Vietnam.” “It rushed in unsuitable recruits from the bottom of the barrel to Vietnam. Human applesauce was the end result.”
Although McNamara’s plans to utilize video training to improve Project 100,000’s intellect levels were genuine, few soldiers actually got it. A brutal war was unfolding in Vietnam, and army and marine forces were in urgent need of replacements. There was a lot of pressure on training facilities to send soldiers to Vietnam as soon as feasible. There was no time for catching up in reading and math.
Only approximately 10% of McNamara’s Boys, according to Westmoreland, could be molded into genuine warriors. Despite the fact that some Project 100,000 men performed well in the military, completing basic training and moving on to useful military duties, a significant proportion of them struggled to cope with the rigors of military life. They were often hazed, mocked, and degraded. “I have ordered that these guys should never be singled out or condemned in any manner,” McNamara stated in one of his speeches praising Project 100,000.
Many of the Project 100,000 soldiers were dealt a harsh blow when it came time to depart the service. A little more than half of them—180,000—were discharged “under circumstances other than honorable,” a stigma that made it difficult to find decent work since many companies would not accept veterans who could not show a certificate of honorable release. Veterans’ entitlements such as health care, housing aid, and job guidance were often denied to them. Some of them became homeless and disturbed on a long-term basis.
Although some “bad-paper” vets had committed severe crimes, the majority had been charged with minor infractions linked to the pressures of military life and war, such as going AWOL, skipping duty, misusing alcohol or drugs, or speaking back to a superior. One of the main reasons given by the military for bad-paper discharges for Project 100,000 soldiers, according to David Addlestone, who was the head of the National Veterans Law Center from its inception in 1978 until his retirement in 2005, was “unsuitability.” It’s no surprise that many of the guys were clearly unfit to be recruited in the first place.
While visiting Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (right) at the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall, Texas, President Lyndon B. Johnson responds to news of heightened difficulties in Vietnam. (Photo courtesy of Corbis via Getty Images)
Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, senior officials on President Gerald Ford’s Clemency Board, wrote about Gus Peters, who “came from a broken home, dropped out of school after the eighth grade, and was unemployed for most of his teenage years” in their 1978 book, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation. His IQ score was just 62…. He was in no better physical shape.” Peters, who was drafted under Project 100,000, was mocked by his fellow troops and failed basic training. He went AWOL after being unable to deal with military life and was ultimately given an unfavorable discharge. Peters was in worse shape when he left the military than when he joined it, according to Baskir and Strauss. They said, “He still had no skills and no relevant work experience, and he was now officially labeled a misfit.”
The less-than-honorable discharges were cruelly ironic. Millions of men who avoided the draft by obtaining deferments and exemptions received no punishment. In reality, girls had an advantage over males who had served in the military: they were given first priority for employment and accrued seniority and experience. Amnesty was granted to draft evaders who escaped to Canada and Sweden. But not McNamara’s vets with poor papers. They didn’t have anybody to advocate for them.
McNamara’s starry-eyed conviction that videotapes might radically change slow learners showed the same naive faith that led him to believe that utilizing computers, statistical analysis, and sophisticated technology, he could beat the enemy in Vietnam. McNamara was a “naive believer in technical miracles,” according to biographer Deborah Shapley.
McNamara projected at the start of his program that when the men of Project 100,000 returned to civilian life, their earning potential would be “two to three times what it would have been if there had been no such program.” However, a follow-up study of Project 100,000 men found that they were “either no better off or substantially worse off” than nonveterans of comparable ability in the 1986–1987 job market.
The war had a psychological impact on many Project 100,000 veterans. Thousands of Project 100,000 men who served in Southeast Asia, according to John Wilson, a psychologist at Cleveland State University who spent several years studying Vietnam veterans’ emotional problems, were so “severely messed up” that they couldn’t function in society—hold jobs, raise families, and cope with day-to-day living.
Historians have also given Project 100,000 a negative review. While the program “was instituted with high-minded rhetoric about offering the poor an opportunity to serve,” Christian G. Appy of the University of Massachusetts wrote in his 1993 book Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam that the program’s result “was to send many poor, terribly confused, and woefully undereducated boys to risk death in Vietnam.” Project 100,000, according to Anni P. Baker, a history professor at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, is a “disaster” that “benefits neither the soldiers nor the Armed Forces.” “McNamara’s experiment in social engineering had the most terrible results,” wrote Jacob Heilbrunn, then a fellow at Georgetown University, in the New Republic in 1993, citing mockery in training camps and death in Vietnam. Project 100,000, according to the late Samuel F. Yette, a Howard University professor, was “nothing more than an express route to Vietnam” rather than equipping poor young men with skills for a better life.
McNamara offered a series of frank mea culpas at the end of his life for misjudgments about Vietnam made during his time at the Pentagon (1961–68), particularly his slowness in acting on increasing concerns about the war’s viability. McNamara told director Errol Morris for the Oscar-winning 2003 documentary The Fog of War, “I’m extremely sorry that in the course of achieving things, I’ve committed mistakes.”
Following their return to the United States, caskets carrying the remains of US soldiers slain in Vietnam are unloaded from an air force cargo aircraft. (Getty Images/Bettmann)
While McNamara, who died in July 2009 at the age of 93, never offered a formal apology for his part in the Vietnam quagmire, he made it plain that he was plagued by the mistakes committed under his watch that cost the lives of thousands of US soldiers. “People don’t like to acknowledge they made mistakes,” he told a New York Times reporter in 2003. “This is true of the Catholic Church, of corporations, of nonprofit organizations, and most definitely of political bodies.”
Project 100,000, which officially terminated on December 31, 1971, was conspicuously missing from McNamara’s apologias. McNamara refused to accept the many stories of abuse, misery, and death connected with Project 100,000 until the end of his life. He maintained that the initiative had been helpful based on the success tales of a few Project 100,000 guys who had done well. He despised the phrase “McNamara’s Moron Corps,” which he had heard often over the years.
Nonetheless, McNamara’s reputation was ruined by Project 100,000 and other Vietnam-era disasters. In the 2012 anthology Scraping the Barrel: The Military Use of Substandard Manpower, 1860–1960, Thomas Sticht said of McNamara: “At first praised for his intellect and analytical skill, he eventually became one of the most despised men in America among the commanders and enlisted people he had led.” McNamara was even challenged in public by one of the officers. An army psychologist treating mentally damaged Vietnam soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center got up and shouted out as McNamara extolled the benefits of Project 100,000 at a Washington conference. Dr. Walter P. Knake, despite being a “mere” captain, warned McNamara, “What you are doing is wrong!”
Regardless of guilt, McNamara’s Boys, who were on average 20 years old and disproportionately black, were condemned by the project’s outcomes, not its goals. Baskir and Strauss concluded, “They never received the training that military service appeared to offer.” “They were the last to be promoted, and they were the first to be deployed to Vietnam. They experienced more than their fair share of battle and were subjected to more than their fair number of nasty discharges. Many found it more difficult to adjust to civilian life than when they first arrived. It was an odd and sad end to a program that promised preferential treatment and a better future but delivered neither.” MHQ
McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War is written by Hamilton Gregory, who served in Army Intelligence in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969.
With the headline: McNamara’s Boys, this essay appears in the Spring 2017 edition (Vol. 29, No. 3) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History.
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“McNamara’s Boys”. The book is a memoir of the Vietnam War written by William Manchester. It details the life and death of Colonel Robert McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defense in Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. Reference: mcnamara’s folly pdf.
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