7. A Tragic and Dishonest Recruitment Drive Dressed up as a Helpful Government Program
The Pentagon needed to square the circle of finding more recruits, without alienating the demographics whose support was most necessary to continue the Vietnam War. So Defense Secretary Robert McNamara came up with a shameful brainchild: Project 100,000. It was touted as a Great Society program that would take impoverished and disadvantaged youth, and break the cycle of poverty by teaching them valuable skills in the military. In reality, Project 100,000 simply amounted to the lowering or abandonment of minimal military recruitment standards, in order to sign up those who had previously been rejected by the draft as mentally or physically unfit. Recruiters swept through Southern backwaters and urban ghettoes, and signed up almost anybody with a pulse. That included at least one recruit with an IQ of 62. In all, 354,000 were recruited.
Needless to say, the Project 100,000 recruits received no specialized training and were taught no special skills. Once they signed on the dotted line, “the Moron Corps“, as they were derisively called by other soldiers, were rushed through training, then bundled off to Vietnam in disproportionate numbers. Once in Vietnam, they were sent into combat in disproportionate numbers. In combat, the mental and physical limitations that had caused them to be rejected by the draft ensured that they were wounded and killed in disproportionate numbers. The toll fell particularly heavily on black youths: 41 percent of Project 100,000’s recruits were black, compared to 12 percent in the US military as a whole.