Project 100,000

Did you ever watch "Gomer Pyle USMC"? How about "Forrest Gump" with Forrest and his buddy, Bubba? You had to look at these shows and think they were just too over-the-top to be true. How could those three-room temperature IQ men ever make it in the military?! And the other "Private Pyle", Vincent D'Onofrio's character in "Full Metal Jacket. That sure didn't end well. Clearly, he did not belong in a combat-centric outfit like the Marines! Ridiculous that anyone would conceive this was plausible!

Well, former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara did. He was the creator of "Project 100,000". You probably never heard of that. I hadn't until yesterday. He was Secretary from 1961 to 1968. The Vietnam war had never gone well for the US. It was all body counts and victories that went nowhere for the Americans who had fought and sacrificed during the very righteous war in Europe and the Pacific that had such an obvious storyline to it. Even to pro-war republicans, Vietnam had to be one big question mark. It just wasn't the same. There was a draft, of course, but young men could avoid that by going to college- and staying- and by marrying and having dependents. People of influence, like Fred Trump, could get a doctor to give their son a medical waiver. By 1967 it was getting hard to fill the ranks in the Army and the Marine Corps. There was talking of calling up the National Guard and the reserves of both those militaries, but that was the third rail of politics at the time. Lyndon Johnson knew he would get slaughtered in a campaign if he did. Calling up the Guard would mean grown men with jobs and families would be suddenly fighting this crazy war, and the public would not have that. This wasn't your father's war where the world was literally at stake.

McNamara's solution was to fill the ranks with men previously deemed unfit for service- the 4F's. When you turned 18 in those days, you were eligible for the draft. You would report to your local draft board and receive a physical and mental assessment. This was like pre-qualification. You weren't going off to war just yet. They were determining eligibility. This was when you could poop in your underpants for a week like rocker, Ted Nugent or get a note from a doctor like Trump. And at first, if you were a Gump or a Gomer, you'd be classified 4F, ineligible for service, like Don and Ted. McNamara decided around 1967, it was time to recall those 4F bodies and give them a chance to serve their country. I don't know about Nugent, but we know now that Trump had five deferments and a rich daddy. 

The men without rich daddies got the call. McNamara saw it as an opportunity for them. They could learn a skill. But most of them couldn't. When you are illiterate or have the mental and social skills of a third grader, you can't even serve in the rear with the gear. These guys couldn't be trained to be cooks or mechanics because they couldn't grasp ratios in recipes or the details of a truck's transmission. So, they were put into combat, integrated into forward units. How that made sense to anyone is as insane as war itself. It's simply unfathomable as to how a fella who fails in several attempts to properly lace up his boots, could be given a rifle and told to engage the enemy. 

On the Vietnam Memorial Wall in DC, there are 5,478 names of these men, who gave their lives for America even though they didn't know where they were nor why they were doing it. To their families they died as heroes. Maybe their mommas knew better. Maybe they didn't. The ones who didn't die, returned to the US with bad paperwork, once the military finally figured out their mistake and started rotating them home. Bad DD214 paperwork meant no GI Bill, no VA benefits and a permanent mark on their employment record that would follow them to every attempt to find work. They suffered the PTSD that regular troops did but were not eligible for treatment. 

Ultimately this obscene experiment helped end the draft, leading to the all-volunteer military that we have today. Our troops are better educated now than at any time in our nation's history. The wars haven't gotten better- maybe less desperate at best- but there are no longer men being treated as experimental cannon fodder to fill out the regimental rosters for those scoring the wars, far back behind the lines. Sometimes the fog of war is in the brains of our leaders. That doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon today.