McNamara's Boys: Lost Innocence in Vietnam
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. Today's show is a bonus episode, part of an ongoing series I've been calling Epilogues.

And as I've said before, the main purpose of these bonus shows is to expand upon the themes of a previous full-length episode or just to explore issues or anecdotes that I had to leave on the cutting room floor. In today's epilogue is a companion to episode 12, The Good Guys, which cataloged the shocking systemic pattern of atrocity and criminal negligence by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. In that episode, our center of gravity, narratively, was

was the My Lai Massacre, in which American soldiers murdered upwards of 500 innocent men, women, and children over the course of four hours on March 16, 1968.

We also explored the flawed government policies and institutional arrogance that made a war crime like My Lai, and many others like it, basically inevitable. Well today, we're going to turn our focus towards something very closely related but altogether unique, because the civilians of South Vietnam were not the only innocent victims of the US government's feckless war in Vietnam. Today, we're going to be talking about the victims that were much closer to home.

During the late 1960s, the Johnson administration, in a well-intentioned but foolishly conceived initiative called Project 100,000, sent countless mentally disabled and low IQ men into combat. To die in a war they could barely understand. And I don't mean understand in a political or ideological sense, I mean understand in the most basic sense of perception. Some of these men couldn't tie their shoes without help.

They couldn't read. They couldn't comprehend basic commands or perform even the simplest tasks. Many had the cognitive capacity of children. They were scared, confused, and utterly without advocates to protect them. And the U.S. government put them in uniforms, handed them fully automatic weapons, and sent them to die halfway across the world.

It was a monstrous crime against the American citizenry, one that most people don't really know about, or talk about, for that matter. And in truth, it probably deserves its own full-length episode, but for now, this will have to do. So with that preamble out of the way, let's dive in and discover what this was all about. Welcome to our second conflicted epilogue, McNamara's Boys.

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Imagine yourself walking through a toy store. It's the year 1970. You're walking through the aisles, past the dolls, the action figures, the little gadgets and guns, and you turn onto the board game aisle. You're walking along, looking up and down the shelves, and they've got all the usual suspects, all the classic American board games like Monopoly or Life or Battleship.

All the old favorites. Then your eyes meander down towards the bottom shelf, the bargain bin. The section that has all the weird, rare games that weren't particularly popular. And one of the games you might have stumbled across was something called Beat the Draft. And this was a very rare board game. Not many were created, although you can actually still find a few of them on eBay. But this game, manufactured and distributed in 1970, was fairly simple.

The antagonist of the board game was a character printed at the very center of the mat, a huge scowling drill sergeant sitting at a desk. And this character was called Sergeant Jones. And in the game, Sergeant Jones is trying to draft you, the player, into the army, into the Vietnam War, which in 1970 was at its zenith.

And the object of the game was to avoid Sergeant Jones until enough time had passed that your character turned 26 years of age in the game. Then you won. Or rather, you didn't lose.

It is a weird game. You can't really find it anywhere. There are only the thinnest traces of its existence on the internet. But this obscure board game is a telling little window into the all-consuming national anxiety that gripped the United States during the Vietnam War.

As we discussed in episode 12, The Good Guys, the war in Vietnam was not popular, especially in its later stages, which created a huge recruitment problem. The United States military had always preferred to rely on volunteers to fill its ranks, which makes sense. When it comes to people with guns, you want people who want to be there. But Vietnam quickly gained a reputation as a conflict you did not want to volunteer for.

It destroyed men, ground them up, and many veterans came home with PTSD and phantom limbs rather than sparkling medals and thrilling war stories. About two-thirds of the men who served in Vietnam were volunteers.

But one-third were compelled into joining the military through conscription, or the draft. Every able-bodied American male from ages 18 to 26 was eligible to be drafted. Although there were some exceptions, which we'll get into in a minute. And it's funny, I actually remember getting my letter from the U.S. government telling me that I had been automatically registered for the draft back in 2007.

something not important it's just a formality these days I mean everybody gets one last time I checked but I remember what a sobering experience it was to see it in black and white addressed to me an adult not to my parents to me and I remember how alone I felt when I got it the protective cocoon of my childhood and my awesome loving parents could not shield me from the needs of my country if it ever came to that

The army could drag me away, put me in boot camp, and make me fight for a cause I didn't know the first damn thing about. Now imagine that letter isn't just a formality. It's real. And it's a summons. Surprise, dude. You're going to Vietnam.

Say your goodbyes, kiss your girlfriend adios, see you in a few months. And most people who got these letters were not idiots. They knew exactly what awaited them in the jungles and the wetlands of Southeast Asia. But lots of people, especially in the middle and upper classes, were not content to just quietly walk down to the draft board office. Hypothetically, if I'd gotten that letter in 1966, there would have been many ways for me, a white middle-class guy,

to get out of it. You'll often hear about draft dodgers who fled to Canada or illegally avoided service, but there were many legal and legitimate ways to sidestep this bullet. For example, you were automatically granted a deferment if you were married with children, were enrolled in a college or university, or were medically unfit.

And there were many among the wealthy and the privileged who tried to game this system to avoid being drafted. Rich parents secured bogus medical deferments for their kids or just straight up bribed government officials to let their children off the hook. As one college grad said later in life, quote, My family spent thousands of dollars to put me through college and law school. If I had joined the military and been killed in Vietnam, it would have been a waste of time and money. End quote.

That quote is from former Vice President Dick Cheney.

And people who did not have the power of the purse got creative by faking mental illness or sometimes gaining so much weight that they were undraftable. And there were people like Jimi Hendrix, John Lithgow, and Ted Nugent, who were some of the more famous faces who went the trickery route. And look, I'm not going to pass judgment on anyone, rich or poor, on the issue of dodging the draft to avoid fighting in a controversial conflict like Vietnam.

Someday I will do an entire full-length episode on the history of the draft in the U.S., but for now, we will table that conversation. There was, however, a huge consequence of all these people sidestepping conscription. As one draftee named Paul Marks wrote, quote, "...for every draft avoider, someone else was made to serve in order to meet the military's quotas. That someone else might very well have been killed in Vietnam."

End quote.

All of this avoidance and lack of volunteers presented the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson with a problem. The Vietnam War was escalating. The conflict was intensifying, and that meant that the need for fresh bodies, fresh soldiers, was skyrocketing as well.

But a huge factor in all of this was politics. A looming re-election, in fact. Lyndon B. Johnson had not won the presidency in a traditional way. He'd been elevated to the big job when his boss, JFK, was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.

So he really, really did not want to upset voters if he could avoid it. And the voters he was most concerned about were white, middle-class, affluent voters. And if he were to dip his hand into these white suburban enclaves to fill the ranks and fight an unpopular war, he might lose his first real election. So he needed to find more men.

More people to draft. From somewhere. Well, his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had a solution.

We talked a little bit about Robert McNamara in The Good Guys, and he's a really interesting person. He was very, very smart. Anytime he's brought up, phrases like "whiz kid" and "wunderkind" and "genius" often appear in the same sentence. But he also seemed to have a huge blind spot. He seemed to have a very difficult time being able to extrapolate his high-minded solutions into what would actually happen on the ground.

What looks great on a whiteboard often looks very, very different in the real world.

One of his most tragic and underreported blunders, although some would say crime, was something called Project 100,000. And the idea behind it was very, very simple and, at first glance, altruistic. One of the Johnson administration's key domestic issues was alleviating poverty in the United States. And one of the ideas they'd been floating around involved taking men who struggled to succeed in the private sector and carving out a home for them within the American military.

Under that umbrella, they could learn skills, a trade, something marketable, but they would also learn discipline, work ethic, and general good lessons for succeeding in life.

And it was especially intended for men with cognitive deficiencies or mental handicaps, which kept them trapped in a cycle of, as McNamara described it, quote, idleness, ignorance, and apathy, end quote. And McNamara elaborated in a speech in 1966, quote, what these men badly need is a sense of personal achievement, a sense of succeeding at some task, a

End quote.

As President Johnson said, quote, We'll teach him how to get up at daylight and work till dark and shave and bathe. And when we turn him out, we'll have prepared him at least to drive a truck or a bakery wagon or stand at a gate as a guard. End quote. It's also worth noting that there appears to have been a conflation by McNamara between the poverty stricken and the mentally challenged. It seems that he considered the two groups linked or at least very closely related.

And there was definitely some overlap, but right from the outset, no one was approaching these issues with anything resembling nuance. As good-intentioned as the overall idea might have been, many thought that putting mentally deficient men into the military in any capacity was a really bad idea, even immoral. As Texas Congressman Charles Wilson said, quote,

I believe that it is morally wrong for us to depend on the deprived and the unfortunate in our society to furnish the manpower for our country's armed forces.

End quote. To quote a study by Lisa Cao, most of the men who would be drafted as a result of Project 100,000, quote, "...came from economically unstable homes with non-traditional family structures. 70% came from low-income backgrounds and 60% came from single-parent families. Over 80% were high school dropouts, 40% read below a 6th grade level, and 15% read below a 4th grade level."

End quote. Normally, men with these kinds of mental and educational deficiencies would never have been considered for the armed forces, not only because of concerns about their own safety, but for the safety of the men around them. In fact, many of them had already been rejected by draft boards for not meeting the minimum

physical and mental requirements to qualify for service. Well, all of that changed after McNamara's pet project kicked into gear. To accommodate the project's goal, which was to draft 100,000 men a year from these backgrounds, the military drastically lowered the testing standards. The result was a massive influx of men into the U.S. military who had absolutely no business being anywhere near a war zone.

During the Vietnam War, anyone who was selected to be drafted into the U.S. military was given an IQ test, which obviously measures your intelligence. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it's a decent indicator of where you fall on the cognitive spectrum. And there are five categories that you can fall into based on your score, and it ranges from Category 1, the highest, which is a score of 124 and above, to Category 5, which is a score of 71 or below.

Prior to Project 100,000, only men in the top three categories were allowed to be drafted. Afterwards, all five categories were open season. A former draftee named David Caruso, no, not that David Caruso, said the Army was, quote, drafting anyone who could breathe, end quote. Category four and five men would almost always miss a question like this on the test, quote,

If a farmer had a bucket of 24 eggs, and he stumbled and broke half of them, how many eggs would he have left?

Technically, it was a federal crime to admit a Category 5 man into the Army. But many of the recruiters, eager to swell their quotas, used a loophole that allowed them to do it anyway. As one veterans counselor named David Robinson said, "...the process was a farce, highly subjective, grossly unfair, and outrageous abuse of the law."

A lot of men from the bottom of the barrel were accepted administratively just so that induction centers could ramp up the number of draftees for Vietnam. This was a crime against the mentally disabled. Most of the category 5 men who were sent into the army under administrative acceptance were truly disabled. But they never protested. And they never complained. How could they? They were the lowest of the low, the dumbest of the dumb. They were being railroaded to Vietnam and they never had a clue.

End quote. I do apologize for some of the less than politically correct nomenclature some of these guys used, but at the time, in the 1960s, there just was not a lot of awareness about the subtleties of mental health, mental illness, or mental disability. People were just either crazy or stupid. In fact, men from Project 100,000 quickly became known among their peers as McNamara's morons.

A war correspondent and decorated veteran named Joseph Galloway summarized the problem, quote, "...these men were, to put it bluntly, mentally deficient, illiterate, mostly black and redneck whites hailing from the mean big-city ghettos and the remote Appalachian valleys. By drafting them, the Pentagon would not have to draft an equal number of middle-class and elite college boys whose mother could and would raise hell with their respective representatives in Washington."

The young men of Project 100,000 couldn't read. They had to be taught to tie their boots. They often failed basic training and were recycled over and over until they reached, finally, some low standard and were declared trained and ready. They could not be taught any more demanding job than trigger pulling. So most of them went straight into combat where the learning curve is steep and deadly.

The cold hard statistics say that these almost helpless young men died in action in the jungles at a rate three times higher than the average draftee. The good book says we must forgive those who trespass against us, but what about those who trespass against the most helpless among us? Those willing to conscript the mentally handicapped, the most innocent, and turn them into cannon fodder. End quote.

In his book, McNamara's Folly, the Use of Low IQ Troops in Vietnam, veteran Hamilton Gregory has assembled a heartbreaking menagerie of stories about these mentally disabled men who were drafted into the U.S. Army. He even tells a story about a man he went to boot camp with, one he tried to protect and watch over as best he could.

At Fort Benning, Georgia, Gregory met a young recruit named Johnny Gupton, and almost immediately he realized that Gupton was one of McNamara's boys, as they were called. Quote, He did not know his home address.

End quote.

Another man Gregory met, a low-IQ recruit named Joe Tucker, was constantly tormented by drill sergeants. He had a really difficult time comprehending basic commands. He just didn't understand what they wanted him to do, and this meant he was a target of cruel, incessant verbal abuse. Eventually, Joe Tucker snapped, screaming, quote, I just want to go home. Why don't you let me go home? End quote.

Hamilton Gregory also met a young man named Freddy Hensley. Freddy was uncommonly handsome, and the drill sergeant started calling him "Pretty Boy."

But Freddy also had a very low IQ. He was a category 4. Normally he would have never been qualified to be in the military or handle a rifle. But as Gregory notes in his book, people have a tendency to assume that attractive people are naturally competent. It's just this lizard brain thing that our minds instinctively do, and we reflexively associate ugliness with stupidity and attractiveness with intelligence.

The result was that everybody assumed Freddy was much smarter than he actually was. He learned as best he could to clean, maintain, load, and fire the standard-issue M14 rifle, but when it came time for the proficiency test, handsome Freddy just falls apart.

He freezes up under the withering verbal abuse from the drill sergeant and the stress of the time limit, and he never fires a single shot. Freddy's mental deficiencies became clear to Hamilton Gregory one night during boot camp when the two were watching a lightning storm. Freddy kept getting frightened at the loud noises even after he was told that they would always follow a flash of lightning. Freddy simply couldn't understand that the two were connected in any way.

Years later, Gregory learned that Freddie had gone on to serve in a combat unit. One of the instructors had given him a passing grade on the rifle test despite his glaring failure.

and Freddie was later killed in Vietnam. Gregory remembered, quote, Freddie's death hit me hard. I remembered how he was always sighing, an indication of the tremendous anxiety he experienced in special training. I remembered how he lacked the mental quickness to qualify with the M14 rifle, and I felt enormous anger, which I still feel decades later. He never should have been drafted. He never should have been administratively passed at special training.

Now, it's tempting to think of the U.S. military as the predator in this situation, but for the most part, they hated Project 100,000. They resented being used as guinea pigs in McNamara's social experiment. As Lt. Paul D. Walker complained, quote,

End quote. End quote.

Obviously, that's not the most sensitive take on the problem, but his point was valid.

As a reserve Air Force captain named William F. Walsh wrote, quote,

End quote. Another lieutenant said, quote, End quote.

And Colonel David Hackworth summarized, quote, Project 100,000 was implemented to produce more grunts for the killing fields of Vietnam. It took unfit recruits from the bottom of the barrel and rushed them to Vietnam. The result was human applesauce, end quote. Well, that's a colorful phrase for carnage if I've ever heard one, but that colonel was right. As I mentioned earlier, the fatality rate of men from McNamara's program was three times higher than that of ordinary GIs.

Hamilton Gregory tells a story of one of these men killed in combat. Quote, "...while serving as a battalion commander in Vietnam, Brigadier General William Weiss watched a squad leader give an order for an ambush patrol. The squad leader gave a simple, clear order, but one Marine couldn't remember any of the crucial details, including the password. That night, this Marine left the ambush to relieve himself without telling anyone."

When returning, he wandered into the kill zone. The squad leader sprang the ambush, and his squad killed him. End quote. Tragically, these men not only posed a danger to themselves, but to those around them. A veteran named William S. Tuttle observed, quote,

If you take someone with an IQ of 40 and give him a rifle, he's more dangerous to you than he is to the enemy. I almost got shot twice and had one guy almost nail me with a light anti-armor weapon when he was startled by a sudden noise. If you put a low IQ man in an infantry patrol, you have to spend most of your time making sure he doesn't kill a friendly by accident and doesn't get himself killed during contact because he's totally unaware of what's going on around him. Imagine sending a 5 year old into combat.

That's what Project 100,000 was all about. End quote. Another veteran remembered a man from his platoon. Quote,

End quote.

An infantry platoon leader named Robert Nyland remembered another tragic incident involving one of McNamara's boys in August 1968. Quote, For several days, a private in Robert McNamara's breathe-in-your-in army had played the same grotesque joke. He pulled the pin on a hand grenade and then rolled the grenade towards his mates.

Well, the first time he pulled this stunt, his mates scattered, terrified, but nothing happened. The man laughed, explaining that he had disabled the grenade by pulling the detonator cylinder, and his goggle-eyed mates pummelled him. "Never again, Bozo!" Well, he played the same trick the next day, and this time his mates beat him harder. The third day he pulled his idiotic stunt, his mates flinched, sighed, muttered, and kept eating. They would not fall for the same lame gag again.

But this time, the man had forgotten to disable the grenade. It exploded, killing two soldiers and wounding several others. End quote. As Lieutenant Colonel John Goss observed, Project 100,000 was, quote, a disaster for those who actually had to serve with and supervise these soldiers. End quote.

The way that these guys were treated during their time in the military varied wildly. Some were the targets of hatred and anger, blamed for their mistakes and targeted for their incompetence, but they couldn't help it. It wasn't their fault that they'd been press-ganged into a job they weren't qualified for. Well, that didn't matter to some of the men who served alongside them. Some of these mentally handicapped men became such a burden that their fellow soldiers deliberately put them in harm's way so that they would be killed and no longer pose any threat.

As one soldier commented, quote, End quote.

But as I stressed in episode 12, the U.S. military was not a monolith, and there were many, many good people sprinkled in among the bad. Good people who tried to watch over and protect these mentally handicapped soldiers. A commander named Gary B. Roberts deliberately transferred some of these men under his command. Quote, I just kept them with me in platoon headquarters to watch them and make sure they didn't hurt themselves, hurt anybody else, or have somebody else shoot them just to get rid of them. End quote.

There's one actually very touching story about a low IQ soldier named Mike Sanchez. Mike was drafted and sent to Vietnam despite the fact that he was illiterate and had the mental capacity of a child. Well, while he was over there, Mike developed a very close relationship with his commanding officer, a platoon leader.

The platoon leader was a kind man who looked after Mike, shielded him from ridicule, and tried to teach him as best he could. Well, one day during an ambush, the platoon leader was shot. As Jim Bracewell, a helicopter pilot, remembered, quote,

and he couldn't find him. He frantically began calling the platoon leader's name, and one of the other soldiers told Mike to stop yelling, that he had seen the lieutenant go down, and he thought he was dead. Mike tearfully asked where he was, and when he pinpointed the lieutenant's position, he shed his equipment, including his rifle, and ran through heavy fire to his lieutenant.

He scrambled to his young leader's side and discovered that he was very badly hit in both legs. He made no attempt at first aid, it never occurred to him, he simply picked up the lieutenant as if he were a doll and ran back to the tree line. Neither of them were hit during their dash to the trees and no one could believe it considering the intensity of enemy fire. They said that the pattern of bullets hitting the rice paddy water all around them made it seem impossible that they were not hit.

Well, the lieutenant received first aid and a short time later evacuated by helicopter. He survived. Mike Sanchez later won the Silver Star for heroism. He was transferred out of his combat unit and later learned to be a barber in his hometown. As one of his mentors noted, quote,

As it turned out for Mike, his being at the wrong place at the wrong time actually was the right place at the right time. He was a bona fide hero, and he shouldn't have even been there. End quote. Over the course of the Vietnam War, Project 100,000 drafted 345,000 low-IQ men into the armed forces. 5,478 of those men died in combat. 20,000 were wounded. 500 became amputees.

Robert McNamara never expressed any regret for the outcome of Project 100,000. Whether that came from a place of willful ignorance or just stubborn arrogance, it's hard to know for sure.

Many of the men who served with McNamara's boys despised the Secretary of Defense for his role in putting these vulnerable men in harm's way. One veteran said that McNamara, quote, deserved to burn in hell for what he did. But it's also difficult to know if the program was born from a genuine altruism, a genuine desire to improve the lives of mentally disabled and poverty-stricken men,

or if they merely served as convenient sacrificial lambs to spare the rich and powerful from having to risk their own sons in pursuit of the national interest. Whatever the case, the project was a failure by its own standards. As a pair of senior government officials said, "...it was a failure for the recruits themselves. They never got the training that military service seemed to promise. They were the last to be promoted and the first to be sent to Vietnam."

They saw more than their fair share of combat and got more than their share of bad discharges. Many ended up with greater difficulties in civilian society than when they started. For them, it was an ironic and tragic conclusion to a program that promised special treatment and a brighter future and denied both."

In our full-length episode on Vietnam, The Good Guys, we discussed the My Lai Massacre, in which U.S. soldiers led by Lieutenant William Calley murdered over 500 innocent civilians, mostly elderly people and children, on March 16th, 1968. Well, in the post-mortem dissection of that monstrous war crime, it was discovered that William Calley had only been given his officer's commission, and thus his ability to lead and command men

because of the relaxed standards of the U.S. military. Calley wasn't a Category 4 or 5 man, but according to U.S. Army Officer Richard A. Gabriel, quote, even the staunchest defenders of the Army agree that in normal times a man of Lieutenant Calley's intelligence and predispositions would never have been allowed to hold a commission. This has been a conflicted epilogue. Thanks for listening.

Conflicted is a proud member of the Evergreen Podcast Network. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates, news about upcoming shows, and semi-daily musings about history. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, thank you so much for your time, and have a great day.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks.