And now for a change of pace—a book about the Vietnam War!
Hamilton Gregory is a writer from North Carolina and veteran of the Vietnam War (he was in military intelligence to be specific). But this book isn’t about his experiences as a spy specifically; rather, it is a book about his processing through Robert McNamara’s ill-fated attempt to increase recruitment: The New Military Standards, AKA “Project 100,000”.
This book is eminently readable and one of the most damning accounts of the road to hell being paved with good intentions: McNamara’s new standards, a government program that Gregory went through firsthand (although a college graduate, he was sent there due to being wildly out of shape). This program lowered recruitment standards across the board resulting in not 100,000, but 350,000, delinquents and misfits of various types (typically the mentally or physically handicapped) being inducted into the military at the height of the war with disastrous results—those recruited in McNamara’s plan died at rates 3 times higher than the regular enlisted man.
Since the majority of these men were previously kept out due to gross mental incompetence, these men would come to be known through history as “McNamara’s Morons”.
This is a book that very well should fill its reader with rage and sorrow, as the most helpless among us, literal retards, were sent into a situation they couldn’t comprehend and were butchered by the enemy having done so. The book is very much a cavalcade of the aforementioned rage and sorrow, outside of a few humorous instances of shenanigans involving the eponymous morons.
The first half of the book is Gregory’s stories of going to bootcamp and ultimately going to Vietnam, with the other half being various other stories of men from the program and their families therein. There is also an appendix detailing the program more and a mock aptitude and intelligence exam that would have been given to recruits at the time. To give an idea of what sort of men we’re dealing with here, the first chapter recounts one of Gregory’s mates in bootcamp, a sub-normal IQ from the Tennessee Valley named John Gupton (not his real name). Gupton was a man that could not identify his own address or name his parents, he was incapable of tying his own shoes or shaving, he had no idea there was a war going on nor was he aware of America’s past military history (he had no idea who Hitler was to name one example). And Mr. Gupton was far from the only one:
Various other gimps and morons are discussed in the book, and honestly some of them are fairly comical: such as one who didn’t know the difference between semen and urine, or one who didn’t know that a dime was worth more than a nickel. But many more stories are simply tragic, detailing how the helpless imbeciles were ruthlessly abused by their comrades and drill sergeants—such as an example of a morbidly obese recruit being held down and kicked in the stomach repeatedly by his commanding officers, or repeated instances of blanket parties and fragging. But not to be outdone, the “Morons”, on several occasions, managed to get others killed due to their blithering idiocy, such as a standing sentry saying “Halt, who goes there?!” and then immediately shooting his commanding officer before he had a chance to respond.
There are many takeways from this book, and here’s a few I took:
1)Forced equality gets us all killed.
This is a book that shows that well meaning liberal “Everybody can be educated” nonsense dates back to at least the 1960s. Gregory takes many great pains to point out that Robert McNamara was neither an idiot (he was a military veteran and was heralded for revitalizing General Motors in the 1950s) or a blood-drinking warlord who wanted to merely use gimps and retards as “cannon fodder”. He genuinely wanted to do something good, in the spirit of LBJ’s “Great Society”. In short, he genuinely believed that his program would help those in the program, and he continued to believe this until his dying day. He was an idealist, and people suffered for his well-meaning endeavors. The irony being that somebody who led a war against communism would kill thousands with his “blank-slatism” just like the communists themselves.
2)The American people have even more reasons to hate the political classes!
Many wealthy and famous Americans have gone on record as having dodged the draft for the Vietnam war. While some of them have gone on record regretting it (such as actor John Lithgow), many others who are currently or were very recently in the government pushing for the Iraq War and ever more wars (Tom Lay, Cheney, Bolton) are damn near PROUD of having dodged the draft— “I had other priorities in the ‘60s than military service. I don’t regret the decisions I made.” says Mr. Cheney. Tom Lay has made flimsy excuses about how he couldn’t volunteer for the war because there were so many people being drafted—this of course being a time when, as detailed in the book, guys whose fingers were fused together in third degree burns, dwarfs, partially blind men, and (I cannot stress this enough) literal retards were being drafted. Recruiters would have jumped to have a healthy person of normal intelligence! If I need to explain to why somebody who runs away from battle, only to order others to fight decades later, is a loathsome coward, please get off my website.
3)Related to the above, any war worth fighting can and SHOULD have everybody in it, from the richest to the poorest.
The fact that so many rich kids were fighting desperately to not get involved shows how unpopular the war was, in addition to what a pack of snakes our upper class is (See above). While I hate to simplify and mythologize World War 2 as the “Good War”, I don’t recall nearly as much “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”-style rhetoric from those days. Perhaps because that war was actually worth getting involved in.
4)IQ Testing is vital, useful, and needs improvement.
The book points out that some men did benefit from Project 100,000—these were men who were “street smart”, quick thinking and intuitive, but due to poverty and lack of opportunity they were not educated. But these men, as well as a few genuine simpletons that pulled off Forrest Gump-esque feats of idiotic heroism (including one who won the silver star doing the exact same action that won Gump the Medal of Honor), were far and far between. Testing is needed to differentiate between men like that and men who are genuinely mentally incompetent. To throw the liberals a bone, they’re right in that traditional intelligence testing used terminology the poor would not recognize (the oft cited “chandelier” word problem when some poor ghetto kid had never seen one in his life). Indeed, the biggest conundrum in intelligence testing is designing a perfect test that anybody can take and be accurately assessed, regardless of education or spoken language—and they’ve been trying for the past century at least. Tests like Raven’s matrices, (in which you recognize geometric patterns and the like), are a big step in the right direction for inclusive intelligence testing that transcends language barriers…not that stops the McNamara’s of the world who still argue that IQ tests mean nothing and everyone is equally capable of education and learning. Whereas people like myself who have been teachers, and my father who is a lifetime public school admin, know better.
5)The mentally disabled CAN be productive members of society IF they are put into environments they can handle.
Early in the book, Gregory points out that there were a few tasks that the “Morons” were capable of doing—indeed, excelling at. These simple-minded fellows show a great deal of pride and self-esteem in themselves when they were capable of spotlessly polishing their boots, peeling potatoes, or mopping floors. But clearly, the mental and physical rigors of infantry training are not what they should be doing. Instead, they need to be in caring environments where they are not stressed, and are given useful labor that they are capable of completing. This has the twofold benefit of making the mentally challenged feel good about themselves and making them productive members of society, and it allows the intelligent to do more intellectually strenuous work rather than having to do monotonous manual labor.
6)America was not the fascist eugenic dystopia we’re taught it was.
This is a point that I’ve made time and time again, but it bears repeating: America’s past is not what you are taught it was. As you can see above, one of the major tenets of modern liberalism started more than half a century ago!
In conclusion, Project 100,000 was McNamara’s well meaning clusterfuck that made one of the darkest chapters in American history just a bit darker. Government programs can work in limited spaces, with surgical application, as we can see with the few examples of men that benefited from the “moron initiative”. What does not work and has never worked is just throwing money at the problem until it goes away. This was evidently McNamara’s overwhelming belief, as seen with the New Standards and in his overall wartime strategy of dropping more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped on all the Axis countries in the entirety of WW2. And sadly as we can see with education in the US, that is still what liberals think. Gregory has used his non-moronic, college educated brain to write a fine history book. If you want to understand the intellectual fruits of the Great Society, pick it up now.
You can buy McNamara’s Folly here