McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War

[Timppa]

A very sad story:

 

[tyrodtom]

I went through Army basic training, and served with some of those troops during my time in the Army.
Though at the time I wasn't aware of the lower standards, I just knew some were a lot less able than the guys I had served with in the USAF just a year before.

Then once I got out of Army Aviation and was in a ordinance outfit then I got to serve in Germany with a lot of McNamara's boys .
We weren't far from the Fulda Gap in Wildflecken, I knew if the Soviets chose to try to cross it, we were in deep dodo.
I decided no more Army for me after 8 years. My older brother, a E-7, decided no more for him too after 20 years, just a year later.

 

[swampyankee]

Pretty much anybody who could get into college would get a four-year deferment until the end of the draft in the early 1970s, which would mean that a new crop of 18-year olds would show up at the time; the college graduates could also get into places where deferments were more likely.

The people who couldn't, or didn't want to, get into college would avoid the draft by joining the Air Force or Navy, which did have higher educational standards than the Army or Marines. The whole system of peacetime (ok; it was the Cold War) conscription was pretty much designed to deter the best and brightest from the Army or Marines. The system of deferments was written into law long before MacNamara, as were the notoriously corrupt local Selective Service System boards.

 

[Barrett]

In the early 80s I had continuing problems with mail delivery, or not delivered. Had two sessions with my local postmaster and finally he said, "Sir, you should see some of the people I have to deal with." Asked him about Project 100k and he seemed surprised that I knew about it. Short version: thousands of those GIs lateraled to the post office and other govt agencies for longevity.....

 

[FLYBOYJ]

McNamara was an overeducated idiot and I blame him for many of the political and strategic failures during the Vietnam War. IMO because of him the US wasted billions of dollars and snuffed out the lives of thousands of young men, damaged thousands of others physically and mentally. This was typical of his thinking. As my dad used to say "so smart but yet so stupid." I think an outhouse should be built over his grave.

 

[Barrett]

McNamara was an overeducated idiot and I blame him for many of the political and strategic failures during the Vietnam War. IMO because of him the US wasted billions of dollars and snuffed out the lives of thousands of young men, damaged thousands of others physically and mentally. This was typical of his thinking. As my dad used to say "so smart but yet so stupid." I think an outhouse should be built over his grave.

Youbetcha. The vile LBJ used to boast "They cain't bomb an outhouse (though he didn't say 'outhouse') without my say-so."

Steve Coonts and I worked on Dragon's Jaw (the Thanh Hoa Bridge saga) for five years--published last May. A few readers (which political affiliation ?) have objected to the political content but how you write about The Vietnam "Conflict" without politics is beyond me.

 

[MIflyer]

Project 100K really sums up McNamera's attitude toward the uniformed military. And it was supposed to induct 100K PER YEAR.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

Pretty much anybody who could get into college would get a four-year deferment until the end of the draft in the early 1970s

Tell that to my classmates in the freshman dorm who fell one credit shy of "appropriate progress toward timely graduation" and came back from the rice paddies in a box before the end of second semester. First semester ended just before Christmas break, and those who had been identified already as likely to fail a course were off to basic before Christmas. The guy next door had a report date of Dec 23, and finals had ended on the 14th. He failed one of his five courses, and the draft board had his exam results before he did. His name is on the wall.

 

[michael rauls]

Tell that to my classmates in the freshman dorm who fell one credit shy of "appropriate progress toward timely graduation" and came back from the rice paddies in a box before the end of second semester. First semester ended just before Christmas break, and those who had been identified already as likely to fail a course were off to basic before Christmas. The guy next door had a report date of Dec 23, and finals had ended on the 14th. He failed one of his five courses, and the draft board had his exam results before he did. His name is on the wall.

Knowing the details about your acquaintance next door and how he got where he did makes him seem an individual and real almost like someone I know not just part of an inanimate number. Sometimes when reading history books it's too easy to not really grasp that every one of those guys that lost there lives is a real individual human tragedy whether ww2, Korea, Viet Nam or other. I mean you know but the numbers are so large it's hard to grasp the multitudes of individual tragedy........very sad

 

[XBe02Drvr]

Knowing the details about your acquaintance next door and how he got where he did makes him seem an individual and real almost like someone I know not just part of an inanimate number. Sometimes when reading history books it's too easy to not really grasp that every one of those guys that lost there lives is a real individual human tragedy whether ww2, Korea, Viet Nam or other. I mean you know but the numbers are so large it's hard to grasp the multitudes of individual tragedy........very sad

It was all about your local draft board and how tight their quotas were, as well as who was in charge. In NJ where Nate was from, draft boards apparently were headed by ambitious political apparatchiks who wanted to look good performance wise. In VT, draft board directorships tended to be viewed as hardship duty "awarded" to politicians who had somehow embarrassed their party by a political gaffe of some sort. VT is a small state with (back then) a small government structure, and draft boards tended to not have much apparatus to shield them from public contact and scrutiny. My draft board looked the other way when I failed a course, and gave out-and-out dropouts six months or more to pursue alternatives before drafting them. The secretary who ran the office would call you up and counsel you on your options. She convinced so many guys to enlist in various special programs that her actual draft quotas were quite low relative to the available manpower. Now that's what I call "military intelligence". Wouldn't happen in today's world.
Cheers,
Wes

 

[Peter Gunn]

All I have to do is see the word/name McNamara and I start to get ill and very angry. An outhouse over his grave is too good for the likes of that S. O. B.

 

[Timppa]

This is a lot funnier story. Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965) was judged mentally deficient in a army draft in early 50's:

After the war the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel to get the guys for the occupation forces in Germany. Up until then the army deferred people for some reason
other than physical first (I was deferred because I was working on the bomb), but now they reversed that and gave everybody a physical first.
That summer I was working for Hans Bethe at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and I remember that I had to go some distance — I think it was to Albany — to take
the physical.

I get to the draft place, and I'm handed a lot of forms to fill out, and then I start going around to all these different booths. They check your vision at one, your
hearing at another, they take your blood sample at another, and so forth.

Anyway, finally you come to booth number thirteen: psychiatrist. There you wait, sitting on one of the benches, and while I'm waiting I can see what is happening. There are
three desks, with a psychiatrist behind each one, and the "culprit" sits across from the psychiatrist in his BVDs and answers various questions.

At that time there were a lot of movies about psychiatrists. For example, there was Spellbound, in which a woman who used to be a great piano player has her hands stuck in
some awkward position and she can't move them, and her family calls in a psychiatrist to try to help her, and the psychiatrist goes upstairs into a room with her, and you
see the door close behind them, and downstairs the family is discussing what's going to happen, and then she comes out of the room, hands still stuck in the horrible
position, walks dramatically down the stairs over to the piano and sits down, lifts her hands over the keyboard, and suddenly — dum diddle dum diddle dum, dum, dum — she
can play again. Well, I can't stand this kind of baloney, and I had decided that psychiatrists are fakers, and I'll have nothing to do with them. So that was the mood I was
in when it was my turn to talk to the psychiatrist.
...
I started looking at the papers the psychiatrists had written, and it looked pretty serious! The first guy wrote:
Thinks people talk about him.
Thinks people stare at him.
Auditory hypnogogic hallucinations.
Talks to self.
Talks to deceased wife.
Maternal aunt in mental institution.
Very peculiar stare. (I knew what that was — that was when I said, "And this is medicine?")
The second psychiatrist was obviously more important, because his scribble was harder to read. His notes said things like "auditory hypnogogic hallucinations confirmed."
("Hypnogogic" means you get them while you're falling asleep.)
He wrote a lot of other technical-sounding notes, and I looked them over, and they looked pretty bad. I figured I'd have to get all of this straightened out with the army
somehow.
...
At the end of the whole physical examination there's an army officer who decides whether you're in or you're out. For instance, if there's something the matter with your
hearing, he has to decide if it's serious enough to keep you out of the army. And because the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel for new recruits, this officer
wasn't going to take anything from anybody. He was tough as nails. For instance, the fellow ahead of me had two bones sticking out from the back of his neck — some kind of
displaced vertebra, or something — and this army officer had to get up from his desk and feel them — he had to make sure they were real!
I figure this is the place I'll get this whole misunderstanding straightened out. When it's my turn, I hand my papers to the officer, and I'm ready to explain everything,
but the officer doesn't look up. He sees the "D" next to "Psychiatric," immediately reaches for the rejection stamp, doesn't ask me any questions, doesn't say anything; he
just stamps my papers "REJECTED," and hands me my 4-F paper, still looking at his desk.

So I went out and got on the bus for Schenectady, and while I was riding on the bus I thought about the crazy thing that had happened, and I started to laugh — out loud —
and I said to myself, "My God! If they saw me now, they would be sure!"
...

After a while I began to worry. Here's a guy who's been deferred all during the war because he's working on the bomb, and the draft board gets letters saying he's
important, and now he gets a "D" in "Psychiatric" — it turns out he's a nut! Obviously he isn't a nut; he's just trying to make us believe he's a nut — we'll get him!
The situation didn't look good to me, so I had to find a way out. After a few days, I figured out a solution. I wrote a letter to the draft board that went something like
this:

Dear Sirs:
I do not think I should be drafted because I am teaching science students, and it is partly in the strength of our future scientists that the national welfare lies.

Nevertheless, you may decide that I should be deferred because of the result of my medical report, namely, that I am psychiatrically unfit.
I feel that no weight whatsoever should be attached to this report because I consider it to be a gross error.
I am calling this error to your attention because I am insane enough not to wish to take advantage of it.

Sincerely,

R. P. Feynman

Result: "Deferred. 4F Medical Reasons.

The whole story:
http://www.rosenfels.org/Feynman

 

[swampyankee]

Tell that to my classmates in the freshman dorm who fell one credit shy of "appropriate progress toward timely graduation" and came back from the rice paddies in a box before the end of second semester. First semester ended just before Christmas break, and those who had been identified already as likely to fail a course were off to basic before Christmas. The guy next door had a report date of Dec 23, and finals had ended on the 14th. He failed one of his five courses, and the draft board had his exam results before he did. His name is on the wall.

You had to maintain a GPA in the top 2/3 of the school for the semester. I'm sorry for your friends, but this isn't a high bar: I made it until the de facto end of the draft, and there were semesters I was near academic probation. Also, of course, the SSS local boards were highly politicized, and more than a little corrupt. You could be sure the ne'er-do-well scion of the town's richest resident would have an easier time getting 4F for his bone spurs than the hard-working son of somebody living in a 4th-floor cold-water flat would for being deaf in one ear. (actually this is close to what happened to a friend of mine: he was drafted into the Army in the early 1970s despite wearing bilateral hearing aids. He actually lived in a small ranch house on a 1/3 acre lot)

 

[MIflyer]

I recall hearing about a guy who was drafted and reported to Ft Jackson for basic training. They discovered he had something like Size 16 feet. They calculated how much it would cost the Army to provide him with custom made shoes and boots and asked him, "How would you like to go home?" He took them up on the offer.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

Also, of course, the SSS local boards were highly politicized, and more than a little corrupt.

That kind of depended on where you were. My draft board was so effective in facilitating military options other than the draft that our quotas were very low for the size of our population. The secretary at the local board was in touch with all the local recruiters and always knew what programs were available at which services. She would counsel "her boys" on how the system worked and what each one's best options were. Her big selling point was 3 year Army enlistments that came with technical training and more rapid paygrade advancement than a draftee could expect. On my way home, I sat next to a guy from my neighborhood who enlisted for 3 in the Army about the time I went for 4 in the Navy. He extended for 16 months and got out as an E6 the same week I got out as E5. He was a SAM missile guidance system tech, and went right to work for Simmons for big bucks, while I farted around playing with airplanes.
Cheers,
Wes