Download PDF of this full issue: v45n2.pdf (18.2 MB)

McNamara's Folly

By Daniel C. Lavery (reviewer)

McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War
by Hamilton Gregory
(Infinity Publishing, 2015)

About 10% of the casualties in the Vietnam War came from low IQ soldiers recruited under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's plan, called "McNamara's 100,000" that lowered standards by "administrative acceptance." Gregory, Vietnam vet, journalist, and college professor points out "The process was a farce — highly subjective, grossly unfair, and an outrageous abuse of the law." If the examiner thought the candidate possessed street smarts he was inducted even though he scored in the bottom group V who were "truly mentally deficient."

Because so many people avoided the draft, received deferments like Dick Cheney five times while he attended college and grad school, and many uniformed men deserted in unprecedented numbers, the pipeline to Vietnam needed to be filled with warm bodies regardless of the law. Surprisingly, LBJ and McNamara commented that this would enable ghetto minorities, unable to get draft counseling, to learn some skill that would help the war on poverty and come back to a job when the war was over.

The reality of unfit men, unable to tie their shoe laces or tell right foot from left, ended tragically with the highest casualties for them and anyone near them in battle. It contributed to tragedies like the My Lai Massacre where the men were led by a college dropout. Men too fat, too short, with medical problems, psychiatric disorders, low IQ's, Downs Syndrome, schizophrenics, and even criminals, placed in intense combat training led to deaths unexplained to their concerned families. Gregory knows details from boot camp at Fort Benning. He helped one draftee from the poverty stricken Appalachian Mountains who didn't know his address, left from right, nor how to make his bed. He explores one case after another carefully documented from his research and interviews of how these men were killed, sometimes deliberately by their frustrated leaders, and the men with whom they fought.

One thought a nickel was more valuable than a dime, so his comrades tricked him into stealing his money. They held a blanket party for an extremely heavy soldier they called "Fat Boy" and beat him unconscious in his bunk. He ran away after being hazed mercilessly. Another fat man collapsed so the Captain had the troops run over him breaking his ankle. After they sent him to the hospital and he returned, the Captain ran him in blazing heat for two hours, causing him dizziness with vomit over him and a temperature of 105 when an ambulance arrived. Medics iced him and let him rest until the Captain sent him to special "rehabilitation training," and gave his name tag to a savvy sergeant to take the general knowledge, rifle, and physical training test so he would pass. Luckily, his commander in Vietnam gave him transportation duty realizing his disabilities.

A low-IQ soldier played a deadly joke for two days pulling the pin of a hand grenade and then rolling it toward his mates. Nothing happened since he had disabled it pulling out the detonator cylinder. His mates beat him each time for scaring them finally yelling at him: "Never again, Bozo!" The third day they muttered and kept eating ignoring him as they wouldn't fall for the same lame gag. When he did the same trick, this time he had forgotten to disable it. The grenade exploded killing two soldiers and wounding several others. Rather than send him to the States to try him for manslaughter, they made him perform risks like walking point exposing him to booby-traps, detonating a landmine, or sniper bait.

A commander of a basic training company at Fort Jackson, SC told of a trainee who as a child suffered severe burns to his upper torso and arms. His fingers were fused together so he could not pull a trigger, and could not turn his head because of a burn. The commander said the medical officer who examined him during induction "should have been court martialed." An attorney in Detroit and draft counselor explained the examining process were cattle calls where the goal was to process as many as possible. A Doctor was fired who worked at the Phoenix induction center because he disqualified men with medical problems like gout, diabetes, kidney abnormalities, and heart defects. He said every inductee was looked at as a malingering hippie who they required proof of a defect that the doctor would be expected to ignore. "They were drafting anyone who could breathe" said an academic vice president at Worchester State College in Mass., who was drafted in 1966 despite his flat feet and serious back problems. The Chicago center said one man was acceptable whose vision was 20-200 in one eye and completely unable to see without thick glasses.

Many "misfits" were unable to adapt to military life or were disturbingly different from anyone. High school dropouts and slow-witted, they became targets of their superiors' rage and peers' resentment. When time to leave Project 100,000, more than half, 180,000, were separated with discharges "under conditions other than honorable." This created a stigma making it hard to become employed and many were denied benefits like health care, housing assistance, becoming homeless and troubled.

Lt. Colonel Leslie John Shellhase, a WW II vet said regarding McNamara's Folly: "Wars are not won by using marginal manpower as cannon fodder, but rather by risking, and sometimes losing, the flower of a nation's youth."

Daniel C. Lavery graduated Annapolis, navigated a Navy jet, and a ship, turned peace activist and became a civil rights lawyer for Cesar Chavez's UFW. His memoir, "All the Difference", describes his experiences. www.danielclavery.com.