In the very long list of shocking and abominable atrocities committed by
the US, there is one that stands out as especially obscene for the appalling
and hypocritical inhumanity of US Government leaders. This was “Project
100,000”, a US military program enacted by then Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara to recruit 100,000 new soldiers per year during a time of
great public opposition to the Vietnam war, and which was promoted as part of
President Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’. In McNamara’s own words, it was “a
program to salvage the poverty-scarred youth of our society”, to give them two
years of military service, then insert them into “a lifetime of productive
activity in American civilian society”.
He further stated,
.
“Poverty in America pockmarks its victims inwardly. If unchecked and
unreversed, that inner ghetto of the poverty-scarred personality of these men
can fester into explosive frustrations of bitterness and violence. Chronic
failures in school throughout their childhood, they are destined to a downward
spiral of defeat and decay … If nothing were done to give them a strong sense
of their own worth and potential, they, their wives and their children would
almost inevitably be the unproductive recipients of some form of the dole ten
years from now. Hundreds of thousands of men can be salvaged from the blight of
poverty, and the Defense Department – with no detriment whatever to its primary
role – is particularly well equipped to salvage them.” (1) (2)
That sounds good, except that this program was
initiated during a time when the US was realising extremely high casualties in
Vietnam, had already admitted the war was “unwinnable”, with most suitable
recruits either taking student deferments or evading the draft by fleeing to
Canada. McNamara’s solution was to run a sieve through the ghettos of
America, an ingenious and diabolical solution to “rid the nation” of its
surplus black and poor, in a program he may have hatched with the advice of
Margaret Sanger, she of Planned Parenthood. In executing this
program, McNamara lowered the standards to the point where these recruits were
in the bottom quartile of intelligence and ability, a great many of them with
an IQ of 60 or 65, and none above 80.
These new “soldiers” were functionally
illiterate, able to read only at a Grade 3 level or lower. They were so
severely (educationally) deficient that the military had to create little comic
books to replace the training manuals, and many had to be taught even
how to tie the laces on their boots. As other authors have noted,
these men often failed their much-simplified basic training several times, with
most being repeatedly “recycled” until they finally reached a deplorable
minimum standard of readiness. None had the mental ability to
appreciate what was happening to them.
The program ran for five years and recruited in
total about 500,000 mentally retarded young men and gave them a one-way ticket
to Vietnam, these helpless young men dying at many times the rate of regular
soldiers. Many researchers have claimed that an overwhelming majority
of these men, especially blacks, received combat assignments, and “comprised an
overwhelming majority of … battle deaths”, and were also generally posted to
“what were considered dangerous military occupations”. These men were
provided with special ‘dog tags’ that began with “US67…” so they could be
quickly identified by other soldiers. By all accounts, the regular troops did
not want to be associated with these men, certainly not in a battle situation,
believing their lack of intelligence and training simply jeopardised the lives
of all around them. Many have reported that when battlefield decisions
were being made, given that these men were unable to learn anything much more
complicated than pulling a trigger, they were just sent to their deaths,
“ending up on the Vietnam Memorial Wall at an alarming rate much higher than
the average”. One young Vietnam veteran reported that a common order issued
to these young men ‘salvaged from the blight of poverty’ was to “Go over there
and see if there’s a sniper in that tree”.
US casualty figures mushroomed after the introduction of this program, the victims
of which were simply cannon-fodder and, for this and other reasons, I
remain convinced there is a high probability American deaths in Vietnam were
grossly under-reported and that a great many of these nearly 500,000 simply
never returned and whose records no longer exist. It is not only possible, but
probable, that American deaths in Vietnam were in fact ten times the stated
50,000. Several organisations in the US have attempted to produce accurate
Vietnam casualty statistics, but with little apparent success.
As one such organisation states,
“The Vietnam War presents multiple challenges to
historians due to official discrepancies with draft numbers, contention over
official number of soldiers deployed, and a general lack of transparency from
the US government during the war leading to possible misinformation in
historical records.”
In other words, the official sources of basic statistics as to the actual
number of men recruited, the number sent to Vietnam and the number who died
there, are often missing, sometimes contradictory, and sometimes wildly
inaccurate, and the US military exercises only obstruction to those interested
in remedying the situation. Moreover, without an Internet or mobile phones, and
no social networking capability, the parents of these men would have no way of
knowing the huge number of casualties from within their group.
On May 30, 2002, Salon Magazine published an
article by Myra MacPherson on the HBO movie “Path to War” in which she
discusses Hollywood’s attempt to “humanise” McNamara “while entirely
overlooking … one of his most heinous acts” and ignoring his “arrogance and
duplicity”. She notes that the HBO movie omits “some of the most
shameful brainstorms of the Vietnam War’s masterminds – including a
little-known recruitment program that turned the mentally and physically
deficient into cannon fodder.”
She details how military recruiters “swept
through urban ghettos and Southern rural back roads”, offering hundreds of
thousands of the retarded poor – with IQs as low as the 60s – “a one-way ticket
to Vietnam”, and that “McNamara’s Moron Corps, as they were pathetically
nicknamed by other soldiers, entered combat in disproportionate numbers”,
noting that they received combat assignments at 250% of the rate of general
servicemen. MacPherson tells us that few today are aware of what she
calls “this particularly shameful chapter” of American history, and that her
stories of this episode were “generally met with disbelief”. This entire
project had been so well buried by the government that almost no one was aware
of its existence and few could believe it would be possible for the American
government to perpetrate such an obvious genocidal travesty against its own
population, especially after the military had already admitted the war “could
not be won”.
In a 2006 article in the New York Times (3), this Project was dismissed as
“a failed experiment” that was “of little benefit to the men it was created to
help”, but my research leads me to conclude that, contrary to being a failed
experiment, this program was a “success”, a truly ingenious and criminal method
of applying eugenics to eliminate poverty (especially black poverty) and idiocy
in America by using the mentally-deficient as cannon fodder in a trumped-up
war, far from the first time a nation’s surplus poor discovered themselves in
similar conditions. In recognition of his success, McNamara was rewarded
by being given the post of President of the World Bank.
*
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Notes
The original source of this article is Global
Research
Copyright © Larry
Romanoff, Global Research, 2019
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