McNamara’s morons during the Vietnam War, drafting the unfit to protect the elite

Posted by John Reed on Feb 18, 2024

I was a lieutenant in the US Army 6/68 to 6/72—82nd Airborne Division, ranger, and a tour in Vietnam. I was shocked at many of the low-rank troops—privates, spec 4s, corporals, buck sergeants. A sentence I used then was, “I did not know people that dumb existed.”
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One example: most elite 82nd Airborne troops ate in the mess hall at the end of the month but ate at fast food places at the beginning of the month. Why? They got paid on the first of the month.
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They also tended to buy stereos on pay day, then hock them with a pawn broker near the end of the month. After the next pay day, they would get it out of hock, then hock it again by the end of the month. Apparently, in most cases, they would stop getting it out of hock after several months.
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I had noticed that all military bases had pawn shops outside the gate. But I did not understand the connection between military and pawn shops. Now I know.
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On Sunday once in Fayetteville, NC—the town where Fort Bragg was—one of my E-4 platoon members spotted me on the sidewalk. He was in a bus that had a sign saying it was going to DC—Sunday night. “Hey, Lt. Reed,” he yelled out the window. “How are you gonna make reveille tomorrow after going to DC tonight?” I asked. He said he was going AWOL. “Why?” “I’m the only guy in the platoon who never went AWOL. The guys say I’m a wimp. So I’m going AWOL.” And that is exactly what he did.
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AWOL gets you a traffic ticket type fine and goes on your record, delaying promotions.
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One of my West Point classmates told me about a new book called McNamara’s Folly The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War. It is written by a Vietnam veteran who enlisted after graduating from college. I just got it and started reading it.
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He said within the Army, they were openly called “McNamara’s morons.” I never heard that name, maybe because I was in communications, not infantry.
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In the early part of the Vietnam War, college and graduate students were deferred until they graduated. Having a kid made you permanently exempt.
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Who got deferments? Bill Clinton, Trump, Biden, Cheney, Romney. Not now, but then, the disproportionally white national guard and reserves were almost never (15,000 out of a million) sent to Vietnam so that was a way of avoiding the war if not military service. Who did that? George W. Bush and his father’s VP Dan Quail. MS had 10,365 guardsmen, only one of them a black guy.
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You could also get out of the draft by getting declared to be 4F (flunk the physical). That sent all the rich kids to the doctor to get a medical deferment letter. Trump did that too—maybe after he graduated from college in 1968 same as my graduation year. I graduated from West Point in June that year. West Point cadets are active duty US Army soldiers all through college. Upon graduation, we became Army 2nd Lieutenants. We had the OPPOSITE of a college deferment.
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A great many military-age American males also dodged the draft or deserted from the military by going to Canada, France, or Sweden. One of my West Point classmates deserted to Sweden. He said he was anti-war. I believe he was just horrified at going back to ranger school, the physical for which he deliberately flunked.
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He and I were in the Fort Monmouth signal (communications) school in the spring of 1969. His class was shorter than mine. When his finished, he was ordered to go back to ranger school at Fort Benning (ranger school is really horrible—https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-blog-about-military-matters/65802307-elite-military-units-army-rangers?_pos=4&_sid=100600350&_ss=r).
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A week or two later, we West Pointers at Fort Monmouth were called into a room at Fort Monmouth and asked where that classmate was. “He went to ranger school,” we said. “He never showed up,” said the West Point grad officer from the Pentagon. We then said we had no idea.
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He later returned to the US, turned himself in, was court martialed, convicted, and sentenced to hard labor at the Leavenworth federal penetentiary. After doing his jail time he got out and gave a substantial gift to West Point. He has been deceased for some years.
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McNamara’s Folly says McNamara (then Secretary of Defense—I briefly dated one of his nieces when I was a cadet) and President Johnson needed more soldiers for the Vietnam war. The US Army alone had 2 million soldiers during Vietnam; only about 450,000 now.
400,000 is similar to how many we had in the Great Depression in 1941 before Pearl Harbor.
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For political reasons, McNamara and Johnson refused to end deferments. So they decided to lower standards for the draft including the IQ test you had to pass to enlist. Muhammed Ali flunked the IQ test when he got drafted. He was convicted of refusing to report for induction. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction.
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During one of the McNamara’s Folly author’s first nights, the first sergeant ordered them to put their clothes on the floor when they went to sleep. The next morning, both their money and the first sergeant had disappeared. They were told MPs would interview them. No such ever did.
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This is a very sad book. These illiterate, clumsy, mentally-ill sad sacks ended up in Special Training, sort of remedial basic training. The author, a college grad, was also in special training, but he graduated from it.
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The officers and NCOs of regular basic training did not want the special training low-IQ trainees because they were competing with other basic training companies to do well in various basic training tests like rifle marksmanship. They thought not doing well in those competitions might hurt their careers. Marginal effect I suspect.
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Generally, the guys in Special Training did not need more time to learn the basic soldier skills. They were NEVER going to pass the tests. One example. They had to run a mile in combat boots, long fatigue pants, and tee shirts in 8:33. We had the same test at West Point every spring. But we had to finish in 6:00 or lose our privileges. That was also the time to get into ranger school that my deserter classmate deliberately ran slower than. I put a piece of scotch tape on my watch face with 4 marks showing where I should be on the course so I finished in 5:50. Other cadets tried to get a lower time than their peers. Nut cakes. There was no prize for that and the intercollegiate athletes at West Point could smoke all of us regular cadets.
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The Special Training guys were told to pace themselves—as I did. They could not understand that instruction. They would blast off running full speed, suffer lactic acidoses, and be unable to finish in 8:33. I do not know why the Army did not simply run a golf cart at the correct pace on the track and tell the soldiers running not to pass the cart.
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Each of the tests was pretty simple, but each also had a bit of technique. The low-IQ soldiers could not comprehend the technique no matter how many times it was explained or demonstrated to them. One who was featured in the book, was unable to learn the meaning of left and right, a rather ubiquitous pair of words in basic training. He was also illiterate. Many basic training written tests require the ability to read. Sergeants falsely filled out that guy’s test answers. He still had to sign the test which he did with an X.
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The Army officers and NCOs face-to-face with the low-IQ draftees kept filing papers telling their superiors they needed to discharge these people. But the reason they were in the Army is they could not get enough qualified warm bodies to send to Vietnam.
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Drafting substandard men does not work for filling the ranks if you then throw them out for being substandard. Ultimately, to keep the substandard troops after they drafted them, they had to cheat on all the various tests during basic training. One way of cheating: the company commander would have sergeants pretend to be basic trainees for the final obstacle course which was run by other officers and NCOs to prevent cheating by the company commander and platoon leaders who have had them all through basic training.
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Ultimately, many of these low-IQs guys ended up carrying an M-16 on infantry patrol in Vietnam and got their names engraved in the wall in DC.
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Many of these guys were from poverty-stricken areas of Appalachia and thought they had died and gone to heaven when they were issued boots and uniforms. I asked my platoon sergeant in the 82nd Airborne why he joined the army. “They put shoes on my feet, sir.”
Puzzled, I asked, “What did you have on your feet before the Army?” “Nothing, sir.” “You mean you were barefoot from when you were born until when you joined the Army?” “Yes, sir.”
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Like I said. I did not know such people existed in America until I encountered them in the Army.
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There is a belief that “grunts” Army and Marine infantry, also called “11 bush” (11B rifleman military occupation speciality) need not meet any standards at all. Not so. They probably have the lowest standards in the military, but the idea that you can waive ALL the time-tested standards for IQ, physical fitness, safety, criminality, sanity is wrong and dangerous.
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Chapter 17 is a comprehensive discussion of Vietnam-era draft avoidance and combat avoidance by joining the guard or reserves: who did it, how they did it.
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One officer showed the McNamara’s Folly author where the Vietnam KIA were from by putting push pins in a regional map of the dead soldiers’ homes. Many pins in the “minority” neighborhoods; next to zero in the nice neighborhoods. There oughta be a law that says the pins should be randomly distributed in all categories of Americans. The way to do that is probably the draft lottery.
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That started during Vietnam.
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“On December 1, 1969, the Selective Service System of the United States conducted two lotteries to determine the order of call to military service in the Vietnam War in the year 1970, for men born from January 1, 1944, to December 31, 1950. These lotteries occurred during a period of conscription in the United States that lasted from 1947 to 1973. It was the first time a lottery system had been used to select men for military service since 1942. The lottery would establish the priority of call based on the birth dates of registrants.” Wikipedia
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The lottery alone did not fix the problem. You also need to fix the doctor letters and the national guard being all white and all the other tricks to avoid infantry combat.
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As I said in my draft article, one result of making the draft fair would be that Americans would be involved in fewer wars. When everybody is draftable, everybody cares about whether we are in a war. That’s probably a good thing. During Vietnam, and since, our wars have been fought by ghetto residents and backwoods rednecks. People who do not fit that description regard US wars as something that “The Others” are taking care of. That’s not right.
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Many have said blacks bore a disproportionate amount of the serving and dying in Vietnam. Seems to be true, but the book Born Fighting by James Webb says the ethnic group that bore the HIGHEST burden of serving and dying in ALL our wars, including Vietnam, was Scots-Irish. That is Webb’s ethnic group—and mine.
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That is an outrage. During the Civil War, they let the rich buy their way out of the draft. They would pay a poor guy to take their place. That was legal. I do not know how WW I went.
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WW II was apparently done right. My dad and his brother were drafted. Uncle Jack enlisted before Pearl Harbor. 10% of the US population served. Men who did not were ashamed and looked down upon. Ivy League schools typically have walls of honor listing their war vets. Pretty short lists for Vietnam. (My wife and I graduated from Harvard Business School and saw the lists of graduates who served in the various wars there.)
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McNamara himself was an Army Air Force officer before WW II. Also before WW II, he graduated from Harvard Business School in 1939. He taught at HBS. He became a captain in 1943.
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He “...serv[ed] most of World War II with its Office of Statistical Control. One of his major responsibilities was the analysis of U.S. bombers' efficiency and effectiveness, especially the B-29 forces commanded by Major General Curtis LeMay in India, China, and the Mariana Islands. McNamara established a statistical control unit for the XX Bomber Command and devised schedules for B-29s doubling as transports for carrying fuel and cargo over The Hump. He left active duty in 1946 with the rank of lieutenant colonel and with a Legion of Merit.” Wikipedia
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The group he headed was informally known as the “Whiz Kids”—mostly Harvard MBAs.
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We actually had one whiz kids case in a course at West Point. It was about how many bombers must we send to destroy X targets if Y% of them will be shot down before dropping their bombs and Z% will miss their targets. As stated above, I became a “whiz kid” of sorts in 1977 by getting the same degree as McNamara.
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I think the ONLY way anyone should get into the US military should be by the draft. Furthermore, no one other than military-only specialists (fighter pilots, submarine crews, tank crews) should be allowed to STAY in the military. No lifers. My draft would draft for all ranks, not just privates. And draftees would not be chosen at random, rather, they would be selected for needed skills like WW II Navy Seabees. Battalion commanders would be drafted from among late 30ish civilian managers, and so on.
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You may think we need lifers for their military experience. What military experience? The majority of the early Battalion and Brigade Commanders who deployed to Vietnam between 1965 to 1967 were either WWII or Korean War veterans. But I did not get there until 1969-70. I was a lieutenant platoon leader in a war. In what war did my battalion commanders serve as platoon leaders? None. They were lieutenants after 1952—no war after Korea ended.
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I was a company commander in 1971—when the Vietnam war was still going on and many of my troops were draftees. When were my battalion and brigade commanders company commanders? Around 1955—no war. A 38-year old who has been working as a civilian business manager for 16 years is a better combat manager than some olive drab or desert cammie bureaucrat who talks a good game and looks the part, but who never won a war. Many WW II officers were lateral transfers by civilian managers who became captains or field grade or flag officers. When I was in, there were many uniformed lawyers and doctors who were instant captains.
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The most powerful article I ever wrote is my argument about why the military should be almost all draft. Some have told me they were hard core anti-draft but my article changed their minds 180º. More said they were 100% anti-draft before they read the article but after could see lots of good reasons for it that they had not been aware of.
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https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-blog-about-military-matters/66448067-should-there-be-a-military-draft?_pos=1&_sid=ecd6c616f&_ss=r
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In WW II, my father and uncles were in Europe “for the duration.” That is, you can come home after you win. In Vietnam, probably again for political reasons, they made Vietnam a one-year tour. That increased the manpower need from the 543,000 peak troops in Vietnam to about a million because the draft duration was two years and the Vietnam duration was one year, so you need two Vietnams’ worth of troops to staff one Vietnam war.
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In the 1960s, President Johnson was doing his Great Society and his War on Poverty. He and McNamara thought the Army’s vaunted ability to turn boys into disciplined, hard-working men was a way to change the culture of the ghetto and Appalachia.
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They needed to test that theory with a pilot program. They did not.
The men who flunked the AFQT (Armed Forces Qualifying Test) seem less low IQ than NO IQ. They did not need the equivalent of an extra two months of basic training. Basically, if you flunked the AFQT, you were not US military material, period. It was already the lowest standard that was feasible. These men were not redeemable as combat soldiers. Some of them did well as janitors and KPs.
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The author tells of widespread lying by recruiters. I encountered that as a company commander. Brigade made me hold a weekly meeting with my 400 men. At the meeting, I asked if they had any problems. Many said they were promised computer or other valuable training and were not getting it or only got one hour of computers—apparently unrelated to their course just so they could say computer training in recruiting pitches.
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I started collecting and documenting these recruiting frauds and I read the pertinent law and talked to other officers about it. I was about to initiate action with JAGs when I was relieved of my command. The author tells of intense pressure to meet recruiting quotas that required accepting the “McNamara morons” and falsifying their test and such. I have seen reports of recruiting fraud periodically in the media since I was a kid. it is perennial when the US is not in a recession.
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The extra training they had to do with the low-IQ soldiers required more money but McNamara and Johnson refused to provide the money. I call such assignments loaves and fishes. Only 7.5% of the illiterate recruits got the reading instruction they were supposed to get.
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Regular troops who ended up getting the low-IQ guys complained that they were required to train the untrainable and that it was taking them away from training the trainable. On the job training? Forget about it. No hope.
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They could not handle supply warehouse paperwork. They could not learn how to drive a truck. One guy took forever to assemble loose letters to print last names on uniforms. The letters were in 26 boxes in alphabetical order. He did not know and could not learn alphabetical order.
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One job they often got was guard duty. Could they handle that? They probably were never tested by the enemy.
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Most ended up as infantry riflemen, a rather complex job because the rifle itself has some complexity. The KIA rate among the low-IQ guys was 3% compared to 1% for the regular troops in Vietnam.
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One Vietnam vet officer said using the low-IQ guys there was like sending a five-year-old into combat. One who was standing guard in Vietnam said, “Halt” to a man approaching him in the dark, then shot him dead. He was an American commander. He was supposed to say, “Halt! Advance one to be identified.” Then a discussion would ensue. “I’m lieutenant Reed. Bravo company. I just placed two men on listening posts.” The low IQ guy just remembered the word “halt” and to shoot the enemy but forgot the figure out who it is before you shoot.
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McNamara’s Folly also talks about letting criminals and drug and alcohol addicts and disabled people into the military. During my four years as an officer, I could see the Army deteriorate. We had many problems with both soft and hard drugs. When I was leaving Vietnam, I and everyone else had to urinate into a cup with an enlisted man watching us to make sure we did not pour someone else’s urine into the test cup.
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Fragging and other types of murder of superiors by enlisted men became widespread—86 cases and that is an understatement. One method was shooting a superior you did not like during a fire fight with the enemy because they did not investigate whether the bullet that killed an America was from a US gun. One of my 20 West Point classmates who was killed in Vietnam was shot by a subordinate in broad daylight in front of his own men.
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The black power movement rose in the military then also. When an officer entered a room, the first person who saw it was supposed to yell “Room attention!” Many blacks would just silently glare at the officer if he was white. I had a black soldier come into my office when I was a company commander. My XO was in the room at his separate desk. The soldier violated about a half dozen laws essentially sullen leaning against the wall, not using any normal of the words required for a discussion with a superior. I gave him a chance to straighten out. Nothing. So I filed court martial papers. The black battalion commander tore them up.
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73% of my West Point classmates got out of the Army before their generous 20-year benefits vested. I am the only one I am aware of who writes about all this stuff. But actions speak louder than words. I got out. They got out
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West Point grad are supposed to be the guys who stay in for a career the most. We did not all get out for exactly the same reasons, but I think my classmates and I got out for roughly the stuff I write about in this post. Some may have gotten out because they expected to be among those who got early promotions then did not. Early promotion means you are top 5% or 10% among your classmates in terms of how well your military career is going.
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Sining by silence when we should protest all that is wrong with the military is immoral and not consistent with the West Point motto “Duty, Honor, Country.”
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Reading this book reminded me of one soldier I had when I was a company commander. My soldiers were communications troops who had graduated from basic training and were now getting their Advanced Individual Training. Radio repairman, teletype operator, telephone lineman, etc. Most probably joined to avoid being drafted and to get training that might help them get a career afterward.
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One day, one of them came into my office jubilant. “Sir, the psychiatrists said they would okay my discharge.”
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“Discharge for what?” He was basically doing a mild “Corporal Klinger” from MASH routine to get out of the Army. “You look fine to me. Get back to your studies.” Then he said he had a deal with the prior CO that he also would sign on the discharge once the psychiatrists agreed.
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“My predecessor got out of the Army. Get back to your studies.”
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He then went back to his “Corporal Klinger” act leaning against the wall and acting sullen.
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I called the psychiatrists. The agreed that he was not qualified for a general discharge but he wore them out.
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Next event, he is found in the barracks bleeding from a suicide attempt. This was a school. School got out around 4pm. At that time, the barracks fill with around 300 troops. So he knew he would be found promptly in that location at that time.
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I told me XO to visit him in the hospital and play good cop. I visited the JAGs to ask what I could do to him. Court martial for malingering, i.e., intentionally inflicting injury upon oneself in order to avoid duty.
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When he was discharged from the hospital, I ordered him to my office, XO there as a witness.
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“Soldier, JAG says I can court martial you for malingering. That is what I am going to do if you do not knock off this crap. Your deal with the prior CO was you would get a general discharge. That would likely hurt you for the rest of your life.
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Here’s my deal. You get court martialed, years at hard labor at Fort Leavenworth Penetentiary, and a dishonorable discharge. That will really hurt you for the rest of your life.
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Or, if you get back to your job of learning your assigned military occupational specialty and graduate from your course, we forget about all this bad behavior. You complete your three-year enlistment, you get out, and live happily ever after.
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“You and I share a decision. We have both decided to leave the Army ASAP. I have no problem with your deciding that. But a three-year enlistment is three years. That is another deal you made. You live up to that and I will live up to my promise to forget about all this if you behave from now on.”
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He went back to his studies, graduated from his course, and months later, the “good cop” XO received a letter from him telling him that the soldier was now doing quite well in his job at his first line unit. The XO and I figure it really was a letter to both of us.
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Sometimes, the Army really does turn a boy into a self-disciplined man. It takes both “good cops” and tough love.
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In the 82nd Airborne Division, my troops were to a large extent immature, thinking girls and boys would be impressed that they were paratroopers. That was all-volunteer because of the parachuting. I guess some of the 82nd guys might have been drafted the volunteered for the paratroopers. I used to talk to my WP classmates who were commanding non-airborne troops. I was amazed at how normal their stories were and they laughed at my guys’ immaturity.

In Vietnam, I had both draftees and volunteers. The draftees were better soldiers. They were a cross section of America. Elvis Presley, college graduates, skilled tradesmen, Teddy Kennedy, Ralph Nader, Neil Simon. I also was in signal corps—communications—so I probably did not get any of the substandard troops the way they did in the infantry. My troops in Vietnam were just normal guys about my age or a little younger.

Then when I returned from Vietnam, I was company commander of over 400 students at the Fort Monmouth. They were AIT students. Advanced Individual Training. They were almost all draft-induced volunteers. Draftees have to serve for two years; volunteers for three. As in WW II, many who volunteered did so to exert some control over their training and assignments. At Fort Monmouth, my guys were being trained in microwave, telephone, ham radio, technical stuff. I don’t think any were low-IQ.

Then there were my cooks. All of my cooks in my Fort Monmouth mess hall were soldiers who were parolees from the Leavenworth penitentiary. Seriously. What were they like? Very quiet. I think they were terrified of being sent back to Leavenworth. I tried to motivate them by putting each cook’s name on the part of the meal they had prepared. That flopped. They had nothing to do with the troops who ate there other than preparing the food. And they seemed impervious to motivation other than staying out of trouble so they could stay out of Leavenworth and get out of the Army when their time was up.

Service academies are probably great places for high school valedictorians to get on a conveyor belt that delivers them to a lot of people who were at the Bottom of THEIR high school class. Not much mention of that in the West Point catalog.

.A career officer reader commented

My Mother used to say, “If you can’t say something nice about someone, then don’t say anything at all.” That’s very good advice. Personally, I served with outstanding soldiers for twenty seven years.

John T. Reed

“Reasonable men adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable men adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable men.”

George Bernard Shaw

I was in for eight years. My troops varied from appalling to excellent. The higher ups seemed to be shortimers, career officers resigned to their fate of being “noncompetitive” for ever being promoted to O-6 or above and waiting for their “you did not go up so you are out” letter, and “competitive” careerists. The military was a severely screwed-up operation then. I have been in private business for 55 years. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the Army about a 2 and the average private business about an 8. In terms of importance, the military is a 10 and private business, still an 8.

For the first time in US history, in Vietnam, we lost a war. All indications are the military is worse now with affirmative action, shrunken size and funding, etc.. The admonition to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil, is a variation on go along to get along. When there is evil, it must be identified and corrected promptly, not prolonged by silence.

The proper attitude toward the military is to fix it fast. That starts with admitting and defining the problem.

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.” John Stuart Mill

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