(I don’t want to leave the impression that all Army sergeants were foul-mouthed. At another unit after basic, I encountered a Mormon sergeant whose strongest words were “I’m as mad as h-e-double-toothpicks.”)
McNamara had proposed Project 100,000 two years before the 1966 manpower crunch, seeing it as a way to contribute to the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. In fact, the idea had been kicking around Washington before McNamara arrived on the scene. Its leading advocate was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist who later became a U.S. senator from New York, whose argument went like this: The best way to solve poverty in America was to draft the hundreds of thousands of young men being rejected annually as unfit for military service. Take inner-city blacks and poor, rural whites—both groups tending to be lazy and fond of booze—and put them into uniform. Instill discipline. Train them to bathe daily, salute, and take orders. Teach them a marketable skill. At the end of a couple of years, you will have transformed lazy, unmotivated slackers into hard-working, law-abiding citizens. Moreover, they will teach their children to be solid middle-class citizens, too, so that once and for all, you will have broken the generation-to-generation continuity of poverty.40 Moynihan’s concept was embraced
McNamara had proposed Project 100,000 two years before the 1966 manpower crunch, seeing it as a way to contribute to the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. In fact, the idea had been kicking around Washington before McNamara arrived on the scene. Its leading advocate was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist who later became a U.S. senator from New York, whose argument went like this: The best way to solve poverty in America was to draft the hundreds of thousands of young men being rejected annually as unfit for military service. Take inner-city blacks and poor, rural whites—both groups tending to be lazy and fond of booze—and put them into uniform. Instill discipline. Train them to bathe daily, salute, and take orders. Teach them a marketable skill. At the end of a couple of years, you will have transformed lazy, unmotivated slackers into hard-working, law-abiding citizens. Moreover, they will teach their children to be solid middle-class citizens, too, so that once and for all, you will have broken the generation-to-generation continuity of poverty.
McNamara had proposed Project 100,000 two years before the 1966 manpower crunch, seeing it as a way to contribute to the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. In fact, the idea had been kicking around Washington before McNamara arrived on the scene. Its leading advocate was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist who later became a U.S. senator from New York, whose argument went like this: The best way to solve poverty in America was to draft the hundreds of thousands of young men being rejected annually as unfit for military service. Take inner-city blacks and poor, rural whites—both groups tending to be lazy and fond of booze—and put them into uniform. Instill discipline. Train them to bathe daily, salute, and take orders. Teach them a marketable skill. At the end of a couple of years, you will have transformed lazy, unmotivated slackers into hard-working, law-abiding citizens. Moreover, they will teach their children to be solid middle-class citizens, too, so that once and for all, you will have broken the generation-to-generation continuity of poverty.
a World War II interpreter advised him “never to believe what anyone says in the Army unless you have it in writing, and then make several copies, sending one to your grandmother and another to your parents or anyone else you might trust for safekeeping.... What the Army respects is paper.... Always have it in writing.”
“Project 100,000 was implemented to produce more grunts for the killing fields of Vietnam. It took unfit recruits from the bottom of the barrel and rushed them to Vietnam. The result was human applesauce.” He added that for fighting in combat, “ten smart-and-fit soldiers are better than 100 out-of-shape dummies.”
cheated out of their money and tricked into taking KP