Stuff You Should Know - Shameful History: Project 100,000

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

During Vietnam, the U.S. lowered the IQ standards for the draft in order to bulk up their front lines. This put thousands of men in harm's way and was a complete disaster. It was called project 100,000.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know with a happy, fun, upbeat edition of Stuff You Should Know. Another entry in the shameful American history bucket. I do want to thank a listener for this idea, by the way. This came from David Bryant. No relation.

Are you sure? Yeah, I don't have any. The only David in my family is my cousin and he is a Mills. Okay, well that checks out then. But specifically David Bryant's mom, I believe, gave David this idea or asked David if those boys ever did a show on Project 100,000.

And we also should shout out a writer, Hamilton Gregory, who was a Vietnam vet and journalist, and who wrote a book, McNamara's Polly, colon the use of low IQ troops in the Vietnam War, which I guess sort of gives away what we're talking about. Yeah, because the name of the project, Project 100,000, certainly doesn't. Yeah, I mean, another name of it was McNamara's Morons

from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, but that name is awful, so I'd love to not use it again. Yeah, it's ridiculously derogatory. Even when this was going on in the mid-60s to the very early 70s, it was still quite derogatory. It hadn't been like a medical term since like the 19-teens. So it was just mean all around. And that's pretty appropriate because this whole idea,

this project, which was a wartime effort to essentially lower the standards for military recruitment so that people with low enough IQs that they were either borderline or mildly cognitively challenged would be acceptable into military service. And it depends on who you ask what the purpose was. We'll go into both of them. But for the most part, it seems like it probably was as bad as it seems on its face, that it wasn't an actual like good idea ever among anybody. Yeah, I mean that's a great setup for a change for us, you know.

Usually people are like, what is this even you're talking about? Yeah, and how did you guys confuse me already? We're only in minute two. Yeah, so I guess we'll just dive right in. I mentioned Robert McNamara, who was during the Vietnam War, was the Secretary of Defense. And this was an idea that wasn't something that he just thought of then. We'll get into it. But he had thought of this idea previously, but it was also something the U.S. military had faced previously when it came wartime.

And they found out that like, hey, we had a real problem with not having enough soldiers. We really overestimated how many, um, like, you know, fit, uh, literate men were qualified to serve. Cause this is what's what a time when it was, I mean, was it exclusively men? Yeah. World War II for sure, at least for combat roles. I think there were other roles for women, but as far as combat's concerned, yes, definitely.

Yeah, and so they, and that was also the first war, which is one reason they had this shortage, that the first war that they had these really kind of big leaps forward in technology with weaponry and communications to where they had specialists that, the brightest of the bright that did that stuff, and everyone else is in combat. So once they had the specialists assigned,

they're like, hey, we don't have enough, you know, like frontline dudes. No, so they had a choice. They could either say, some of you specialists, we may have assigned you to radar duty too hastily. We need you to be on the front lines because we don't have enough combat soldiers. Or they could lower their standards

to allow more people into the army or infantry so they would automatically be combat soldiers. Yeah. And one guy said, but my name is Radar. And he said, well, just get over to the mash unit then. Yeah, man, that show was not funny to me. Is this the first time I'm hearing this? I don't know.

Maybe you're not a mash man. No, I thought you love mash. No, I remember like hanging out with my dad while he watched it and he would like laugh and clap and everything. And I'd be like, this is not funny. And then I grew up and I'm still like, this is not funny. Wow. That's funny. Cause the other day, uh, RIPoretta Switt, who just passed away,

Hot Look's Hoolahan, I was remarking on Paulette Tompkins' Instagram page, because he did a little tribute tour that, it's like, it's so funny for me to think back of being like a 12-year-old kid watching a movie about alcoholic surgeons in the Korean War on Thursdays, five times a day, every other day of the week week four times a day.

I ate it up. I thought it was the best thing ever. Well, I liked the movie. Interesting. Why do you dislike the movie but like this show? No, I mean the movie is just the great Robert Altman. So I certainly love it. But I just think it's interesting. Yeah, I thought you were a MASH guy. I mean, once they got rid of Trapper John, I was like, I'm done with even giving this a chance.

But this is what I like about our friendship is we're still learning about each other after all these years. Yeah. And we can still get along despite our views on MASH. Uh, this is going to take me a minute, but it will be fine. So we left off basically before this little tangent that the Army had a decision either lower their standards to allow more combat troops in or get some of those specialists off to the front lines and they're like we'll just go ahead and lower our standards. Yeah and they did that they lowered the

intelligence standards and they were pretty surprised they're like wow a lot of you guys maybe are illiterate and can't read. Maybe you can't understand basic orders even. We knew, obviously, this was in the 1940s, we knew so much less about mental challenges and different intelligences and learning disabilities and like you were either this or you were that back then. And so all of a sudden they said, oh, well, we got a lot of that and we thought it would be a little more like guys like this. Right. So I think they managed to get 350,000 men at least,

they kind of opened the flood gates during World War II. This is just between 42 and 45. But the caveat to this is that the military provided remedial education classes. 42 and 45, but the caveat to this is that the military provided remedial education classes, like you would sign up for three years, they would teach you, they'd spend some of this time teaching you what you didn't learn in high school, because maybe you

dropped out or maybe your high school sucked. Maybe you had to work in the fields half of the day, so you didn't get a full education. The army educated them to bring them up to the level that their former standards met, right? Yeah, or tried to at least. Yeah, they did their best. And then after World War II ended and Hitler was dead, dead, dead, the army was like, well,

the military in general said, we're going to re-raise our standards back to where they were before. Yeah, exactly. And then they needed to make the movie MASH, and then later the TV show. So they started the Korean War. Well, wait, the Rosenbergs started the Korean War, don't forget. That's right. No, the Korean War came along and they had the same problem, of course. So they lowered the standards again, of course, and there was another scramble to kind of get ready. And so they were like, you know, guys, before we go into our next war, which we should do

pretty soon, we need to like have a real plan in place for this. And you know, get the manpower we need the right way. And so part of that, you know, led into what led to Project 100,000. Yeah. That wasn't all, though.000. That wasn't all though. No, that wasn't all. There was this, I don't know how much faith to put in this. So let's just present it as if it's real

and we'll let the listeners decide. But there's a senator named Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was a long time sitting senator for New York. Prior to that, in the era that we're talking about, he was assistant secretary of labor under both Kennedy and LBJ. He was actually one of the architects of the war on poverty. And I don't know if it was his idea or he just really bought into this idea, but it was that there's a bunch of people who aren't fit for military service, either because they're overweight or underweight or because they're not intelligent enough

to pass the basic intelligence standards. I think he found like 30% of American men weren't fit for military service because of those standards. So he said, okay, rather than like go back to the beginning and try to fix the educational system, let's just get these people into the army and let the army kind of like polish them up so that once they're done with their hitch, they can become productive members of society. And even better, we're taking people out of like abject poverty, giving them a chance to have like a life for themselves and provide

a stable home for their children who can then go on to become middle class and so on and so forth and the cycle of poverty will be broken. That's what Daniel Patrick Moynihan was saying. Yeah, and he had a lot of people on his side. It wasn't some hugely controversial thing to propose. It was at a time when it was like, you know, you got a kid who's a problem, send them into the army, and, you know, they'll shape you up into a real man and a productive member of society.

It was kind of the way of thinking at the time, so much so that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Maynes Johnson, they were big-time believers in this. They were both, like, fully, fully on board. So we just want to make that clear. It wasn't just one or two people making these decisions and there were presidents going, I don't know about that. That doesn't sound like the best idea. We will kind of hit some early critics because there were some, but people were kind of steaming ahead, you

know, full steam ahead with this. Steaming ahead, full steam ahead. That's really steamy. That's full steam. Uh, yeah. Kennedy said in 1963, our, uh, today's military rejects include tomorrow's or a hardcore unemployed. You know, it's funny. I have, uh, written down on my thing. Do you really?

Oh yeah. That was the worst Kennedy anyone's ever done, but that was my best. I know we're all frightened and horny. And the LBJ for his part. Can I do LBJ? Yeah, please do. He was a country guy, right? Texan.

Yeah, yeah. We'll teach him to get up at daylight and work till dark and shave and bathe. And when, when we turn them out, we'll have them prepared at least to drive a truck or a bakery wagon or stand at a gate. That was more a gentleman dressed in a seersucker suit at the conducted Derby, I think. All right. Either way.

I think LBJ did that. Hey, it was better than my Kennedy. How about that? It was fine. Uh, so you mentioned that we were going to kind of run into some of the critics early, um, to this idea and the, the first vocal critics were the military leaders themselves. They were like, this is no, we don't want to do this. We're not, the army's not to rehabilitate and educate people who got left behind in school.

Do something else with them. There were other people who were like, yeah, there's this thing called Job Corps. If you're at a Job Corps, that's what that's for. Don't send them to the military. So it wasn't like a home run once it left the Oval Office and started to spread outward on Capitol Hill. Yeah, for sure. But that's where it did go because in 1966

is when Robert McNamara formally announced Project 100,000. But this was, like I mentioned, not only the US military tried to do this before, but McNamara himself had tried this before. Two years earlier in 64, he proposed something called the Special Training Enlistment Program, or the STEP Program, and this was not full Project 100,000. It was a little more like, hey, we got like 40,000 guys that didn't meet the standards, but they're super close. Maybe they're just below the IQ test level or maybe they need to put on a few pounds or shave a few pounds. And this

STEP program was intended to kind of correct those guys up quickly into getting on board, but it would cost a little bit of money they would enlist for three years received this special training that special training was going to cost about 16 million bucks so Congress said no we're not gonna pay for that no and one other thing you kind of mentioned it is that they were gonna get remedial instruction like the the soldiers in World War two got right that was part of the program that was what the 16 million was for. Okay.

So Congress said no, like you said, and McNamara is like, okay, whatever. I'm just going to move on. I have other things to do right now. Um, like agitate for escalation in Vietnam. And in 1966, apparently he was chatting with some Marines and they made mention that they had actually set up their own little special training program so that the recruits who weren't cutting it, hacking it, could be kind of like brought up to minimum standards themselves. And he had a eureka lightbulb moment basically saying like,

I'm going to steal that idea and make it military wide. And that way Congress doesn't have to have their greedy little fingers in it because I can just use the regular training budget for this kind of thing. Yeah, and they can, you know, those Marines had their private piles that they got up to speed and turned them into killing machines just like in the movie. Yeah, I mean, private pile is based on this Project 100,000 we're about to talk about, like a hundred percent. is based on this Project 100,000 we're about to talk about. Like, 100%. Yeah, and I feel like Forrest Gump has gotta be inspired by this, even though that was never a part of the movie

that at least made it into the movie. I don't know about the original script, if he had any kind of special training or anything. I don't know, or the book by Winston Groom, if it's possible that he ran across that in the research. But not just Forrest, but Bubba as well. Oh, yeah. Good point. So I say we take a break and come back and talk about how project 100,000 actually kind of made it. Let's do it. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never

forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts. Every week I sit down with your favorite book lovers, authors, celebrities, book talkers, and more to explore the stories that shape us, on the page and off. I've been reading every Reese's Book Club pick, deep diving book talk theories, and obsessing over book to screen casts for years.

And now I get to talk to the people making the magic. So if you've ever fallen in love with a fictional character, or cried at the last chapter, or passed a book to a friend saying, you have to read this, this podcast is for you. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google.

I'm talking anywhere. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes. So in this one case, two of the search results that I think were in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, a picture of Michael Jordan.

But cops are still using it to make arrests. Police, they are trusting this software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. This is not a minority report. This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, where every Wednesday we explain

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["I'm On My Way to the World"] All right, so where we left off is McNamara found a workaround from the official step program to basically an unofficial step program. And in 1966, they found that they really needed this because they had a pretty dire manpower situation because, well, one reason is because of the incredible amount of deferments. I saw some stats that from draft eligible men in 1966, 60% of them took some sort of action to gain a deferment. A lot of them rushed off to get married

because initially there was a marriage deferment. A lot of them went to college that maybe weren't too keen on it because there was a college deferment. There were medical deferments. There were certainly, uh, wealthy kids who had their parents, uh, pay their way out of the war with things like medical deferments. Uh, there were conscientious objector deferments,

like 170,000 of those, uh, people having kids, like they, they sort of started moving the goalposts a little bit with the marriage and kids thing. Um, cause at first it was like, if you're married, you're not going, but then they're like, actually, we need to marry you guys. Maybe if you just don't have kids. So guys started having kids.

So long way of saying they needed, they needed infantrymen on the front line. Uh, another way to avoid it was obviously joining something like the national guard or the coast guard. Yeah. Because then you could be like, I'm the coast guard is almost certainly not going to Vietnam. I'll join the coast guard so I can serve and help out,, the Coast Guard is almost certainly not going to Vietnam. I'll join the Coast Guard so I can serve and help out, but I'm not going to be shipped off to Vietnam. Some people also just fled the country, went to Canada. Sweden was another place where what are called draft dodgers ran off to.

So yeah, there were a lot of people, particularly middle class and higher, who were just basically not having to go fight in Vietnam. Right? Yeah. And the other reason why they needed people or the basic reason why they needed a bunch of people all of a sudden, or fighting men, I should say, on the front lines, is because in 1966, the US sent combat troops to the ground in Vietnam, in South Vietnam. To that point, the U.S. had been nothing but advisors and trainers. And then there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident where a Navy ship was fired upon. That kind of brought the U.S.

into the war and we started like doing firebombing raids. And then finally they were like, we need infantrymen. And that's when they really needed a bunch of people to go fight in Vietnam and that's when project 100,000 was like, yeah, let's, let's do this because we need to. Yeah. And I didn't even look it up, but I imagine were they trying to get a hundred thousand soldiers? Was that that number per year?

Oh, per year. Okay. Cause they ended up getting far more than that. They did. Uh, they were officially active with this project from October 1st, 66, through the end of the year, 71, so about five years. And there were early critics of this, you know, official program as well. And a lot of them, you know, kind of make sense, but a lot of them early on were civil rights leaders. There was a congressman named Adam Clayton Powell who said, this is genocide for poor

black Americans. It's nothing more than killing off human beings that are not members of the elite. But nevertheless, they pushed on. Yeah, I mean, the very fact that these men came from high levels of poverty and had learning disabilities in a lot of cases meant that they were not going to get any kind of college deferment. They were almost certainly not in college and even if they were they weren't

doing a good enough job to get a deferment. And then secondly, National Guards almost to a state were still segregated. So if you were black, you couldn't go join the National Guard and not be shipped off to Vietnam. So these were really vulnerable population of people that they tapped into with Project 100,000. Yeah, and they call these guys new standards recruits, capital N, capital S. And most of those new standards guys were sent to Vietnam. Out of those guys, about half of them served in combat roles. And this is what that looked like.

Yeah, I think there were a total of 354,000 men who were admitted in that time. 91% hadn't met the previous minimum IQ requirements, and the median score on the Armed Forces qualification test, which measured intelligence among other things, was 13.6, which meant that the new standards men had an IQ average around 75, whereas for all recruits, the average was IQ of about 100. And that's the average IQ. I saw that 70 is the cutoff, the beginning of mild cognitive disabilities.

So if 75 is the average, that means there are people with real cognitive disabilities who were in this 354,000 men who were part of Project 100,000. Yeah, 48% of those guys were from the South, compared to 28% of the total recruits, and 38% were non-white, when minorities at the time made up just about 10% overall. Right. So you can imagine that these men who didn't meet the minimum requirements that had previously been met,

some of them couldn't even meet these new lowered requirements. And so recruiters stepped in and did some really shady stuff to get people into this Project 100,000 shoot. Yeah, recruiters, I mean, they can say whatever they want because they're not, you know, you can't go back and say, Oh, well, my recruiter said I wasn't supposed to go to the frontline. Uh, that just doesn't fly.

So they could say whatever they want. They could say, you're not going to go to the frontline. You, maybe you won't even go to Vietnam. Uh, you may be, you know, you're going to get really great job training, uh, and set you up great for later in life. After you get out of the army, their job is to recruit you, not to be held to anything that they say. That's so wrong, man.

Especially when you're dealing with people with cognitive disabilities, you know? For sure. Especially people who are illiterate and some of them were illiterate. So the recruiters would bring in ringers. People, they paid to take the tests for the qualification tests for these these men who were the new standards men. And they, I mean that's just fraud, you know? Yeah, for sure. They were, you know, once they got to basic training they were bullied. They were obviously the object of ire from their drill sergeants and stuff like that. But they were also bullied physically and emotionally within their platoons.

They didn't have any understanding a lot of times of even what was going on when this was happening. Yeah, that writer, Hamilton Gregory, recounted the story of one recruit who couldn't tell you what state he was from, didn't know his left from his right, wasn't aware that the U.S. was at war. I mean like really profoundly cognitively challenged men in some cases who had no business being in the military not just because they were potentially in danger or most certainly in danger in a lot of cases but they also posed a danger to other people in their platoon as well because they didn't know what they were doing. Yeah for sure they did have those special training companies set up like

you know McNamara had envisioned you know from the tip from those Marines but a lot of times you know that didn't work and even when they failed to get through basic training, they would just recycle them back through until they pass or just say you passed. Yeah. Those recruiters also, they use something called administrative acceptance. That's what it was where they were given the power to say, I think you're flunking this test on purpose, so you're actually going to be admitted anyway. They could use that to, um, to assign or to get these cognitively challenged men into the Army.

Basically saying like, I think you're smarter than your test reflects, right? So there was just no way that they weren't going to make it into the Army and then through basic training. And I mean, once they got through basic training, I think you said half or more of them were shipped off to Vietnam, and I think the majority of them ended up on the front lines. And the statistics about what happened to these men in Vietnam are just shocking,

especially when you compare them to the statistics for just the military or the army as a whole. Yeah, 5,478 of them were killed in Vietnam, them to the statistics for just the military or the army as a whole? Yeah. Uh, 5,478 of them were killed in Vietnam, which was a fatality rate three times higher than your average soldier. Uh, 1300 of those were killed by mines and booby traps, uh, because a lot of times they were like, just put one of those guys up front and if they step on the landmine, then it's no big loss for us.

Yeah. Uh, 20,000 of them were injured. up front and if they step on the landmine then it's no big loss for us. Yeah. Twenty thousand of them were injured including five hundred amputees which is again at a higher rate than other GIs. Yeah I think I saw like fifty something thousand people were killed, Americans were killed in Vietnam so like the New Standards Men made up like ten percent of that. Which I mean that's just crazy. There are also like a lot of horror stories about these poor guys and just what happened

to them over there. There was one who Hamilton Gregory wrote about, he would change the names of these men and he changed one of their names to Jerry. And Jerry was on night guard duty at his post in Vietnam. And he was told that if he saw anybody coming up to the fort that he was to say halt and tell them to say who they were, to identify themselves, right? And even this basic order, Jerry couldn't follow it because when he saw somebody moving in the jungle,

he just started opening fire and it turned out it was an officer from his camp and he killed him. He accidentally killed this officer because he just started shooting because he didn't know how to follow orders. You know why guys like you and I aren't fit for the military?

Why? Because you had a hard time coming up with the word order. Yeah. What's it called that Sarge yelling at us about that thing he wants us to do? Yeah, the instruction, but like angry instruction. Angry instruction. I think that's the definition of orders and angry instruction. I think so too. They also, and this is, you know, it gets even sadder.

New standards men were referred for psychiatric evaluation 10 times as frequently as other troops. And, you know, they were obviously going through a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression, extreme agitation. And some of them frequently attempted suicide or, you know, went AWOL or attacked their fellow soldiers, which all of a sudden you're in the stockade, you're getting a conviction and a dishonorable discharge, which we're going to talk more about in a minute.

That was a big, a big issue. But I mean, I saw the AWOL thing described as like, I mean, imagine if everybody's really mean to you, beats you up and you just don't understand why, of course you're going to want to get away from it if you just can't make sense of that heads or tails. Right. So AWOL, I mean, there was a pretty good reason for a lot of these guys to go AWOL. And again, I think Private Pyle's experience in basic training was like pretty true to life for what happened to some of these guys.

And, you know, Private Pyle chose kill and then die himself rather than AWOL, but a lot of them chose AWOL instead. What a movie. Yeah, man, that movie is just amazing. We're talking about full metal jacket, by the way, just in case people are like, what movie? Yeah. So good, good call, man.

Uh, the great Stanley Kubrick. Um, should we take our second break? Uh, I think we should. Yes. All right. We'll be right back and finish up with Project 100,000. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies.

I'm Danielle Robay and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts. Every week I sit down with your favorite book lovers, authors, celebrities, book talkers, and more to explore the stories that shape us, on the page and off. I've been reading every Reese's Book Club pick, deep diving book talk theories, and obsessing over book to screen casts for years. And now I get to talk to the people making the magic. So if you've ever fallen in love with a fictional character, or cried at the last chapter, or

passed a book to a friend saying, you have to read this. This podcast is for you. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google. I'm talking anywhere. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes. So in this one case, two of their search results that are, I think we're in the top 10 of the

search results were Michael Jordan, a picture of Michael Jordan. But cops are still using it to make arrests. Police, they are trusting the software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. This is not a minority report. This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, where every Wednesday we explain

the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill Switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much.

And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Stephens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happen. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the wife said it was okay.

Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day of ninth grade, and I called to ask how it was going. She was like, uh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school? And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money.

Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my god, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast. So I said there are a lot of horror stories and there are plenty for the McNamara boys

or Project 100,000 men. What's much harder to find are positive stories, like hopeful stories. I could find two, but it turned out they were actually the same guy. Yeah, this isn't a silver lining situation. No, definitely not. But the guy, his name was Mike Sanchez, uh, not his real name.

And he had two different experiences while he was in Vietnam. And both of them were because he was essentially adopted by his commanding officers at both of his posts. Yeah. Which, I mean, that's still not a silver lining, but at least there were some compassionate officers who took these guys under their wing and were like, I'm gonna try and see

that this kid doesn't go home in a pine box. So, thankful for that, obviously, but one of the things that happened was a soldier like this, and apparently it happened to others, is they were given assignments sort of under the wing of that officer, like maybe be their driver. And in this case, this guy was assigned to drive an officer, but couldn't drive and didn't

have the capacity to learn how to drive. So instead of just sticking it back on the front line, this officer drove himself and just had this guy sit next to him in the passenger seat. Yeah. So, I mean, like that's really taking a soldier under your wing. Like that is just straight up protecting him. That was after, that was the second part of Mike Sanchez's stint in Vietnam. The first part of it, he actually distinguished himself in battle.

And this is actually pretty similar to Forrest Gump, if you think about it. Well, I think this might have been directly inspired by that. That was my feeling. Okay. So, Mike Sanchez, when he first got to Vietnam, his first commanding officer also took him under his wing to protect him and was like, you have no business being here. I'm going to see to it that you make it out of here alive.

And Mike Sanchez was the kind of guy who just, if you were nice to him, if you were kind to him, if you treated him with respect, he would loyal to you to the end. Like you just captured his heart. And that happened with his first commanding officer. He felt deeply loyal to them and they ended up in a firefight together, right?

Yeah, and kind of just like out of the movie Forrest Gump, the, the officer ended up in big trouble. Mike couldn't find him. Everyone said he's back there. He got hit, but no one was going back to get him. So that's what this guy did. He ran back, ran back, you know, forgoing his own safety, called out for him, found him wounded, he couldn't move and carried him to safety through some serious bullet fire and got the Silver Star for that action.

Yeah, isn't that cool? It's pretty great. Yeah, Mike Sanchez is just one of those rare, hopeful, or nice stories. He actually went on to become a barber, which was his dream, because his brother was a barber, so he got to go work with them after the Army. Yeah, and again, don't bother Googling

because his name is not Mike Sanchez. No, but you can find an account of this by the second CEO who he was the driver for. His name was Jim Bracewell. He wrote an account about Mike Sanchez. It's worth reading for sure. There was another one. This is from Dave Ruse.

One of these guys, his name was Elmer. I don't know if that's his real name or not in this case, but he was apparently just a real, had a real talent for keeping things super clean and orderly and he was assigned, his assignment was to clean a sick bay on a big Navy ship and he may not have understood like what sterile meant and things like that,

but he really knew how to get stuff done and keep the place clean and sterile. And he apparently was, had a pretty rare positive experience, and that everyone loved this guy, and everyone thought he did a great job. And that's sort of like, that's sort of what I was thinking earlier, is, you know, they knew so little about different intelligences and things back then, and they probably could have found a lot of roles that might have been suitable for some of these guys. Instead, they were just like, we want worn bodies on the front line because they're basically

expendable. Yeah. I mean, like basically booby trap catchers, essentially. Yeah. So yeah, those stories are very rare. For the most part, the Project 100,000 recruits suffered greatly, and not just in battle, but also at the hands of their own platoon members. Like they just had it horrible all around in a lot of cases. And so it's not much of a surprise that when they were studied after they left Vietnam

and came back to the United States, they had a much harder time than even the average Vietnam vet who had a hard time themselves. These guys had it even harder. They were apparently significantly more likely to suffer PTSD compared to other vets and that they had a harder time holding on a job, they had a harder time with everyday living, and that they were more likely to experience homelessness, drug addiction, and suicide

than even the average Vietnam vet. Yeah, which you know the the big thumb in the eye in all this is it was kind of posed as, no, these guys are going to be so much better off after serving their country in the Army. Yep. They're going to get better jobs. They're going to, you know, work themselves up into a maybe lower middle class situation when they came from poverty in a lot of cases.

And they've studied this. When compared to, even when compared to other low IQ Americans of the same age, the veterans had worse financial outcomes. There was a study in the 80s that found that 10% of low IQ veterans were unemployed compared with only 3% of low IQ non-veterans and earned less money, an average of $18,000 a year compared to $24,000 a year for non-veterans. Yes. And so again, just to clarify, they were supposed to have a better life,

like you said, after the war, and they had a worse life. And one reason, a huge reason why, is something you touched on earlier. A lot of them, I think something like half of them, were discharged under conditions other than honorable. And if you have anything but an honorable discharge from the military, you are stigmatized for the rest of your life. Not only will businesses typically not hire you, there's plenty of businesses who won't.

The military itself, like the VA, will help you less than it will help other vets. Like it's harder to get access to healthcare and to job counseling and to all the things that somebody like a Project 100,000 recruit would need after they got back to America, that was shut down to half of them because they were discharged dishonorably. Yeah, I mean, it's just so shameful. There was at least one guy, there was a recruiter

who I guess felt pretty bad about taking part in this. His veteran name, Bill Daniel. And he, you know, put a lot of thought into this after the war and said, you know what, I'm gonna, they called it bad paper if you got a dishonorable discharge. And so he wanted to appeal as many of these bad paper discharges as he could. And he was successful in 400 cases.

180,000 of them were dishonorably discharged. So 400 isn't much, but for Bill Daniel to take, to spend his time and his life getting 400 of these guys cleared is pretty admirable. Yeah. And then one more thing about the bad paper, the dishonorable discharges, apparently among Project 100,000 recruits,

the main reason that was given for their dishonorable discharges was that they were unsuitable for the military. And that was the case from the outset. The military brought them on on purpose anyway, and then spit them out the other end saying you should have never been in the military in the first place. And now here's the stigma for you to carry around for the rest of your life. Yeah. Man.

So did Robert McNamara feel bad about all this? Because he's certainly somebody who, maybe more so than most secretaries of defense, looked back a lot on his life and wrote about it. There was a memoir called In Retrospect, Colon, The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. He also very famously was in the great Aero Morris's documentary, The Fog of War, where he talked at length about things that he did right and wrong.

So surely, he looked back on Project 100,000 is a big mistake, right? No, no, I could tell by your tone that you knew that. But he didn't, he actually did apologize for things like his involvement in pushing for escalating the war in Vietnam. He wasn't one of those guys who's like, no, I never did anything wrong, you're all wrong. He soul searched, like you said,

more than most other people in his position, but he never apologized for Project 100,000. And I don't know what that says. Like on his face, you would suspect, well, he really was a true believer. He didn't think it was a, like he wasn't doing anything nefarious, but I mean, these guys who were like planning

and carrying out the Vietnam War, you had to be nefarious to be doing that, you know? So how much credit can you give them? How much benefit of the doubt do you give them? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the vet that wrote that book, Hamilton Gregory, he himself was like, yeah, you know what? I think he actually had good intentions.

I think he really did think he could coach them up into a better life and that the military would be genuinely good for them. And that it was just a tragic misjudgment and not just an attempt to supply the front lines with foreign bodies, but that may be generous. I don't know. Yeah, other people like the guy who wrote we were soldiers Joe Galloway He was embedded with the seventh Calvary in battle with in Vietnam

He actually was one of the rare civilians decorated with the Bronze Star for valor during a battle He was just a war correspondent in he was like no, this is unforgivable Yeah, he essentially said in a column the day after McNamara died, like just from project 100,000, he's on his way to hell basically. Yep. I mean, that's what he said. Not, I'm not saying he's on his way to hell. Yeah.

But, and I'm paraphrasing too, but that's, that's basically what he said. Yeah. And I think a lot of people agree with him for that too. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Looking forward to moving on to more positive stories. Yeah. Who was the person that suggested it? David Bryant's mom.

Thanks, David Bryant's mom. We appreciate that. That was a good idea. I'm glad we learned about it. I'm glad we could tell everybody else about it because it's not a very well known part of American history. Totally.

Chuck said totally. He just triggered listener mail. This is about our shorty, Can You Not Have a Name. Hi guys, my second time emailing. Just listened to Can You Not Have a Name and had to email about the most unusual name I've come across in my 50 plus years of working with the public. 30 in the restaurant industry, 16 doing vacation rentals, and now four and a half years owning a flower shop. About seven or eight years ago, a customer came in of Asian descent and gave me his credit card that showed me his surname as YY. I commented and said, what an unusual last name. And he asked if it was a common Asian name.

And he said, actually, my last name is only Y. But American Express does not accept a last name composed of just one letter. So I had to add the second Y just to get the credit card. Also, my sister and I are both baby boomers and we were not given middle names so we could take our maiden name as our middle name once we got married and not have to drop that middle name.

Oh, I never thought about that. Yeah, it worked for my sister, but I'm still single and looking for a man with a short last name. What's her name? So this is Jane Trehanofsky, who is the owner of Lavon's Florals in Newport Beach, California. And I even went to the website.

It looks like a lovely flower shop business. And so, you know, pop in and see Jane if you're a boomer with a short last name. Yeah. And you could do a lot worse than going to Newport Beach for a day or two. Totally. Well, thanks a lot, Jane. We appreciate that. We love anecdotes and stories about stuff that have to do with episodes we've recently recorded.

And if you have one of those, you can talk to us via email. Send it off to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies.

I'm Danielle Robay and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off. Each week I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are there any pictures of you online? Then you could already be in a massive police database without even knowing it. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, a podcast about how living in the future is

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