McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War by Hamilton Gregory

Author:Hamilton Gregory
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History/Military/Vietnam War
Publisher: Infinity Publishing
Published: 2015-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

“The dull-witted soldier,” said Pentagon official Eliot Cohen, “does not simply get himself killed—he causes the death of others as well.”109 According to Chief Warrant Officer 4 William S. Tuttle, a Vietnam veteran, “If you take someone with an IQ of 40 and give him a rifle, he’s more dangerous to you than he is to the enemy. I almost got shot twice and had one guy almost nail me with a LA W [light anti-armor weapon] when he was startled by a sudden noise. If you put [a low-IQ man] in an infantry patrol, you have to spend most of your time making sure he doesn’t kill a friendly [a comrade] by accident, and doesn’t get himself killed during contact because he’s totally unaware of what’s going on around him. Imagine sending a five-year-old into combat. That’s what Project 100,000 was all about.”110

G.J. Lau, an Army veteran who served with the 1st Infantry Division in 1969, remembered Jerry (not his real name), who was a member of “McNamara’s 100,000”—guys who “were not exactly your best or your brightest.” One night “Jerry was out on the Quan Loi Green Line [perimeter] standing night guard. A very popular officer had been out setting his men in position and was returning to inside the wire. There is a challenge procedure, just like you see in the movies. ‘Halt, who goes there?’ ‘Lt. So-and-So.’ ‘Advance and be recognized.’ That’s not it exactly, but you get the idea. You order the person to halt and then do whatever it takes to identify them as friend or foe, normally not a difficult task given the obvious differences between the average NVA or VC and us.”

But for some reason, “Jerry saw the officer approaching and shouted out ‘Halt,’ and then immediately opened fire, killing him on the spot.”

The killing caused consternation in the camp. “The men under the officer’s command immediately made it known to any and all that Jerry was a dead man. Period. End of discussion. Someone must have taken that threat pretty seriously, because Jerry was gone at first light. Never saw him again.”111

New, inexperienced men in Army and Marine units—especially Project 100,000 men—had a high rate of getting themselves and their comrades wounded or killed in the first few months of their tours in Vietnam. James R. Ebert found that 43 percent of Army fatalities happened in the first three months. He quotes the recollections of an Army infantryman named Michael Jackson about a squad on patrol: “This real goofy dude who hadn’t been in country very long didn’t have his M-16 safety on. They were coming up a little knoll that was real steep and muddy, and this guy’s M-16 discharged accidentally and shot another guy in the foot. The M-16 round tumbles. It isn’t a clean round, it is a messy round. It went in his foot and came out in his leg and he died of shock. He had something like two weeks to go [before leaving Vietnam].”112

One veteran

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.