Project 100,000 effects linger 35 years later

Project 100,000 effects linger 35 years later

To meet President Johnson’s Vietnam War troop quotas, the military drafted thousands of men who did not meet physical or mental requirements.

McClatchy Newspapers

DALLAS — Jewell Harris was one of more than 350,000 men drafted despite failing to meet the military’s physical or mental requirements as part of a plan called Project 100,000. He fought and was wounded in Vietnam.

But in the 35 years since, Harris has been haunted by the notion that Uncle Sam hadn’t played straight with him. There was something different about him that others seemed to know, but nobody would tell him what it was.

He was among more than 350,000 men drafted despite failing to meet the military’s physical or mental requirements. The plan, created by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, was criticized as a ploy to fill Vietnam quotas without the political risks to President Lyndon Johnson of calling up the National Guard and Reserves or canceling college deferments.

The plan was called Project 100,000, in reference to the number of lower-standards men whom McNamara sought to get into the service every year. They were later dubbed “McNamara’s Morons.”

“I went to our military as a man and a soldier because I was called, but them using me and calling me a project, that’s wrong,” Harris said.

McNamara died earlier this year at age 93, reviving attacks of his social experiment as an utter failure.

Project 100,000 is not widely discussed. Representatives of the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration and the House Committee on Veterans Affairs declined to comment for this story.

But John Cook, a Collin County (Texas) Veterans Service Officer, points to cases where “projects” have been granted discharge upgrades and eligibility for health care and disability services.

“I’ve had three or four of them, and I’ve got all of them upgraded by using the fact these individuals were Project 100,000, and they never should have been in the military,” Cook said.

Harris, who lives in Garland, Texas, volunteered for the Army in 1964, during his junior year of high school. But he scored too low on the Armed Forces Qualification Test and was sent home. He got a high school diploma he thinks he didn’t deserve because of his poor reading skills.

In May 1967, Harris received a draft notice. The Army wanted him after all.

Harris did not know that the rules had been changed to allow men who scored low on the armed forces exam — from the 10th to 20th percentile — to get into the military.

Projects, like Harris, came predominantly from disadvantaged backgrounds, had little education and were largely unemployed, according to testimony from a 1990 congressional hearing.

Harris smelled a rat in basic training.

“I had a suspicion there was something going on,” he said. “They kind of lagged us back.”

He arrived in Vietnam in January 1968, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment in and around Cu Chi, 20 miles from Saigon. Among other duties, he carried a radio and laid field wire.

On Jan. 31, Viet Cong by the hundreds stormed out of tunnels underneath Cu Chi headed for Saigon as part of the Tet Offensive. It was a nasty start to Harris’s 13-month tour, and it didn’t get much better.

McNamara said Project 100,000 was part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. It would offer the men remedial education and occupational training.

In January 1968, McNamara told Air Force Magazine he was confident that the men would do well in the service and that when they returned to civilian life, their “overall achievement in society will be two or three times what it would have been had there been no such program.”

Nobody told the projects they were guinea pigs. But their serial numbers were coded with numbers that identified them.

Defense Department officials have said the men were not segregated and did not know they were members of a separate group. Even the men’s trainers, they said, didn’t know them as different from other troops.

That doesn’t fit with Harris’ experience. Throughout his time in the Army, he said, every time somebody saw his service number, he knew by the way they looked at him and talked to him that they knew something about him.

The project was “kind of a best-kept secret” for a long time, Cook said.

Today, most veterans service officers know about Project 100,000.

“Most county or state officers have come across it at some time in their careers,” Cook said.

Project 100,000 didn’t just lower mental thresholds to service. It lowered physical barriers, too.

Men were inducted with conditions deemed correctible in six weeks or less including convalescence.