“Remorse”

Photos: Grayson County, VA; a Black soldier in Vietnam; scene from “Full Metal Jacket”; McNamara with JFK and the ruthless dictator of Iran installed by UK and US intelligence in the 1950s

Private Pyle, the troubled character who goes off the deep end in Stanley Kubrick‘s Vietnam War film “Full Metal Jacket“, was based on some now largely forgotten US policy decisions from the turbulent 1960s.

Those who have seen the film will recall that Private Pyle was both emotionally disturbed and overweight – conditions which would have usually rendered him ineligible for service or the military draft.

By the late 1960s, anti-war sentiment was coming to a boil, especially among US college students and Black Rights activists.

The US administration under LBJ was ramping-up US military involvement in Southeast Asia – and Secretary of Defence Robert S. McNamara was the primary architect of the way in which US participation in and escalation of the war in Vietnam would unfold.

In 1966, the USA military-industrial complex needed more bodies, and quickly.  Up to that point, young men studying at college had been able to defer being drafted into military service.

This meant of course that the burden of military duty fell on the poor and working classes who, for various reasons (mostly financial) were unable to attend college.

Needless to say, in the America of 1966, the percentage of the Black population able to attend college was tiny, compared to “white” America.

Afraid of inflaming anti-war feeling among educated “white” voters by bringing the draft numbers of <mostly white> college students and reservists forward, Robert S. McNamara came up with possibly the most blatantly classist, elitist, and racist policy in recent American history.

“Project 100,000” would attempt to get bodies on the ground in Vietnam by drastically lowering the standards and criteria for military service.

Under- or overweight?  Come on in!

Little or no educational attainment?  No problem!

“Minor” mental or medical issues?  Can’t really be all that bad!

Sub-average scores on standardized intelligence or aptitude tests, or below average literacy or math scores?  Hey, we’ll find a place for you!

In the politically incorrect language of the time, these recruits and draftees were often referred-to as “McNamara’s Morons“.

For a man who had championed the Civil Rights Act, Project 100,000 ranks as as one of Lyndon Johnson‘s moral nadirs.

The “project” was obviously a licence to turn America’s most marginalized and vulnerable groups of men into cannon fodder.

Even more disgusting was the cheap marketing job which attempted to characterize this scheme as part of Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, hard-selling “The Project” as an “opportunity” for unskilled and under-educated Black and poor Appalachian and rural southern “white” communities to advance their knowledge, skills, and education.

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The numbers tell their own story.

Perhaps 350,000 young men went to Vietnam under this scheme.

About 25% of “normal” non-project Vietnam recruits and draftees might expect to be assigned to combat roles.

With “McNamara’s Morons“, the numbers placed into combat roles rose to around 40%.

IT GETS WORSE.

About 12% of “normal” non-project Vietnam recruits and draftees were Black.

With “Project 100,000”, this number rose to around 41%.

IT GETS EVEN WORSE.

Among “Project 100,000” recruits and draftees, the death rate in combat was THREE TIMES HIGHER than among “normal” soldiers.

“Project 100,000” recruits and draftees were also far more likely to suffer PTSD, marriage breakdown, substance abuse, and post-war unemployment than mainstream recruits and draftees.

Add to all of this the fact that before 1970, African-Americans were virtually absent from the draft boards deciding who would be sent to fight overseas.

Some state draft boards (like that in Louisiana) even included high-ranking KKK members!

And does anyone really believe that middle class and elite “white” America could be relied upon to measure Black or “Hillbilly” aptitude or intelligence honestly and dispassionately in the first place?

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The “Before We Were White” bit…

Robert Strange McNamara.

While his father’s family came directly out of County Cork in Ireland, his mother’s family was profoundly “Old Mix American”.

Colonial America and the early USA (particularly those places which lay in a sort of Southern Appalachian no man’s land before, during, and just after the Revolutionary War era), were home to innumerable enclaves of families and communities who never quite fit into the “white” Anglo-Saxon Protestant or often imaginary “Scots-Irish” story of the American frontier.

Displaced indigenous peoples, outlaws and renegades, Tories/Loyalists, sundry free people of color from the four corners of the world – all were present in places like Western Virginia and the Carolinas, or Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky.

Robert S. McNamara should have thanked his maternal ancestors from Grayson County, VA (an Old Mix hotspot) for their judicious decision-making when selecting marriage partners over the generations.

Many of the Phipps “people of color” in McNamara’s family tree eventually crossed over into “whiteness”.

By eventually being able to “present as white”, Mr. McNamara’s family was able to access educational and employment opportunities far exceeding those available to most Black Americans and mixed-ethnic mountain people.

In Robert’s case, his education included attending the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Business School – in short, the full works…

During WWII, McNamara put his grasp of business analytics and statistics to use in the Air Force, working under General Curtis Lemay to maximize the efficiency of US B-29 bomber raids.

One such fire bombing raid over Japan in early 1945 resulted in the burning alive of over 100,000 civilians.

McNamara was later quoted recollecting these bombing campaigns:

“Lemay said, `If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He – and I’d say I – WERE behaving as war criminals.”

McNamara then asked the interviewer “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

Robert Strange McNamara.  Whiz-kid and statistician who, post-WWII, helped Ford Motor Company make endless millions.

Later asked to join John F. Kennedy‘s cabinet as Secretary of Defence, he soon became the orchestrator of the USA’s inexorable military build-up in Vietnam, treating bloody warfare and napalm death with the same phlegmatic pragmatism as he once treated automotive assembly line restructuring.

The line between America’s bellicose “pragmatism” shown against Asians/Latin Americans/the Middle East, and a certain Austro-German leader’s Final Solution, is not as clear as we would like to think…

But it is worth saying again.  In being able to “present as white” and gain access to an elite education, men like Robert McNamara were able to spend the Vietnam War behind a desk holding discussions with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson – instead of being subject to and victim of his own classist and racist military draft policies.

No need to even pay-off a doctor for a diagnosis of bone spurs…

McNamara died in 2009, having reached the decent old age of 93.

Only very late in life did McNamara claim to feel some remorse for many of the decisions he took during the Vietnam War era.

Did he even know that some of his own ancestry was Black, or was this family knowledge long ago burned on the usual American pyre of lies, myth, and forgetting?

If Robert S. McNamara HAD known of his own Black and Old Mix Appalachian ancestry and history, would it have changed his willingness to sacrifice these people on the altar of efficiency and expendability?

Who knows?

But the transgenerational pain and suffering of underclass Americans and Vietnamese caused by those privileged to sit at the chess board of “white empire” requires a good bit more than “remorse” and a whimpering cry for absolution late in life…

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In late 2024, we are wandering ill-clothed into a propaganda blizzard the likes of which have never been seen in a supposedly “free” democracy.

The president-elect speaks openly of people with “superior genes”.  His funders and cronies are fans of “race science” – a shocking new re-emergence of race eugenics which claims there is no point in funding social programs to give our underclasses a fighting chance, because any lack of attainment is due to “lower base intelligence”.  Such humans are deemed fit only for wage slavery or cannon fodder.

Yet so many people of high educational attainment, people who have reached positions of privilege and power – people like Robert S. McNamara, whiz-kid, Harvard grad, and statistician – are the descendants of precisely those people seen by eugenicists as “low IQ population groups”.

Blacks.  Irish.  “White trash”.

Proof, as if any should be needed, that educational attainment and a place at the levers of power are related to luck, socio-economic conditions, and access to opportunities – as well as naked ambition.