The government targeted disabled people from some of the poorest communities in the country, who McNamara referred to as, “the subterranean poor.”
Many of those drafted were illiterate, they had to be taught to tie their shoes, and they didn’t know things like who the president was, even as they were being sent to kill and die on his orders for an imperialist war, for reasons they could not understand.
A book called McNamera’s Folly records some stories of those recruited in the program. One thought a nickel was worth more than a dime, because it was bigger. One of them failed to attend training and was sentenced to four years of labor in prison, and the sergeant asked if anyone “wanted to join them in the stockade.” Another conscript didn’t know what the word “stockade” meant and thought it meant going home, so he said yes - he received the same sentence.
If you can believe it, this was actually sold to the public as a “progressive” program, as part of Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The claim was that this would be a way to help the conscripts learn useful skills. in reality, a study by the DoD itself found:
Comparisons between Project 100,000 participants and their non-veteran peers showed that, in terms of employment status, educational achievement, and income, non-veterans appeared better off. Veterans were more likely to be unemployed and to have a significantly lower level of education. Income differences ranged from $5,000 [to] $7,000 in favor of non-veterans. Veterans were more likely to have been divorced.
Obviously.
I know this sounds cartoonishly evil, but please consider how the unemployment rate went down drastically within this subpopulation.
Now about my newest idea ‘tunnel-sized toddlers with claymore mines’
Maybe the real problem was that there weren’t enough civilian jobs that could make use of the valuable skills they were taught, like, “how to get shoved into the line of fire while the rest of us run away.”
Yeah this is the kind of shit you literally couldn’t put into a fictional movie because viewers would not buy that a first-world democracy would do that to their citizens. You’d need an intentionally over-the-top cartoonishly evil fictional entity like Vault-Tec to even approach a “Moron Corps” scenario in fiction…
[off topic?]
I’ll take this opportunity to tout a favorite graphic novel.
Big Man Plans.’ A slightly off kilter officer recruits a 4-F little person to be a tunnel rat in Vietnam. Then it gets kinda weird…
Didn’t they recruit little people to be aircraft mechanics in WWII? They could fit inside fuselages and wings?
I never heard that. They’d have had normal sized women and it’s more likely that they’d plan around the building than to rely on little people. Remember that the US was building thousands of planes and ships and needing extra small folks would have created a massive bottleneck.
I did a quick search and nothing came up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovitz_family
Family of ‘dwarves’ who survived the concentration camps.
Very possible it’s some crazy shit I was told as a kid. I’ll have to do some digging.
Little people were employed in the building and inspection of B-24s. Henry Ford Collection
Guess there’s some sort of truth to what I remember.
You learn something new every day.
Thanks.
Once in the concentration camp Auschwitz, the Ovitzes attracted the attention of the German camp physician Josef Mengele
Fucking hell.
But they all survived. Let’s not forget what happened despite all the ambient bullshit about holocaust denial.
You had me in the first half
Just like the good old days and the coal mines.
McNamara was truly one of the most cold-blooded sociopaths in US history.
“Just need a few more million tons of bombs bro. Then the NVA will finally realize that WE’RE the good guys bro.”
– Robert McNamara (Probably)
The Fog of War is a damn good documentary. I watched it in a college class about the Vietnam War, and that class absolutely radicalized me. There was zero reason for the US to be there.
It is indeed a great documentary. Ironically, McNamara happily agreed to be interviewed for it. I haven’t seen it in over 20 years, but I just remembered being absolutely repulsed at how completely unfeeling the dude was about everything.
Along with Kissinger and Nixon.
I understand the program and/or participants were pejoratively referred to as “McNamera’s Morons”. They had an absolutely dismal survival rate for what I imagine are super obvious reasons. Beyond fucked up and still somehow not in the top 5 of fucked up shit our government and/or military has done to our own citizens.
This is why Forrest and Bubba went to Nam, and why Lt. Dan was not super thrilled to have them in his squad.
And don’t forget Gomer Pyle.
promoted as a response to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty
US war on the poor has been consistently successful.
Part of me really thinks that our entry into Vietnam was partly because there wasn’t enough jobs for all the baby boomers that were coming of age, and they needed to cull the numbers a bit.
The reality is worse.
The US was almost totally focused on the Soviet threat after WW2. The US wanted France as a strong ally, so the French coerced the Americans to pick up the torch in Vietnam and help the South beat the North. Eisenhower and Kennedy gave the South ‘military advisors’ but didn’t want to fully commit. Then LBJ became President.
Johnson believed that he could win the War with a massive buildup. His plan backfired, and the US went from having a small force committed to a large force stuck in a quagmire. Johnson didn’t want to raise taxes for the War, so he printed money, which lead to inflation.
Nixon got elected as a ‘peace candidate.’ He then doubled down on LBJ’s policies of a big War paid for with paper money. Nixon knew the War was unwinnable; he planned on keeping it going until 1976 when he was out of office.
The inflationary spending was starting to hurt the US economy when the OPEC Oil Embargo hit. That made everything in the US much more expensive. It was so bad under Ford that families that used to be able to do well with one job needed Mom to get a job too.
Jimmy Carter’s man, Paul Volker, won the war on inflation, but people only saw results after Carter was out. Reagan got the credit for Volker’s plan, but Reagan had his own inflationary program ready to go.
In 1964, before the War ramped up, ‘middle class’ was one Union job supporting a family of four with enough money to send the kids to college and have some luxuries. In those days, $1 million was a vast fortune. By 1993, when George Bush Sr. was done, ‘middle class’ was two incomes to keep a household going. In 1993, $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
It was so bad under Ford that families that used to be able to do well with one job needed Mom to get a job too.
Oh boy, am I glad those days are in the past…
The basic flaw of you thinking is that there was ever a “reason” the US entered that war.
There wasn’t one. There was just lots of justifications for why te US had to stay in it.
Please don’t use the “US is evil” argument to justify not knowing history.
I am not using that justification and I am well aware of the history of the US involvement in the Vietnam war.
The war transcended five presidential administration and everyone of them inherited the shit show from the last.
The basic flaw of you thinking is that there was ever a “reason” the US entered that war.
There wasn’t one. There was just lots of justifications for why te US had to stay in it.
The MAGA crowd meets the conscription criteria and they’re ready for the jungles in Venezuela.
The people of Venezuela do not deserve that.
"Each soldier was then issued an AR-15 rifle, three clips of NATO 7.62 mm rounds… "
That’s one of my favorite Onion articles and I never noticed this detail.
There are AR-15s that use 7.62, jokingly called “AR-47”. They’re not using 7.62 NATO though.
I’m sure there’s a .308 Winchester version of an AR-15 out there though, which is basically the same thing.
AR-10 is the .308
Can someone who knows guns explain why this is funny?
Short answer is that it’s the wrong ammo and won’t fit in the gun.
Slightly longer answer. Ar15 is 5.56 mm (sort of a .223). A 7.52 mm (.308 ish)won’t fit in the chamber, much less a magazine fit in the weapon. "Sort of’ and “ish” because of a longer explanation about chamber pressure differences
Art imitates life imitates art imitates…
I never saw this in the service. I’m in tears! 😂
Isn’t this just eugenics?
No because its poor people and they aren’t considered humans to anybody in the upper class.
They were mentally challenged people.
From the poorest communities. I don’t see rich disabled people on the front lines in any timeline. Almost like your income is used to discriminate in a system designed ages ago for kings and Queens but fuck me for saying we just put a new coat of paint on the old systems.
I think Poutine has been doing this since 2022 too!
I condemn these serious allegations against Poutine
Well, it does exacerbate climate change
see also: Conscription of people with disabilities. It’s ongoing in present-day Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Defence Ministry amended the criteria for medical exemptions, reclassifying people with tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, thyroid disease and HIV to be fit for military service
I think that’s a bit different than drafting mentally challenged people to be canon fodder
typical .ml
***Numerous Ukrainians with disabilities have been drafted over the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[4][5][6] ***The Ukrainian Defence Ministry amended the criteria for medical exemptions, reclassifying people with tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, thyroid disease and HIV to be fit for military service.[7] On 22 October 2024, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy sign a decree which dissolved the medical examination commissions for determining the severity of disabilities that qualified for military exemptions.[8] On 8 July 2025, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights published a report which acknowledged “***systemic and documented human rights violations under martial law” ***which included the conscription of people with disabilities.[9]
.ml sucks but if you actually looked at the wikipedia article, you’d see this is a broken clock moment.
***Numerous Ukrainians with disabilities have been drafted over the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[4][5][6] ***The Ukrainian Defence Ministry amended the criteria for medical exemptions, reclassifying people with tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, thyroid disease and HIV to be fit for military service.[7] On 22 October 2024, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy sign a decree which dissolved the medical examination commissions for determining the severity of disabilities that qualified for military exemptions.[8] On 8 July 2025, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights published a report which acknowledged “***systemic and documented human rights violations under martial law” ***which included the conscription of people with disabilities.[9]
you think there might be a difference between russia drafting mentally challenged canon fodder for a baseless war of attrition and Ukraine doing whatever it needs to to stay alive? maybe? a little difference?
Yes there is. I wholely believe there is. But the claim was “they don’t draft the mentally ill” and was proven wrong.
Ukraine is better fighting for its survival. Russia is an oppressor trying to colonize.
But the claim was wrong, the commentor was downvoted for giving a link, and someone who clipped only a chunk of a paragraph that proved them wrong was upvoted. That’s Fox News shit.
oh dang, then you almost made a point then. nice job!
Because it seemed like you were trying to say that Ukraine was drafting mentally challenged people, and was just as bad as russia for doing so. but it turns out that they just adjusted their acceptance standards and dissolved a commission. Good thing we know now that the point you tried to make was pointless distraction, and that my original comment is a far better interpretation of the actual events.
***Numerous Ukrainians with disabilities have been drafted over the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[4][5][6] ***The Ukrainian Defence Ministry amended the criteria for medical exemptions, reclassifying people with tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, thyroid disease and HIV to be fit for military service.[7] On 22 October 2024, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy sign a decree which dissolved the medical examination commissions for determining the severity of disabilities that qualified for military exemptions.[8] On 8 July 2025, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights published a report which acknowledged “***systemic and documented human rights violations under martial law” ***which included the conscription of people with disabilities.[9]
They’re downvoting you because they cherry picked from this entire paragraph. Amazing reading levels from .world.
There was Cleveland, he was from Detroit…
Great share, thanks!
I once worked with a guy named Toledo who was from Flint, MI
His parents were just massive fans of Klinger from MASH.
I encourage you all to read “the plutonium files” if you’d like to read about even more fucked up shit the US govt has done.
I knew about MK ULTRA from that time but hadn’t heard about this one. I know about so much fucked up shit the US has done, but it seems like there’s always more out there.
Freedumbs not free, amirite ‘muricans?
This country never ceases to amaze me with how shitty they can be and sweep it under the rug.
Guess Forrest Gump and Benjamin Buford Blue could potentially be examples of the program even if it wasn’t part of the film.
Edit: a quick look says that yes indeed, our movie characters were part of Project 100,000.
I guess that’s why RFK wants that autism list
