In short
Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know - Episode: Shameful History: Project 100,000
Overview In this episode of "Stuff You Should Know," hosts Josh and Chuck delve into Project 100,000, a controversial program implemented during the Vietnam War that aimed to lower the IQ standards for military recruits. This initiative was intended to bolster troop numbers but ended up putting many vulnerable individuals in dangerous situations.
Key Themes
Background of Project 100,000
- The program was initiated during the Vietnam War under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a response to a shortage of soldiers.
- The military had previously faced recruitment challenges in World War II and the Korean War, prompting them to lower standards for enlistment.
- The idea was to enlist individuals who were borderline or mildly cognitively challenged, leading to the derogatory term "McNamara's Morons," although the hosts choose to avoid this term.
Justifications for the Program
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a senator and former assistant secretary of labor, was a proponent of using the military as a means to uplift poor and uneducated individuals.
- The rationale was that military service could provide education and job training, thus breaking the cycle of poverty.
Controversies and Criticism
- Critics included military leaders who believed that the military's role should not include rehabilitating individuals with significant educational gaps.
- Civil rights leaders raised concerns over the disproportionate impact of the program on poor and minority populations, with one congressman describing it as "genocide for poor black Americans."
Implementation of Project 100,000
- Officially announced in 1966, the project aimed to recruit 100,000 soldiers per year.
- Over its five years of operation, approximately 354,000 men were enlisted, with a significant percentage not meeting the previous IQ requirements.
- The program led to the creation of "New Standards Recruits," who often faced harsh treatment and bullying in the military.
Experiences of the Recruits
- Many recruits suffered from cognitive challenges that made it difficult for them to follow orders or understand military protocols.
- The hosts recount several tragic stories, including one recruit who accidentally killed an officer due to his inability to follow basic orders.
- Reports indicate that these soldiers experienced higher rates of injury, mental health issues, and suicide compared to their peers.
Consequences After Service
- The majority of these recruits struggled with reintegration into civilian life.
- Many received dishonorable discharges, which greatly limited their access to benefits and job opportunities.
- Studies showed that they faced worse financial outcomes compared to non-veterans of similar cognitive abilities.
Reflections on Leadership and Accountability
- The hosts discuss McNamara's reflections on his decisions, noting that while he expressed regret for escalating the Vietnam War, he never apologized for Project 100,000.
- Critics argue that his actions were unforgivable, with some asserting that the initiative was a moral failure.
Conclusion
- The episode highlights the tragic consequences of a program that sought to rectify manpower shortages at the expense of vulnerable individuals.
- The hosts emphasize the need for understanding the complex historical context of military recruitment practices and their lasting impacts on society.
Key Takeaways
- Project 100,000: An initiative to lower IQ standards for military enlistment during the Vietnam War.
- Criticism: Concerns about the ethical implications and negative impacts on marginalized groups.
- Consequences: Many recruits faced severe challenges in the military and upon returning home, including mental health issues and financial struggles.
- Historical Reflection: A discussion on the accountability of leadership in military and governmental decisions.
This episode serves as a somber reminder of the complexities and moral quandaries surrounding military recruitment practices and their effects on individuals and society at large.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:31on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Babes, what are you doing? What? I'm just mowing the lawn. No, it's blazing hot and dry out here. Don't you remember? Smokey Bear says... Avoid using power equipment when it's windy or dry. Where'd you learn this? Oh, it's on... SmokeyBear.com with many other wildfire prevention tips. Right. Thanks, honey bear. Because remember, only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
1:16Hey, 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. No David Bryant. Well, it takes out then. But specifically, David Bryant's mom, I believe, gave David this idea, or ask David if those boys ever did a show on Project 100 ,000.
1:57And we also should shout out a writer, Hamilton Gregory, who was a Vietnam vet and journalist and who wrote a book, McNamara's Folly, 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.
2:36It hadn't been like a medical term since like the 1910s. 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. Yeah. 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.
3:22Yeah. 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.
4:02we really overestimated how many, like, you know, fit, literate men were qualified to serve, because this is 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, it'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, you know, weaponry and communications to where they had specialists that, you know, the brightest of the bright that did that stuff.
4:37Right. And everyone else is in combat. So once they had the specialists assigned, they were like, hey, we don't have enough front line 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. Right. And he said, well, just get over to the MASH unit then. Yeah. Man, that show was not funny to me.
5:16Is this the first time I'm hearing this? I don't know. Maybe. You're not a MASH fan? No. I thought you loved 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 because the other day, RIP Loretta Swit, who just passed away, Hotline Toulahan, I was remarking on Paula Tompkins' Instagram page because he did a little tribute to her 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 four times a day.
6:00I ate it up. I thought it was the best thing ever. I liked the movie. Interesting. Why, do you dislike the movie but like the show? No, I mean, the movie is the great Robert Altman, so I certainly love it. But I just think it's interesting. Yeah, I thought you were a MASH guy. No, 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. This is going to take me a minute, but it'll be fine.
6:33So 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 is in the 1940s, we knew so much less about mental challenges and different intelligences and learning disabilities.
7:12And 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. Right. So I think they they managed to get 350 ,000 men at least. They kind of opened the floodgates during World War Two. This is just between 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.
7:51maybe 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? Or try 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.
8:27That'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. 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.
9:09But there is a senator named Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was a longtime 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.
9:53So he said, OK, 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.
10:32And 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 Maines 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.
11:04That 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. Yeah. Kennedy said in 1963, our today's military rejects include tomorrows or hardcore unemployed. You know, it's funny. I have 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 LBJ for his part. Can I do LBJ? Yeah, please do. He was a country guy, right?
11:44Texan. Yeah, yeah. We'll teach him to get up at daylight and work till dark and shave and bathe. And when we turn him out, we'll have him 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 Kentucky Derby, I think. All right. Either way. I bet LBJ did that. Hey, it was better than Mike Kennedy. How about that? It was fine. So you mentioned that we were going to kind of run into some of the critics early to this idea. And the first vocal critics were the military leaders themselves. They were like, this is no, we don't want to do this.
12:23We're not. The army is 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. Have you heard of 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 U.S. military tried to do this before, but McNamara himself had tried this before.
13:03Two 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 the 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, receive this special training, and that special training was going to cost about 16 million bucks.
13:44So Congress said, no, we're not going to pay for that. No. And one other thing, you kind of mentioned it, is that they were going to get remedial instruction like the soldiers in World War II 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, 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.
14:26and he had a eureka light bulb moment basically saying like i'm going to steal the 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 their regular training budget for this kind of thing yeah and they can uh 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 and we're about to talk about, like 100%. Yeah, and I feel like Forrest Gump has got to be inspired by this, even though that was never a part of the movie that at least made it into the movie.
15:08I 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. 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.
15:39New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link.
16:12Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.
16:48This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
17:24I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
18:10Starting January 20th.
18:29All 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.
19:08There were medical deferments. There were certainly wealthy kids who had their parents pay their way out of the war with things like medical deferments. There were conscientious objector deferments, like 170 ,000 of those. People having kids, like they sort of started moving the goalposts a little bit with the marriage and kids thing. Because 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 infantrymen on the front line. Another way to avoid it was obviously joining something like the National Guard or the Coast Guard.
19:45Yeah, because then you could be like, 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. Now, 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 U.S.
20:25sent 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 100 ,000 soldiers?
21:02Was that that number? Per year. Oh, per year. Okay, because they ended up getting far more than that. They did. 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.
21:38Yeah. I mean, the very fact that these 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 a really vulnerable population of people that they tapped into with Project 100 ,000. Yeah, and they called these guys New Standards Recruits, capital N, capital S.
22:18And 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.
23:04So 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 percent of those guys were from the South compared to 28 percent of the total recruits. And 38 percent were non-white when minorities at the time made up just about 10 percent 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.
23:51Yeah, 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 front line. That just doesn't fly. So they could say whatever they want. They could say you're not going to go to the front line. Maybe you won't even go to Vietnam. You may be, you know, you're going to get really great job training 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?
24:22For 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 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, you know, drill sergeants and stuff like that. But they were also bullied, you know, physically and, you know, emotionally within their, you know, platoons. And they didn't have any understanding a lot of times of even what was going on when this was happening.
25:06Yeah, 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.
Read the full transcript
25:47But 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 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.
26:28And, 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, which was a fatality rate three times higher than your average soldier. 1 ,300 of those were killed by mines and booby traps because a lot of times they were like, just put one of those guys up front.
27:06And if they step on the landmine, then it's no big loss for us. 20 ,000 of them were injured, including 500 amputees, which is, again, at a higher rate than other GIs. Yeah, I think I saw like 50-something thousand people were killed. Americans were killed in Vietnam. So, like, the New Standards Men made up like 10 % of that. Yeah. 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.
27:49And 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.
28:32Yeah. What's it called with that Sarge yelling 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, an 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.
29:09You're getting a conviction and a dishonorable discharge, which we're going to talk more about. 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.
29:54What 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 call, man. The great Stanley Kubrick. Should we take our second break? I think we should, yes. All right, we'll be right back and finish up with Project 100 ,000.
30:24New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast. And every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link.
30:58Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.
31:33This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
32:09I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
32:56Starting January 20th.
33:15So I said there are a lot of horror stories, and there are a 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 is Mike Sanchez, 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 going to try and see that this kid doesn't go home in a pine box.
34:13So 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 it'd 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, you know, 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.
34:49That 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, he would loyal to you to the end.
35:31Like you just captured his heart. And that happened with this 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 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, you know, foregoing his own safety, called out for him, found him wounded. He couldn't move and carried him to safety through some serious, you know, bullet fire and was got the silver star for that action.
36:09Yeah. 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 him 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.
36:54And 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.
37:31Instead, they were just like, we want warm 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, 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.
38:16These 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 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. 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.
38:57And they've studied this. When compared to even when compared to other low IQ Americans of the same age. Yeah, this is big. The veterans had worse financial outcomes. There was a study in the 80s that found that 10 percent of low IQ veterans were unemployed compared with only 3 percent of low IQ non veterans and earn less money, an average of eighteen thousand dollars a year compared to twenty four thousand dollars a year for non veterans. Yes. And so, again, just to just to clarify, they were supposed to have a better life, like you said. after the war then, and they had a worse life. And one reason, a huge reason why is something you touched on earlier.
39:38A 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 health care 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.
40:17Yeah. I mean, it's just so shameful. There was at least one guy that was a recruiter who I guess felt pretty bad about taking part in this. It was a veteran named Bill Daniel. And he, you know, put a lot of thought into this after the war and said, you know what, I'm going to, 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. You know, 180 ,000 of them were dishonorably discharged. So 400 isn't much, but, you know, this is for Bill Daniel to take, you know, to spend his time and his life getting 400 of these guys cleared is pretty admirable.
41:02Yeah. And then one more thing about the bad paper, the dishonorable discharge is apparently among Project 100 ,000 recruits. The the main reason that that was given for their dishonorable discharge was that they were unsuitable for the military. And that was the case from the outset. that 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 he wrote about it, And there was a memoir called In Retrospect, Colon, The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.
41:53He also very famously was in the great Errol Morris' 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 as 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. Like he he wasn't one of those guys who's like, no, I never did anything wrong. You're all wrong. He he soul searched, like you said, more than most other people in his position. But he never apologized for Project 100000.
42:31And I don't know what that says on like on its 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 him? How much how much benefit of the doubt do you give him? 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 warm bodies.
43:21But, you know, 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 7th Cavalry in battle 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. He was like, no, this is unforgivable. He essentially said in a column the day after McNamara died, just from Project 100 ,000, he's on his way to hell, basically. Yep. I mean, that's what he said. I'm not saying he's on his way to hell. Right. Yeah. And I'm paraphrasing too, but that's basically what he said.
44:01Yeah. 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.
44:35This 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 a 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. Nice. 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.
45:13But 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 Trahanofsky, who is the owner of Lavon's Florals in Newport Beach, California. And I even went to the website.
45:46It's 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, 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 StuffPodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.
46:17Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
46:33Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. there was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff, here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Babes, what are you doing?
47:07What? I'm just mowing the lawn. No, it's blazing hot and dry out here. Don't you remember? Smokey Bear says. Avoid using power equipment when it's windy or dry. Where'd you learn this? Oh, it's on SmokeyBear.com with many other wildfire prevention tips. Right. Thanks, honey bear. Because remember, only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals. Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of Checking In on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
47:50And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth and everything you need to step into your next season, whole and empowered. New year, real you. Listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
From the publisher
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.
