McNamara...God hopefully has a special place in hell for this bastard...

via USS Edsall Tumblr Page.

Who out there remembers Mr. McNamara’s — he was the ultimate bean-counter who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing — Project 100,000?

If nothing else, Project 100,000 surely guarantees that Judgment Day and eternity will not be very comfortable for Mr. McNamara, now arriving on Track 12.

Beginning in 1965 and for nearly three years McNamara each year drafted into the military 100,000 young boys whose scores in the mental qualification and aptitude tests were in the lowest quarter — so-called Category IV’s. Men with IQ’s of 65 or even lower.

They were, to put it bluntly, mentally deficient. Illiterate. Mostly black and redneck whites, hailing from the mean big city ghettos and the remote Appalachian valleys.

By drafting them the Pentagon would not have to draft an equal number of middle class and elite college boys whose mothers could and would raise Hell with their representatives in Washington.

The young men of Project 100,000 couldn’t read, so training manual comic books were created for them. They had to be taught to tie their boots. They often failed in boot camp, and were recycled over and over until they finally reached some low standard and were declared trained and ready.

They could not be taught any more demanding job than trigger-pulling and, so, all of them were shipped to Vietnam and most went straight into combat where the learning curve is steep and deadly. The cold, hard statistics say that these almost helpless young men died in action in the jungles at a rate three times higher than the average draftee.

McNamara’s military even assigned the Project 100,000 men special serial numbers so that anyone could identify them and deal with them accordingly.
The Good Book says we must forgive those who trespass against us — but what about those who trespass against the most helpless among us; those willing to conscript the mentally handicapped, the most innocent, and turn them into cannon fodder?

I can only hope that the last voices Robert S. McNamara heard before he was gathered into the darkness at long last were those of the poor boys in the Infantry, the poor boys of Project 100,000, the poor victims of Agent Orange, the poor Vietnamese farm families whose lives and the very land itself were torn apart by millions of tons of bombs rained on them by the best and the brightest.

Save your tears for them. Bob McNamara certainly doesn’t deserve them.

— 100,000 Reasons to Shed No Tears for McNamara, by Joseph L. Galloway of We Were Soldiers fame. Written as an opinion piece in the wake of Robert McNamara’s death.

Yeah.  This author is so right and I've got to get his book.  If God is indeed merciful then there is a special place in hell for the bastard named McNamara.