← Back to the front page

A West Virginia Town Applied For Soviet Foreign Aid, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan February 21, 2020 33 min

Vulcan - McDowell County — Vulcan miners in 1919. The Sangha Kommune

19. Project 100,000

Robert McNamara. Medic in the Green Time

To solve the military’s manpower shortfall without antagonizing middle and upper-class Americans by sending their kids to Vietnam, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara came up with a shameful brainchild: Project 100,000. It was touted as a Great Society program that would take impoverished and disadvantaged youth, and break the cycle of poverty by teaching them valuable skills in the military.

In reality, Project 100,000 simply amounted to lowering or abandoning minimal military recruitment standards, to sign up those who had previously been rejected by the draft as mentally or physically unfit. Recruiters swept through Southern backwaters and urban ghettoes, signing up almost anybody with a pulse, including at least one recruit with an IQ of 62. In all, 354,000 were recruited.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.