June 21, 2019
Old & Young Vets' suicide rates mixed together - deceiving?
Jack Kemp
I've just read a source book on transcendental
meditation which mentions significant information about veterans, as the
author has come across an interesting clarification, one showing
that what we are told in the press about current veterans' suicide rates
have been distorted and exaggerated by sensation seeking
"journalists,." making younger vets appear more prone to suicide than
they statistically are, even though there is a lot of PTSD among recent
war veterans. In the book "Strength and Stillness" by Bob Roth, it states:
"...according to a recent study from the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs...The study includes more than fifty
million veterans' records from 1979 to 2014 from every state. Most
striking, roughly 65 percent of all veteran suicides in 2014 were for
individuals fifty years or older, many of whom spent little or no time
fighting in the most recent wars."
The source of this study was an article in the Military Times, namely:
Leo Shane III and Patricia Kime's "New VA Study
Finds 20 Veterans Commit Suicide Each Day," Military Times online, last
modified 7 July 2016 and can be found here.
So the older veterans of the Vietnam Era had more
problems. Well there are reasons for this that have nothing to do with
the intelligence of the typical citizens' I.Q. in the Vietnam era. This
is further explained in a recent ground breaking book that I summarize
in the following brief article I include below. The Dept. of Defense and
the VA did a lot of "blaming the victim" in those days, more so than
now.
Hamilton Gregory is a Vietnam War U.S. Army veteran
as a college grad who became a regular infantryman and not an officer.
By going through basic training boot camp, he got to meet and mentor
some of the draftees from Sec. of Defense McNamara's absurd social
program concept
called "Project 100,000." Others in the military called it "McNamara's
Morons" who were brought into the services. The situation was a perfect
storm of
military manpower shortages and elitist do gooder concepts that created a
nightmare social program. These low I.Q. combatants brought into the
military to "uplift them" suffered triple the
death rate of the soldiers they fought with because a number of them -
at the lower end of the I.Q. scale - could not literally tell their left
foot
from their right or know how to tie the laces of their combat boots, as
author Hamilton Gregory observed firsthand in the service. He later
contacted other veterans' stories to get an overall view of this
problem.
Mr. Gregory tells the story of a national
"leadership" folly and
the mostly sad and unjust impact it had on these low I.Q. veterans, a
group that was easy to exploit because they were often poor urban black
and also poor back country whites, both groups which did not know how to
use the system
to protest their abuses by contacting Congressmen or getting legal
advice. And this policy of taking very low functioning recruits all
started in their early 1960s, even before the Vietnam War buidup.
President Kennedy's Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara,
a technocrat and former Ford Motor Company CEO and WWII U.S. Army
statistical analysis officer himself, had championed this idea even before the
military buildup of the Vietnam War, namely that the military (mostly
the Army and the Marines) could take in recruits who had failed the
military's intelligence test, getting scores below an 80 I.Q. and giving
them remedial education with the use of 1960s-era high techvideotape coursework. This was a
continuation of many social programs that made up Lyndon
Johnson's "War on Poverty." The problem was most difficult when the
military began taking in recruits with I.Q.s around 60. I'm not making
this up. Hamilton Gregory details this history in his book "McNamara's
Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War." And the last
chapter talks in great detail about this practice still being continued,
to some extent, even to the present day. A thirty-six minute summary of Mr. Gregory's findings can also be seen on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g
Where McNamara was partially right was with a few of
these low I.Q.
recruits in the higher range who could be trained to do decent basic
work
such as carrying supplies or cleaning medical clinics. But many of sub
70 I.Q. recruits were
a threat and danger to themselves and their fellow combatants. This
problem could not be then eliminated because of the nature of the draft
and draft exemptions. Politicians were reluctant to eliminate college
students military deferments and
fatherhood deferments (as well as the ease of even avoiding the draft by
getting braces for one's teeth). The politicians allowed this because
didn't want to risk being voted out of office by the middle class. Major
League professional
athletes, for example, in all but two cases, found themselves positions
in Reserve units that were not deployed to the war at all, as they have
been the case in
recent Middle Eastern wars.
Mr. Gregory talks of such down to earth real
things that McNamara,
in his Pentagon office, was nowhere close to having to deal with
face-to-face on a
daily basis but could be imagined by him from a distance as his "doing
good for the disadvantaged" project. This included problems such as
these
"Project 100,000" enlistees constantly failing physical training tests
(officers often sent them to sick bay on the days when test times were
recorded for their units) to also having ringers (mentally competent
sergeants) take basic training mental proficiency tests in place of
these low
I.Q. enlistees. But this resulted in problems in the field such as the
story
about a low I.Q. soldier who challenged an officer in Vietnam to give a
password but then shot the officer dead before he had the chance to
answer or soldiers who constantly wanted to talk while on patrol -
another risk to the fighting unit's lives.
Hamilton Gregory, besides being a career journalist,
has made an effort to tell the story of those low I.Q. soldiers after
the war. But his telling the stories has not undone the past damages.
One of those soldiers, a man named John L. Ward. wrote a history of his
time in the service which he titled "Moron Corps: A Vietnam
Veteran's Case for Action." I got this book and frankly found it offers
few insights on how he helped others. And the book states that Ward has
moved to the Philippines.
But this Hamilton Gregory's book (and the Youtube
video of his) gives one insight into how a war was halfheartedly fought
in the 1960s and the aftereffects still haunting this country. It's
always easier to blame the veterans than those who set up the system.
NOTE:
After showing this article to Brett D'Alessandro, the veteran who
co-runs
the charity Backpacks for Life, he tells me he still believes the
figures of current veteran suicides is understated. Disagreeing with the Bob book and the Military Times article and also noting that second book about McNamara's "Project 100,000," he adds
this comment: "For every one veteran that commits suicide there are a dozen that go
undocumented. I get his point that possibly the older generation might
have the majority of veterans committing suicide but the numbers are not
low."
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
03:28 PM
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