In one of the more controversial efforts of the Johnson Administration's "Great Society," the military was directed to utilize "Project One Hundred Thousand." This effort was designed to allow underprivileged blacks to gain access to the work experience, pay, and eventual benefits, of military service. The goal, never achieved during the life of the project, was to enroll one hundred thousand blacks in the military each year.
Many of those enrolled in the military via Project One Hundred Thousand would not have been eligible to join the military before the Vietnam War required so many more bodies. About "37% of Project One Hundred Thousand recruits were assigned to combat-type skills, and over half who entered the Army and the Marine Corps were sent to Vietnam."12
Most men serving in the military, as had always been the case, were volunteers. Those drafted represented approximately 20% of all those in the service. "At no time during the Vietnam war did draftees comprise more than one third of all enlisted men,"13 yet "draftees, disproportionately drawn from among the poor and the working class, bore the brunt of the fighting and death in Vietnam."14
The war in Vietnam, limited in scope by the choice of political leaders, was beginning to bring to light the flaws in the original draft laws. The armed forces no longer represented a diverse sample of American youth. While middle- and upper-class males decided where to go to school, "poorly educated, low-income whites and poorly educated low income blacks together bore a vastly disproportionate share of the burdens of Vietnam. Men from disadvantaged backgrounds were twice as likely as their better off peers to serve in the military, go to Vietnam, and to see combat."15
Because of the availability of education deferments, the Vietnam War had become a war divided by class. Although the Johnson administration saw that the "modernization manifested in the draft was the states's ability to develop. . .the orderly use of manpower"16 the reality was that military service was becoming the dividing line between classes in the United States. The poor fought, the middle and upper classes went to school.
Though the armed forces were integrated, blacks were over represented in frontline combat units, and among those wounded and killed. In 1967 the U.S. National Advisory Commission on Selective Service noted that "white, middle class, college educated Americans are likely to escape the mud and death of Southeast Asia while those who are poor and 'unsuitable' for college die in battlefields at a rate double that of their proportion in the population."17 The ability to achieve a deferment had become the wedge that divided the classes.
As stated earlier, deferments had existed since the inception of the draft, and, after the experience of World War II, had been expanded to allow American society to progress, even as foreign policy decisions sent the U.S. military to fight. The new deferments were built with the understanding that if a university student were called away from his studies to serve in the military, his years of potential work would be lost to society.
With most Americans of draft age unable to continue their education at universities, education deferments affected only a tiny portion of the draft age pool. One Harvard College graduate noted that in 1966 "before the draft calls began to rise 'students complained that the system was highly discriminatory, favoring the well off. They called the II-S an unfair advantage for those who could go to college'' . . . as the war escalated, the altruism was forgotten. What was most important now was saving your own skin."18
World War I induction physical
