This is a somewhat-rough screen capture (using the Camtasia 2018 app) of my annual presentation to the Crossroads intro course to SE Asian history and culture, at Northern Illinois University. AFAIK, I'm the only affiliated scholar here who actually served as a combat soldier at the height of the VN war (1968-69), and I'm preparing a new eBook much more narrowly focused than usual on the 17th December 1968 crash of a C-123 transport plane just taking off from Chu Lai, VN of which only nine of the 45 crew and passengers aboard survived. One of the fatalities was CPT Morton Singer, a rare Jewish chaplain whom I had met just a month earlier, and who was extremely influential even now on my life choices. With absolutely certainty, the cause of the crash was that the plane's fuel tanks had just been incorrectly refilled with JP4 jet fuel, rather than the 115-145 octane aviation gasoline that was clearly specified on the aircraft exterior, near the filler port. It was almost unimaginable that the driver of the fuel truck could be so incompetent and irresponsible! However in just the last several years it became more widely known that as result of decisions secretly taken by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and US President Lyndon Johnson, more than 300,000 prospective draftees whose dismal scores on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) was below the previous acceptable threshold for serving in the US military (see... youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g). This decision was entirely politically motivated as the alternatives were to eliminate the "2-S" student deferment, and/or to mobilize for overseas service troops in National Guard and reserve units who were exempted thereby from risking getting their heads blown off in what was an extremely unpopular war. Amazingly, i was in extensive phone and email contact with two of the contributors to this new narrow-focused project in the several days just preceding this presentation (which was altogether unscripted, worsened by a sub-optimal microphone mounting stand). Also I slightly confused recounting the stories of several of the key personages: one of whom —the freaked out crash truck first-responder Tracy Diffin II— had just died in March 2019. Neither of the other recent connections had ever heard of the McNamara's Moron's" debacle and who were appalled to conclude, as indeed I was myself, that the direct case of the C123 disaster (CPT Singer was only 29 y/o at the time of his death) was likely —but then, as now, unproven— the appalling and deeply cynical AFQT ploy.
