There's another obvious theory that will explain that difference. It was easy to dodge the draft. You could say that those who didn't ended up earning less because failing to get out of going was a signal of incompetence.
Or, if you were aware that the problems they had in supplying raw manpower to Vietnam led the army to emphasize drafting people who should legally have been unable to serve based on their very low IQs, you could observe that it would be pretty shocking if veterans as a class showed equal earning power to society in general.
> 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.
I believe these papers made some attempts to avoid seeing the effects of draft-dodging. For example one of them goes only by draft numbers, without looking at who actually fought, and finds worse outcomes among the children of the group with bad numbers (fighters and dodgers) compared to good numbers. But I don't know enough details to say whether some biases remain.
Indeed "McNamara's Morons" is a pretty crazy story. Turns out the army had rules for who to recruit for a good reason.
Or, if you were aware that the problems they had in supplying raw manpower to Vietnam led the army to emphasize drafting people who should legally have been unable to serve based on their very low IQs, you could observe that it would be pretty shocking if veterans as a class showed equal earning power to society in general.
> 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.
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article24544984.html
https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1...