The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  “It is America’s role,” wrote Jim, “to lead the world to paradise.”

  Jim returned from his journey in 1979 and wrote a confidential paper for his superiors. The first line read, “The U.S. army doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful.”

  A disclaimer at the bottom read, “[This] does not comprise an official position by the military as of now.”

  This was Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.

  The manual was a 125-page mixture of drawings and graphs and maps and polemical essays and point-by-point redesigns of every aspect of military life. In Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion, the new battlefield uniform would include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools, foodstuffs to enhance night vision, and a loudspeaker that would automatically emit “indigenous music and words of peace.”

  Soldiers would carry with them into hostile countries “symbolic animals” such as baby lambs. These would be cradled in the soldiers’ arms. The soldiers would learn to greet people with “sparkly eyes.” Then they would gently place the lambs on the ground and give the enemy “an automatic hug.”

  There was, Jim accepted, a possibility that these measures might not be enough to pacify an enemy. In that eventuality, the loudspeakers attached to the uniforms would be switched to broadcast “discordant sounds.” Bigger loudspeakers would be mounted on military vehicles, each playing acid rock music out of sync with the others to confuse the enemy.

  In case all that didn’t work, a new type of weaponry—nonlethal or “psychoelectronic” weapons—would be developed, including a machine that could direct positive energy into hostile crowds.

  If all else failed, lethal weapons would be used, although “no Earth soldier shall be denied the kingdom of heaven because he or she is used as an instrument of indiscriminate war.”

  Back on base, robes and hoods would be worn for the mandatory First Earth Battalion rituals. The misogynistic and aggressive old chants (“I don’t know but I’ve been told, Eskimo pussy is mighty cold …”) would be phased out and replaced by a new one: “Om.”

  Military marching bands would learn how to become more like traveling minstrels. “Singing and dancing” and “the elimination of the desire for lust” would be as important a part of training as martial arts.

  “A Warrior Monk is one who has no dependence on lust,” wrote Jim. “A Warrior Monk is one who has no dependence on status. This regimen is not meant to produce puritanical fanatics but is clearly designed to exclude the soldier of fortune.”

  (The above portion of the manual was, presumably, disregarded by Michael Echanis, who became America’s most famous soldier of fortune in the years between allegedly staring a goat to death at Fort Bragg and dying under mysterious circumstances in Nicaragua.)

  First Earth Battalion trainees would learn to fast for a week drinking only juice and then eat only nuts and grains for a month. They would:

  fall in love with everyone, sense plant auras, organize a tree plant with kids, attain the power to pass through objects such as walls, bend metal with their minds, walk on fire, calculate faster than a computer, stop their own hearts with no ill effects, see into the future, have out-of-body experiences, live off nature for twenty days, be 90%+ a vegetarian, have the ability to massage and cleanse the colon, stop using mindless clichés, stay out alone at night, and be able to hear and see other people’s thoughts.

  Now all Jim had to do was sell these ideas to the military.

  I think Jim Channon is a wealthy man. He certainly owns pretty much an entire Hawaiian hillside, with an amphitheater, a village worth of outbuildings, yurts, and gazebos. Nowadays he does for corporations what he did for the army: he makes their employees believe they can walk through walls and change the world, and he does it by making those things sound ordinary.

  “Do you honestly believe,” I asked Jim at one point during our day together, “that somebody can reach such a high level of warrior monkdom that they can actually become invisible and walk through walls?”

  Jim shrugged.

  “Women have been known to lift up an automobile singlehanded when their child is under it,” he said. “Why not expect the same from a Warrior Monk?”

  Jim told me—just as he had told his commanding officers back in 1979—that “warrior monk” might sound like a crazy new military prototype, but was it any more crazy than the old prototypes, like cowboy, or football player?

  “A Warrior Monk,” said Jim, “is someone who has the presence of the monk, the service and the dedication of the monk and the absolute skill and precision of the warrior.”

  He had told his commanders this at the officers’ club in Fort Knox in the spring of 1979. He had arrived there a few hours earlier and had dragged in as many potted plants as he could find around the base. He arranged them into a circle, a “pseudo-forest.” In the center of the circle he lit a single candle.

  When the commanders arrived, he said to them, “To begin the ceremony, gentlemen, we’re going to do a mantra. Take a deep breath and as you let it out sound eeeeeeee.”

  Jim told me, “At this point, they laughed. A few of them chuckled, a little bit embarrassed. So I was able to say, ‘Excuse me! You’ve been given a set of instructions and I expect them to be carried out at high level.’ See? Tapping right into the military mind-set. Second time we did it, the place became unified.”

  And then Jim began his speech. He said, “Gentlemen, it is a great honor to have you in this place of sanctuary where we can mend our wounds and dream our dreams of better service. Together, with all the other armies of the world, we will turn this place around, and a new civilization can be born that does not know boundary lines but knows better how to live in the garden and knows that we are one thought away from paradise.”

  The commanders were not laughing anymore. In fact, Jim found that some were almost in tears. Like Jim, they had been crushed by their experiences in Vietnam. Jim was speaking to four-star generals and major generals and brigadier generals and colonels—“the top people”—and he had them captivated. In fact, one colonel present, Mike Malone, was so moved that he leaped to his feet and yelled, “I am mullet man!”

  Noticing the perplexed expressions on the faces of his fellow military commanders, he elucidated. “I push the cause of the mullet because he is a low-class fish. He is simple. He is honest. He moves around in great formations and columns. He does damn near all the work. But he is also noble. He is like another noble thing I once loved, called ‘soldier.’”

  Jim continued his speech: “The only time that rose-colored glasses don’t work is when you take them off,” he said. “So join me in this vision of being all that we can be, for this is the place where the First Earth Battalion begins. This is the place where you have the right to think the unthinkable, to dream the impossible. You know we’re here to create the most powerful set of tools for the individual and his team, for that is the difference between where the American soldier is today and where he needs to be to survive on the battlefield of the future.”

  “You know what this story is about?” Jim asked me, in his garden in Hawaii. “It’s the story of the creativity of an institution you would expect to be the last to open the door to the greater realities. Because you know what happened next?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I was immediately appointed commander of the First Earth Battalion.”

  The disclaimer at the bottom of Jim’s Operations Manual had read that this was not the official position of the United States military. Nonetheless, within weeks of its publication, soldiers throughout the army began seriously to try to implement his ideas.

  Somewhere in a strip mall in the heart of Silicon Valley is a building that looks like a long-abandoned and entirely undistinguished warehouse. Nonetheless, busloads of tourists turn up from time to time to photograph the exterior because this is the building where Silicon Valley began. It started life as an apricot-storage warehouse, but then Profe
ssor William Shockley moved in and coinvented the transistor and grew silicon crystals in the back room and won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1956.

  By the late 1970s this building—391 San Antonio Road—had a new owner, Dr. Jim Hardt. He was just as much of a pioneer in his field as Shockley, just as much of a visionary, but his science was, and remains, somewhat weirder.

  Dr. Hardt still works there, charging civilians $14,000 for a week-long brain-training retreat—“Mention the keyword ‘hemi-coherent’ and get a $500 discount!” says the publicity pack—in a series of tiny offices at the back. They are dark, lit only in fluorescent purple, the clocks have no hands, and the place reminded me a little of Disney World’s Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride.

  I had come to believe that Michael Echanis was not, after all, the fabled goat starer. I had decided that Glenn Wheaton had been mistaken, beguiled by the Echanis legend, and that it was another Jedi Warrior altogether. Perhaps Dr. Hardt might be able to provide the answer, for it was he who retuned the brains of the Jedi Warriors in the late 1970s, and took them to a level of spiritual enlightenment within which staring a goat to death was, apparently, possible.

  Dr. Hardt sat me down and he told me the story of his “fascinating, yet somewhat melodramatic” adventures with Special Forces.

  It all began with a visit from a colonel named John Alexander, who turned up one day at Jim Hardt’s door with a few other military men. Colonel Alexander had headhunted Dr. Hardt, having been deeply moved by Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion Operations Manual. He wanted to know if Dr. Hardt could really turn ordinary soldiers into advanced Zen masters in just seven days, and give them the power of telepathy simply by plugging them into his brain machine.

  Dr. Hardt said it was indeed true, and so the quest to create a supersoldier, a soldier with supernatural powers, was set into motion right there in that building in Silicon Valley.

  The colonel told Jim Hardt that Special Forces had, ever since the publication of Jim’s manual, invited one peak-performance guru after another from the new-age and human-potential movements of California to lecture the soldiers on how to be more attuned with their inner spirits, and so on, but it had not been a success. The gurus had routinely been greeted with boos, catcalls, and theatrical yawns by Special Forces.

  Now, Colonel Alexander wanted to know, would Dr. Hardt be willing to give it a try? Would he bring his portable brain-training machine to Fort Bragg?

  Jim Hardt showed me the machine. You strap electrodes onto your head and your alpha waves are fed into a computer. Knobs are tweaked and your alpha waves are attuned. When this has been achieved your IQ is boosted by twelve points and you effortlessly reach a spiritual level usually attainable only through a lifetime’s diligent study of Zen techniques. If two people are strapped to the machine simultaneously, they get to read each other’s minds.

  Dr. Hardt explained all this to Colonel Alexander, and he offered to give him a demonstration, but Colonel Alexander declined. He said there was a lot of classified military information stored in his brain and he couldn’t risk telepathically revealing it to Dr. Hardt.

  Dr. Hardt said he understood.

  Colonel Alexander felt obliged to tell Dr. Hardt that Special Forces were really quite hostile to the whole idea, which they considered mumbo-jumbo. They would in fact be “uncontrollable” and refuse to “sit still and listen.”

  In that case, Dr. Hardt replied, he would accept the challenge only if the soldiers were first sent on a month-long meditation retreat.

  “Well,” Dr. Hardt said to me now. “First of all, they wouldn’t call it a meditation retreat, because retreat is a no-no word in the army. So it was called a meditation encampment. And it was hugely unsuccessful.”

  “How come?” I asked.

  “The soldiers actually brawled with each other in the meditation setting,” he said. “They brawled out of boredom.”

  And so, by the time Dr. Hardt arrived at Fort Bragg, Special Forces were still “extremely hostile,” blaming Dr. Hardt for their month’s enforced meditation, which they had considered “nonsense” and “a waste of time.”

  The small, thin, and delicate Dr. Hardt anxiously surveyed the hostile soldiers, then he gently strapped the electrodes onto their heads, and onto his head too. He switched on the alpha-wave brain-training computer, and the tuning began.

  “And then suddenly,” said Jim Hardt, “a tear came out of my eye and it rolled down my face and it splashed onto my tie.”

  A tear almost formed in his eye now, as he recalled this moment of emotional telepathy.

  “So I picked up my tie, it was still wet, and I said, ‘I telepathically know that somebody in this room is experiencing sadness.’ And I slammed my hand down on the table and I said, ‘We are not leaving this room until whoever it is owns up to it.’ Well. Two minutes of total silence. And then this hardbitten colonel raised his hand and he said, ‘That was probably me.’”

  And then the colonel told Jim Hardt, and his fellow Special Forces soldiers, the story of his sadness.

  This colonel had sung in his glee club at college. He had sung folk and choral music and, as his brain was being tuned, his mind filled with the memories of his glee club days some twenty years earlier.

  “He experienced such joy in that,” said Jim Hardt. “But then he went straight from college to officer training school and he made an intellectual decision to give up on joy. He decided on graduating from college that joy had no role in the life of an army officer and so he consciously and willfully, click, turned joy off. Now it was twenty years later, and he came upon the realization that it wasn’t necessary. He had lived twenty years without joy. And it wasn’t necessary.”

  On day two of the brain tuning, the soldiers strapped the electrodes to their heads once again.

  “And this time,” said Jim Hardt, “both of my eyes were like faucets. And I took my tie and I wrung it. That’s how soaked it was with my tears, and so again I said, ‘Who is it? Who is experiencing sadness?’ And again it was two minutes before the same guy raised his hand and this time he recounted a story that he had lived through.”

  It was the Tet offensive in 1968. The colonel was in a small forward firebase up by the demilitarized zone when the Vietcong attacked.

  “And this colonel single-handedly saved their little fire-base from being overrun,” said Jim Hardt, “and the way he did this was by running the machine gun all night long. And then, when dawn came, he looked out at the piles of bleeding, dying bodies that he had caused, and he had feelings that are larger than one heart can encompass.”

  At the end of day three of the brain tuning, Jim Hardt studied the alpha-wave computer printouts, and he saw something that amazed him.

  “In one of the soldiers,” he said, “I saw a pattern of brain waves which is found only in people who have experience of seeing angels. We call it ‘perception of astral plane beings,’ beings that are discorporate but have a luminous body. So I was sitting across the desk from this soldier who had been trained to kill, and I asked him, in a very calm voice, ‘Do you talk to beings that other people don’t see?’

  “And he spun back in his chair. He almost tipped over. It was like I had hit him with a two-by-four! And he was all nervous and alarmed and his breathing was heavy, and he looked left and right, to ensure that nobody else was in the room. Then he leaned forward and admitted it, ‘Yes.’ He had a martial arts spirit guide who would appear to him alone. And he had only told his best buddy about this, and he had sworn that he would cut his throat if his friend breathed a word of this to anyone.”

  And that was the end of the story. That was all Dr. Hardt could tell me. He left Fort Bragg, never returned, and said he didn’t know which, if any, of the Jedi soldiers whose brains he tuned had gone on to stare a goat to death.

  “Nonlethals only!” yells the evil medical researcher Glenn Talbot. “I repeat, nonlethals only! I must have a sample of him. Hit him with the foam!”

  In the under
ground Atheon military base, hidden beneath a disused cinema in a desert somewhere, the Incredible Hulk has escaped and is destroying all in his path. The soldiers do what Glenn Talbot has ordered. They take up position and spray the Hulk with Sticky Foam, which expands and hardens the moment it hits his body. The foam succeeds where all previous weapons have failed. The Hulk is stopped in his tracks. He struggles, roaring, against the foam, to no avail.

  “So long, big boy …” snarls Glenn Talbot. He shoots the Hulk in the chest with some kind of handheld missile launcher. This is a mistake. It makes the Hulk angrier—so angry, in fact, that he summons enough power to break through the foam and continue his rampage.

  This foam is not an invention of the writers of the Hulk movie. It is the invention of Colonel John Alexander, the same man who recruited Dr. Jim Hardt to retune the brains of the Jedi Warriors. Colonel Alexander developed the Sticky Foam as a result of reading Jim’s First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.

  The army leaders present at Fort Knox back in 1979 had been so taken with Jim’s speech that they offered him the opportunity to create and command a real First Earth Battalion. But he turned them down. Jim had higher ambitions than that. He was rational enough to realize that walking through walls, sensing plant auras, and melting the hearts of the enemy with baby lambs were good ideas on paper, but weren’t, necessarily, achievable skills in real life.