The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  Jim’s superiors were literal-minded men (hence General Stubblebine’s many determined efforts to walk through his wall), but Jim’s real vision was more nuanced. He wanted his fellow soldiers to find a higher spiritual plane by reaching for the impossible. Had he accepted the offer of leading a real First Earth Battalion, his superiors would have demanded measurable results. They would have wanted to see Jim’s soldiers demonstrably stopping their own hearts with no ill effects, and when they failed, the unit would most probably have been shut down, in ignominy, without anyone really knowing it had existed.

  This was not what Jim had in mind. He wanted his ideas to float out there and take root wherever fate decreed. The First Earth Battalion would exist wherever someone read the manual and became inspired to implement its contents however he chose. Jim imagined it would be assimilated into the fabric of the army so successfully that the soldiers of the future would act on it without knowing anything about its fantastic provenance. And so it was that Sticky Foam became an early, real-life, First Earth Battalion weapon.

  The foam has had a rocky history. In Somalia in February 1995, United Nations peacekeeping forces were attempting to hand out food when the crowd began to riot. U.S. Marines were brought in to calm things down and aid in the UN’s withdrawal.

  “Use the Sticky Foam!” ordered the commanding officer. And the Marines did. They sprayed the foam not into the crowd, but in front of it so that it would harden and produce an instant wall between the rioters and the food. The Somali crowd paused, looked at the bubbling, expanding, hardening, custardlike substance, waited for it to solidify, climbed over it, and carried on rioting. All this occurred in front of the TV cameras. That night, news broadcasts across America ran the footage alongside a clip from Ghostbusters in which Bill Murray was slimed.

  (One of the deployers of the Sticky Foam in Somalia—Commander Sid Heal—later warned me against portraying the incident as an unmitigated disaster. He said they had hoped it would take the rioters twenty minutes to figure out how to scale the foam, but instead it took them five minutes, and so the worst you could say was that it was a three-quarters disaster. It was, however, the first and last time that the foam was deployed in a combat situation.)

  Unperturbed by the Somali incident, the U.S. penal authorities introduced Sticky Foam into prisons in the late 1990s to subdue violent inmates before they were transported elsewhere. The practice was quickly discontinued, however, because it was impossible to move the foamed prisoners from their cells once they’d been immobilized. They were just stuck there.

  But now, unexpectedly, the foam is enjoying a renaissance. Bottles of the stuff were taken to Iraq in 2003. The idea was that once U.S. troops found the weapons of mass destruction, Sticky Foam would be sprayed all over them. But the weapons of mass destruction were never found, and so the foam remained in its bottles.

  Of all Jim’s ideas, the most fruitful was his insistence that military operatives and scientists should journey to the wildest corners of their imaginations, unafraid to appear harebrained and half-baked in their pursuit of a new kind of weapon, something cunning and big-hearted and non-lethal.

  The foam is one of hundreds of similar inventions mentioned in a leaked 2002 air force report—Non-Lethal Weapons: Terms and References—which comprehensively details the latest endeavors in this field. There are a number of acoustic weapons: the Blast Wave Projector, the Curdler Unit, and the low-frequency Infrasound, which, according to the leaked report, “easily penetrates most buildings and vehicles” and creates “nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage or death.” (Jim Channon’s successors seem more laissez-faire about their definition of the term non-lethal than he was.) Then there are the Race-Specific Stink Bomb and the Chameleon Camouflage Suit, neither of which has gotten off the ground yet, because nobody can work out how to invent them.

  There is a special pheromone that “can be used to mark target individuals and then release bees to attack them.” There’s the Electric Glove, the Electric Police Jacket, “which jolts anyone who touches it,” the Net Gun, and the Electric Net Gun, which is the same as the Net Gun but “will release an electric shock if the target tries to struggle.” There are all manner of holograms, including the Death Hologram—“used to scare a target individual to death. Example, a drug lord with a weak heart sees the ghost of his dead rival appearing at his bedside and dies of fright”—and the Prophet Hologram, “the projection of the image of an ancient god over an enemy capital whose public communications have been seized and used against it in a massive psychological operation.”

  The First Earth Battalion’s Colonel John Alexander is named as a coauthor of the report. He lives in the suburbs of Las Vegas, in a large house filled with Buddhist and aboriginal art and military awards. There were also, I noticed, a number of books written by Uri Geller on his shelf.

  “Do you know Uri Geller?” I asked him.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “We’re great friends. We used to have metal-bending parties together.”

  Colonel Alexander has been a special adviser to the Pentagon, the CIA, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NATO. He is also one of Al Gore’s oldest friends. He is not completely retired from the military. A week after I met him, he flew to Afghanistan for four months to act as a “special adviser.” When I asked him who he was advising and on what, he wouldn’t tell me.

  For much of the afternoon, instead, John reminisced about the First Earth Battalion. His face broke into a broad smile when he recalled the secret late-night rituals that he and some fellow colonels would enact on military bases, after reading Jim’s manual.

  “Big bonfires!” he said. “And guys with snakes on their heads!”

  He laughed.

  “Have you heard of Ron?” I asked him.

  “Ron?” said Colonel Alexander.

  “Ron who reactivated Uri,” I said.

  Colonel Alexander fell silent. I waited for him to respond. After about thirty seconds, I realized that he wasn’t going to say another word until I asked him a different question. So I did.

  “So did Michael Echanis really kill a goat just by staring at it?” I asked.

  “Michael Echanis?” he said. He looked perplexed. “I think you’re talking about Guy Savelli.”

  “Guy Savelli?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said the colonel. “The man who killed the goat was definitely Guy Savelli.”

  4. INTO THE HEART OF THE GOAT

  The Savelli Dance and Martial Arts Studio stands around the corner from a Red Lobster, a TGI Friday’s, a Burger King, and a Texaco garage, in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. The sign on the door advertises lessons in ballet, tap, jazz, hiphop, aerobatics, pointe, kickboxing, and self-defense.

  I had telephoned Guy Savelli a few weeks earlier. I told him who I was and asked if he might describe the work he had undertaken inside Goat Lab. Colonel Alexander had told me that Guy was a civilian. He was under no military contract. So it seemed possible that he might talk. But instead there was a very long silence.

  “Who are you?” he finally asked.

  I told him again. Then I heard a profoundly sad sigh. It was something more than “Oh no, not a journalist.” It sounded almost like a howl against the inescapable and unjust forces of destiny.

  “Have I called at a bad time?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “So were you at Goat Lab?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He sighed again. “And yes, I did drop a goat when I was there.”

  “I don’t suppose you still practice the technique?” I asked him.

  “Yes, I do,” he said.

  Guy fell silent again. And then he said—and his voice sounded sorrowful and distressed—“Last week I killed my hamster.”

  “Just by staring at it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” confirmed Guy.

  Guy was a little more relaxed in the flesh, but not much. We met in the foyer of his dance studio. He is a grandfather now, but s
till jumpy and full of energy, moving around the room as if possessed. He was surrounded by some of his children and grandchildren, and half a dozen of his Kun Tao students stood anxiously around the edges of the studio. Something was up, that was clear, but I didn’t know what.

  “So you did this to your hamster?” I asked Guy.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “Hamsters,” I said, suddenly unsure of myself.

  “Yes,” he said. “They …” A look of bewilderment crossed his face. “When I do it,” he said, “the hamsters die.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Hamsters drive me nuts,” said Guy. He began talking very fast. “They just go around and around. I wanted to stop it from going around and around. I thought, I’m going to make it sick so it’ll burrow under the sawdust or something.”

  “But instead you made it die?”

  “I’ve got it on tape!” said Guy. “I taped it. You can watch the tape.” He paused. “I had a guy take care of the hamster every night.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Feed it. Water it.”

  “So you knew it was a healthy hamster,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Guy.

  “And then you started staring,” I said.

  “Three days,” sighed Guy.

  “You must hate hamsters,” I said.

  “It’s not that I want to do that to hamsters,” Guy explained. “But supposedly, if you’re a master, you should be able to do that kind of stuff. Is life just a punch and a kick and that’s it? Or is there more to it than that?”

  Guy jumped in his car and went off to find his home video of the hamster being stared to death. While he was gone, his children, Bradley and Juliette, set up a video camera and began to film me.

  “Why are you doing that?” I asked them.

  There was a silence.

  “Ask Dad,” said Juliette.

  Guy returned an hour later. He was carrying a sheaf of papers and photographs along with a couple of video cassettes.

  “Oh, I see Bradley has set up the camera,” he said. “Don’t worry about that! We film everything. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Guy put the tape into the VCR, and he and I began to watch.

  The video showed two hamsters in a cage. Guy explained to me that he was staring at one, trying to make it sick and visibly paranoid about its wheel, while the other was to remain throughout an unstared-at control hamster. Twenty minutes passed.

  “I’ve never known a hamster,” I said, “so I—”

  “Bradley!” interrupted Guy. “You ever own a hamster?”

  “Yes,” replied Bradley.

  “You ever see one do that before?”

  Bradley came into the room and watched the video for a moment.

  “Never,” he said.

  “Look at the way it’s glaring at the wheel!” said Guy.

  The target hamster did indeed seem suddenly mistrustful of its wheel. It sat at the far end of the cage, looking at it warily.

  “Usually that hamster loves its wheel,” explained Guy.

  “It does seem odd,” I said, “although I have to say that emotions such as circumspection and wariness are not that easy to discern in hamsters.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Guy.

  “There will be some people reading this who own hamsters,” I said.

  “Good,” said Guy. “Then they’ll know how rare that is. Your hamster people will know that.”

  “My hamster-owning readers,” I agreed, “will know whether or not this is aberrant behavior… . He’s down!” I said.

  The hamster had fallen. Its legs were in the air.

  “I’m accomplishing the task I wanted to do,” said Guy. “Look! The other one has run right over it! He’s right on top of the other hamster! That’s bizarre! That’s kind of nuts, isn’t it? He’s not moving! I’m accomplishing my task right there.”

  The other hamster fell over.

  “You’ve dropped both hamsters!” I said.

  “No, the other one has just fallen over,” explained Guy.

  “Okay,” I said.

  There was a silence.

  “Is he dead now?” I asked.

  “It gets more bizarre in a minute,” said Guy. He seemed to be dodging the question. “Now! It’s more bizarre now!”

  The hamster was motionless. And it remained that way—utterly immobile—for fifteen minutes. Then it shook itself down and began eating again.

  And then the tape ended.

  “Guy,” I said. “I don’t know what to make of this. The hamster did seem to be behaving unusually in comparison with the control hamster, but on the other hand it definitely didn’t die. I thought you said I was going to watch it die.”

  There was a short silence.

  “My wife said, ‘No,’” he explained. “Back at the house. She said, ‘You don’t know if this guy’s a bleeding-heart liberal.’ She said, ‘Don’t show him the hamster dying. Don’t show him that. Show him the tape where the hamster acts bizarre instead.’”

  Guy told me that what I had just seen were the edited highlights of two continuous days of staring. It was on the third day, Guy said, that the hamster dropped dead.

  “I am a ghost,” said Guy.

  We were in the foyer of his dance studio, standing underneath the bulletin board. It was covered with mementos of Savelli family successes. Jennifer Savelli, Guy’s daughter, danced with Richard Gere in Chicago. She danced in the seventy-fifth Academy Awards. But there was nothing much on the wall about Guy—no newspaper cuttings or anything like that.

  “You would never have known about me if Colonel Alexander hadn’t told you my name,” he said.

  It was true. All I could find about Guy in the newspapers was the odd notice from the Cleveland Plain Dealer concerning awards won by his students in local tournaments. This other side of his life was entirely unchronicled.

  Guy riffled through the papers and the photographs.

  “Look!” he said. “Look at this!”

  He handed me a diagram.

  “Guy,” I said. “Is this Goat Lab?”

  “Yes,” said Guy.

  Bradley silently filmed me studying the Goat Lab diagram. Then Guy dropped the papers and the photographs. They scattered all over the floor. We both bent down to pick the stuff up.

  “Oh,” murmured Guy. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

  I quickly looked over. In the moments before Guy hid it between some documents, I caught a glimpse of what I wasn’t supposed to see.

  “Bloody hell,” I said.

  “Right,” said Guy.

  It was a blurry snapshot of a soldier crouched in a frosty field next to a fence. The photograph appeared to have captured the soldier in the act of karate chopping a goat to death.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “You really weren’t supposed to see that,” said Guy.

  Guy’s story began with a telephone call he received, out of the blue, in the summer of 1983.

  “Mr. Savelli?” said a voice. “I’m phoning from Special Forces.”

  It was Colonel Alexander.

  Guy was not a military man. Why were they calling him? The colonel explained that since their last martial arts teacher, Michael Echanis, had died in Nicaragua back in 1978, Special Forces had basically stopped incorporating those kinds of techniques into their training programs down at Fort Bragg, but they were ready to give them another try. They had chosen him, he explained, because the branch of martial arts he practices—Kun Tao—has a uniquely mystical dimension. Guy teaches his students that “only with total integration of the mental, physical, and spiritual can one hope to come away unscathed. Our intention is to teach this integrated way and show others how to have exceptional paranormal results that are usually associated with fables for the young.”

  The colonel asked Guy if he could come down to Fort Bragg for a week or so, to test the waters. Could he step into Michael Echanis’s shoes? Guy said he’d give it a try
.

  On the first day, Guy taught the soldiers how to break slabs of concrete with their bare hands, how to withstand being whacked on the back of the neck with a thick metal rod, and how to make a person forget what he is about to say.

  “How do you make a person forget what he’s about to say?” I asked Guy.

  “Easy,” he said. “You just do this—” Guy scrunched up his face and yelled, “Noooooooo!”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “You ever play pool and you miss your shot and you want your opponent to miss his shot and you go, ‘Noooooooo’? And then they miss their shot! It’s the same thing.”

  “Is it all in the tone of voice?” I asked.

  “You say it inside your head,” said Guy, exasperated. “You get that feeling inside of you.”

  And so it was, on the evening of the first day, that Special Forces mentioned to Guy that they had goats. Guy said he couldn’t remember who steered the conversation then, but he did recall, at some point during the evening, announcing, “Let’s give it a try.”

  “So the next morning,” Guy said, “they got a goat, they set it up, and we started.”

  As Guy recounted this story, the atmosphere inside the dance studio remained apprehensive. Bradley continued to film me. From time to time, when we made small talk about holidays or the weather, I could see what a lovely family the Savellis were—close-knit, tough, and intelligent. But whenever we returned to the subject of goats, the mood instantly hardened.

  It turns out that the goat Guy stared at had not been debleated or shot in the leg. Guy had said he wanted a normal, healthy goat, so that’s what they gave him. It was herded into a small room that was empty but for a soldier with a video camera. Guy knelt on the floor in another room.

  And he began to get that feeling inside him.

  “I pictured a golden road going up into the sky,” he said. “And the Lord was there, and I walked into His arms, and I got a chill, and I knew it was right. I wanted to find a way to knock that goat down. We have this picture of St. Michael the Archangel with a sword. So I thought about that. I thought about St. Michael with this sword going …”