The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Jon Ronson

  “Now, would we have a special rate for Mossad?” said Danny.

  We laughed.

  “I think we ought to collect royalties,” said Christopher. “If I’d written the songs directly for the army, they would pay me, right?”

  “No,” said Danny. “You’d be a work for hire. You’d be employed by them.”

  “Well, I’m not a work for hire in this case,” said Christopher.

  “I’m not so sure,” said Danny. “As a citizen, you have to work for hire, if the military needs you.”

  “Well, they could have asked me to volunteer,” said Christopher.

  He was more serious now. Danny took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “Wanting money for the use of your music in a time of crisis,” he said, after a moment, “seems a little shabby to me.”

  And the two men collapsed in helpless laughter.

  In the late autumn of 2003, after many faxes and e-mails had gone back and forth, and I had been security screened by various offices within the Pentagon and the American embassy, PsyOps consented to show me their CD collection.

  Adam Piore, the Newsweek journalist, had said that the list of songs blasted at the prisoners had been chosen here at PsyOps headquarters. The collection was housed in a series of radio-production suites inside a low brick building in the middle of Fort Bragg, some five hundred yards up the road from where, it was rumored, Goat Lab was situated. I kept looking out windows in the hope of spotting dazed or hobbling goats, but there was none in evidence.

  PsyOps began by showing me their sound-effects CDs.

  “Primarily deception,” explained the sergeant who guided me during this portion of the day, “designed to make enemy forces think they’re hearing something that doesn’t exist.”

  One sound-effect CD was labeled “Crazy Woman Says ‘My Husband’s Never Liked You.’”

  “We purchased a job lot,” explained the sergeant.

  We laughed.

  “Many Horses Galloping By” read another, and we laughed again and said this would have been deployable three hundred years ago, but not now.

  Then he played me an applicable one: “Tank Noises.” The radio suite filled with the rumblings of tanks. They seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. The sergeant explained that sometimes PsyOps hide behind a hill to the east of the enemy and blast their tank noises as the real tanks rumble in, more quietly, from the west.

  Then he showed me their Arabic music CDs (“Our analysts and our specialists are familiar with what may be popular and culturally relevant, and we purchase that music in order to appeal to the population”), followed by their collection of Avril Lavigne and Norah Jones CDs.

  “How might Avril Lavigne be deployed in hostile countries?” I asked.

  There was a silence.

  “In some parts of the world Western music is popular,” he replied. “We try to stay current.”

  “Who chooses the playlist?” I asked.

  “Our analysts,” he said, “in conjunction with our specialists.”

  “Which countries?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to go into that,” he said.

  My tour of PsyOps was a well-rehearsed whirlwind—the same tour as a visiting dignitary or a congressman would get. A PsyOps soldier knows how to design a leaflet and burn a CD and operate a loudspeaker and take a photograph and snap into formation for the official tour.

  They showed me their radio studios and their TV studios and their archive library, with shelves full of videos labeled “Guantanamo Bay,” and so on. I noticed a poster on a wall reminding the soldiers of PsyOps of their official functions: “Surrender appeals. Crowd control. Tactical deception. Harassment. Unconventional warfare. Foreign internal defense.”

  They showed me their leaflet-printing presses, and their canisters. These are dropped from planes and are designed to split open in midair, and then tens of thousands of leaflets float down into enemy territory.

  The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on U.S. troops, designed to be psychologically devastating. They read, “Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.”

  Then I was led into a PsyOps conference room where I was introduced to the specialists and the analysts. Some were in uniform. Others looked like friendly eggheads, bespectacled and in business suits.

  The specialists showed me some of their leaflets that had floated down from PsyOps helicopters into Iraqi forces just a month or two earlier. One read, “Nobody benefits from the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Any unit that chooses to use Weapons of Mass Destruction will face swift and severe retribution by coalition forces.”

  “This product,” explained a specialist, “is making a clear link between their unfulfilled need and our desired behavior.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “Their unfulfilled need,” he said, “was that they didn’t want to face severe retribution. And our desired behavior was that we didn’t want them to use weapons of mass destruction.”

  I nodded.

  “Our most effective products are the ones which link an unfulfilled need on their part with a desired behavior on our part,” he said.

  There was a silence.

  “And weapons of mass destruction were not used on American forces,” the specialist added, “so this leaflet may very well have been effective.”

  “Do you really ... ?” I started. “Oh, nothing,” I said.

  I picked up another leaflet. It read, “You people aren’t being fed. Your children are going hungry. While you live in squalor, Saddam’s generals are so overweight and fat he has to fine them to keep them in fighting shape.”

  As I read this leaflet, I had a short conversation with a PsyOps analyst named Dave. He wasn’t in uniform. He was a friendly, middle-aged man. What he said to me didn’t seem particularly significant at the time, so I just nodded and smiled, and then I was bustled out of the conference room and into an oak-lined office where a tall, handsome man wearing khaki shook my hand and said, “Hi, I’m Colonel Jack N… .”

  He blushed, disarmingly.

  “N!” He laughed. “Middle name! Jack N. Summe. I’m the commander of the Fourth Psychological Operations Airborne, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.”

  “Are you in charge of all of PsyOps?” I asked him.

  My hand was still being vigorously shaken.

  “I’m in charge of the active-duty Psychological Operations group in the United States Army,” he said. “Our job is to convince our adversaries to support U.S. policies and to make the battlefield a less dangerous place using multimedia techniques.”

  “Colonel Summe,” I said. “What can you tell me about the deployment of Barney and Sesame Street, by PsyOps, inside shipping containers in al-Qā’im?”

  Colonel Summe didn’t miss a beat.

  “I was at the Joint Staff headquarters and I took command of the Fourth PsyOps group on seventeen July, so I have not had the ability to operationally deploy into Iraq and find out at what level we’re doing things.” He paused to take a very short breath and continued, “We serve as force providers. When there is a requirement—a crisis requirement—we are tasked to send PsyOpers forward to support. When Psychological Operations deploys …”

  Colonel Summe’s words, delivered like machine-gun fire, swam around my head. I smiled and nodded blankly at him.

  “ … We are always in support of the commander. The senior commander or maneuver commander or area commander is never a PsyOps officer. We are always a support force. So when we attach that PsyOps force to a commander he may identify a use of Psychological Operations loudspeaker capability for that very reason… .”

  I continued nodding. It was almost as if Colonel Summe wanted to tell me something, but he wanted to say it in such a way that he didn’t want me to understand it. Maybe, I thought, as my mind drifted, and I glanced out the
window to the lawn outside his office in the vain hope of spotting injured goats, he was performing some kind of PsyOp on me.

  “ … If we have combat forces in the field I would rather see our PsyOps capability being used to support those combat forces as opposed to some other mission like you’ve kind of outlined.”

  Then Colonel Summe coughed and he shook my hand again and he thanked me for my interest and I was bustled out the door.

  8. THE PREDATOR

  Martial arts master Pete Brusso, who teaches hand-to-hand combat at the Camp Pendleton Marine base near San Diego, has read Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion Operations Manual cover to cover. Just a week before I met Pete, in March 2004, he had had a long telephone conversation with Jim, during which they discussed how First Earth principles might be deployed in Iraq today. Pete had a “number of my operatives” in Iraq “right now,” he told me.

  We were cruising through Camp Pendleton inside Pete’s $167,000 Hummer H1. His license plate read MY OTHER CAR IS A TANK. Pete’s Hummer is something like a nightmare version of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car, in that it can swim, can effortlessly navigate the most treacherous terrain on the planet, and has a number of places scattered around the bodywork on which to mount one’s weaponry. Pete turned the music up loud to demonstrate his state-of-the-art sound system. He played me a very loud, crystal clear, but weird song, which basically went bling blong bling blong.

  “I COMPOSED THIS MYSELF,” shouted Pete.

  “WHAT?” I said.

  Pete turned the music down.

  “I composed this music myself,” he said.

  “It’s interesting,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you why it’s interesting,” said Pete. “It thwarts bugs. Someone’s bugging this Hummer? Just turn up the music. The bugging device can’t cope. Usually spies can take a bugging tape, strip out the music, and hear the conversation. Not with this music.”

  Pete does for the Marines at Camp Pendleton what Guy Savelli used to do for Special Forces at Fort Bragg. He teaches them martial arts techniques with a First Earth Battalion dimension. But, unlike Guy, Pete is a military veteran. He fought in Cambodia for ten months. His combat experience has made him sniffy about Guy’s goat-staring capabilities. Violent goats don’t come running at you on the battlefield. Guy’s goat staring may be fabled, but it is basically a party trick.

  Then Pete turned the music up loud and told me a secret, which I couldn’t hear a word of, so he turned the music back down and told me it again. The secret was that he and Guy Savelli were now competitors. Military commanders have been considering a mandatory post-9/11 martial arts training program. The two sensei—Pete and Guy—were vying with each other for the contract. Pete basically said there was no contest. Would the military really want a civilian, like Guy, with his party tricks?

  In short, Pete is a pragmatist. He’s an admirer of the First Earth Battalion but has taken it upon himself to adapt Jim’s ideas into practical applications for the battlefield Marine.

  I asked Pete to give me an example of a practical application.

  “Okay,” he said. “There’s a gang of insurgents standing in front of you. You are alone. You want to dissuade them from attacking you. What do you do?”

  I told Pete I didn’t know.

  Pete said that the answer lay in the psychic realm—specifically the use of visual aesthetics to instill psychically in the enemy a disincentive to attack.

  “Can you be more explicit?” I asked.

  “Okay,” said Pete. “What you do is grab one of them, rip out his eyeballs, and stab him in the neck, the blood squirts out like a fountain—really, a fountain—get the blood to spurt over his friends. Just punish the bejesus out of him, right there in front of his friends.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Or go for the lungs,” said Pete. “Create a gaping chest wound. What you’ll have then is lots of sucking in air and frothing. Or scrape a knife across the face. Here’s a clever thing: Get your knife inside the clavicle. That’s the collarbone. Once you’re in there you can scrape most of the tissue away from that side of the neck. Separate his brain stem from the back of his neck. Doesn’t take much movement, physics-wise.” Pete paused. “What I’m doing, you see, is creating a powerful visual psychic disincentive for the other insurgents to attack me.”

  Pete turned the music up loud.

  “THAT’S A …” I shouted.

  “WHAT?” shouted Pete.

  “ ... BROAD INTERPRETATION OF JIM’S IDEALS,” I yelled.

  Pete turned down the music again and shrugged as if to say, There you go. That’s warfare.

  We pulled up outside a hangar. A half-dozen of Pete’s trainees were waiting for him. We wandered inside. Then Pete said, “Choke me.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Choke me,” said Pete. “I’m old and fat. What can I do? Choke me. Right here.”

  Pete pointed at his neck.

  “Now choke,” he said, softly. “Choke. Choke.”

  “You know,” I said to Pete, “I feel that neither of us has anything to prove here.”

  “Choke me,” said Pete. “‘Attack me.’”

  When he said the words attack me, he did that quotation-mark thing in the air with his fingers, which angered me a little because it implied that I was incapable of mounting anything more than a figurative attack. I was indeed incapable, but I had known Pete for only a few minutes and I felt he was jumping to conclusions about me.

  “If I do choose to choke you,” I said, “what do you intend to do?”

  “I’m going to interrupt your thought pattern,” said Pete. “It’ll take your brain three-tenths of a second to realize what is happening to you. And after that three-tenths of a second you’ll be mine. I’m going to touch you and that’s it. I’m not going to move even my feet. But I’m going to project myself into you, and you will fly.”

  “Well,” I said. “If I do decide to choke you, will you bear in mind that I am not a Marine?”

  “Choke me,” said Pete. “Choke.”

  I looked behind me and I saw a number of sharp edges.

  “Not into sharp edges,” I said. “Not sharp edges.”

  “Okay,” said Pete. “No sharp edges.”

  I raised my hands in readiness to choke Pete, and I was surprised to see how violently they were trembling. I had presumed until that moment that we were essentially kidding around, but the sight of my hands made me realize we weren’t. At that moment of realization, the rest of my body caught up with my hands. I felt incredibly weak. I put my hands back down.

  “Choke me,” said Pete.

  “Before I choke you,” I said, “I would like to ask you one or two other questions.”

  “Choke me,” said Pete. “Come on. Choke me. Just choke me.”

  I sighed, placed my hands around Pete’s neck, and began to squeeze.

  I didn’t see Pete’s hands move. All I know is that both my armpits, my neck, and my chest began to hurt enormously, all at once, and then I was flying, flying across the room, flying toward two Marines, who stepped gently out of the way, and then I was skidding, skidding like a sore ice-skater toward sharp edges, and I came to rest a few inches from those edges. I was in great pain but also impressed. Pete was truly a maestro of violence.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Does it hurt?” asked Pete.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I know it does,” said Pete. He seemed pleased. “It fucking hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You felt fear,” said Pete, “didn’t you? Beforehand.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was debilitated with fear beforehand.”

  “Would you say that level of fear was abnormal for you?” asked Pete.

  I thought about this.

  “Yes and no,” I said.

  “Explain further,” said Pete.

  “I do sometimes experience fear when something bad is happening to me, or is about
to happen to me,” I explained, “but on the other hand, the amount of fear I felt in the runup to the choking seemed unusual. I was definitely more scared than I ought to have been.”

  “You know why?” said Pete. “It wasn’t you. It was me. It was thought projection. I was inside your head.”

  I was, he explained, a real-life plaything of a practical application of Jim Channon’s vision. I was the Iraqi insurgent being sprayed with the fountain of blood emanating from the neck of his friend. I was the hamster. I was the goat.

  And then Pete produced, from his pocket, a small yellow blob of plastic. It had pointed edges and smooth edges and a hole in the middle. It looked like a children’s toy, albeit one with no obvious means of being fun. This yellow blob, Pete said, was his own design, but it was an embodiment of Jim Channon’s vision, and it was being carried right now in the pockets of the Eighty-second Airborne in Iraq, and soon, Pentagon willing, it would be in the pocket of every soldier in the United States Army. His blob, Pete said, “is friendly to the Earth, it has a spirit to it, it is as humane as you want it to be, the pointed bits go into people, it can snuff your life out in a heartbeat, and it looks a little bit funny. It is,” he said, “the First Earth Battalion.”

  “What’s it called?” I asked.

  “The Predator,” said Pete.

  For the next hour or two, Pete hurt my chakra, in many, many ways, with his Predator. He grabbed my finger, placed it in the hole, and twisted it 180 degrees.

  “You’re mine now,” he said.

  “Stop hurting me,” I said.

  He grabbed my head, and stuck the pointed bit in my ear.

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Stop.”

  “This is a great Iraqi story, by the way,” said Pete.

  “The ear thing?” I asked, getting up from the floor and brushing myself down.

  “Yeah,” said Pete.

  “What does the Iraqi story have to do with putting the Predator in someone’s ear?” I asked.

  Pete began to tell me, but a Marine commander standing near us shook his head, barely perceptibly, and Pete fell silent.

  “Sufficient to say,” Pete said, “the Iraqi who didn’t want to stand up stood up.” He paused. “You want a bit of pain compliance?” he asked me.