The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson

[rachelmanija]

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror.

This hilarious and eventually horrifying account of America's bizarre forays into mind control, super-soldiers, and other forms of military weirdness begins with a general stubbing his nose in an attempt to walk through a wall. At first I wondered if the book was nonfiction or an elaborate put-on. Then I got to the part where a bunch of American psychic spies were delegated to a shack to which they had to bring their own coffee because as they officially didn't exist, their coffee budget didn't exist either. This eventually became a focus of a great deal of resentment.

At that point I decided that the story had to be true, or at least the author had to believe it was true, because that sort of detail is too good to be invented. Later Ronson references a number of people (often from the scary borderland in which the lunatic fringes of the martial arts, New Age, and military communities intersect) and events, such as the CIA's plot to give Fidel Castro LSD, which I had already heard of. I'm not sure that everything in the book is correct, but I bet dollars to donuts that a whole lot of is.

Ronson melds a history of American military nuttiness with current events and his own adventures attempting to track down the legendary man who killed a goat by staring at it. This is complicated by some of his contacts refusing to speak on the record, and other being complete lunatics -- sometimes lunatics employed by the US government and let loose on American citizens and America's accused enemies alike. The depiction of the completely nutso schemes to make better warfare, and how they play out when various branches of the military are working at cross-purposes and not consulting with each other, is simultaneously funny and chilling. Ronson makes a convincing case, and one which I haven't heard before, that some of the weirder stories to come out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were the result of PsyOps experiments on prisoners.

Very readable, very funny, very disturbing: Dr. Strangelove meets narrative nonfiction.

Thanks to telophase for the loan!

Comments

[smtfhw.livejournal.com]

I really should overcome my prejudice against Ronson as a journalist and give the book a go...

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the First Earth Battalion stuff was the inspiration for Zac Penn on Suspect Zero? It all sounds fairly similar. Or perhaps it's just all the same nutty/scary archetype?

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

That sounds like wacky historical fun!

[epj.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! My husband would love this book.

[homasse.livejournal.com]

That sounds too insane to be real, until the coffee part. And then, yes. It suddenly seems very, very true.

I so wanna read this now.

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for this recommendation; my next novel is going to touch on PsyOps, and there isn't a lot of written material about it. So this is definitely a must-read. :)

[j-d-finch.livejournal.com]

One of the great things about taking LSD is telling your mentor/role model in the early days (Sixties) that you didn't take LSD until he and his pal Tim Leary said it was ok. I remember being in high school and hearing about rock stars (Beatles, Stones, Doors) taking it and thinking "come on -- what do they know?"

But when Prof. Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) of Harvard went with it, so did I. You should have seen the beatific smile on his face when I told him, forty years later, that he helped me change my life.

I can't imagine taking it on anyone else's terms. Ken Kesey (Sometimes A Great Notion, One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest), who was part of a government study of the effect of LSD, perhaps would have been better off personally and artistically without the experience.

For some reason I think that Castro would be -- pardon the expression -- a trip on acid. I would take remedial Spanish just to understand what he says under the influence.