- Ronson, Jon.
The Men Who Stare at Goats.
London: Picador, 2004.
ISBN 0-330-37548-2.
-
I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. If you take everything
at face value, you're asked to believe that U.S. Army Intelligence
harbours a New Age pentacle in the Pentagon cabal bent on
transforming Special Forces soldiers into “warrior monks” who can
walk through walls, become invisible, and kill goats (and presumably
the enemy, even if they are not goats) just by staring at them.
These wannabe paranormal super-soldiers are responsible for the cruel
and inhuman torture of prisoners in Iraq by playing the Barney the
Purple Dinosaur song and all-girl Fleetwood Mac covers around the
clock, and are implicated in the Waco massacre, the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal, and the Heaven's Gate suicides, and have “re-activated” Uri
Geller in the War on Terror.
Now, stipulating that “military intelligence” is an oxymoron, this
still seems altogether too zany to be entirely credible.
Lack of imagination is another well-known military characteristic,
and all of this seems to be so far outside the box that it's in
another universe entirely, say one summoned up by a writer
predisposed to anti-American conspiracy theories, endowed with an over-active
imagination, who's spent way too much
time watching
X-Files reruns. Anyway, that's
what one would like to believe, since it's rather disturbing to
contemplate living in a world in which the last remaining superpower
is so disconnected from reality that its Army believes it can field
soldiers with…super powers. But, as much as I'd
like to dismiss this story as fantasy, I cannot entirely do so. Here's my
problem: one of the central figures in the narrative is a certain Colonel
John Alexander. Now I happen to know from independent and direct
personal contacts that Colonel Alexander is a real person, that he is
substantially as described in the book, and is involved in things
every bit as weird as those with which he is associated here. So
maybe all the rest is made up, but the one data point I can
confirm checks out. Maybe it's time to start equipping our evil
mutant attack goat legions with Ray-Ban shades! For an earlier,
better sourced look at the Pentagon's first foray into psychic spying,
see Jim Schnabel's 1997 Remote
Viewers.
A U.S edition is now
available, but presently only in hardcover; a
U.S. paperback edition
is scheduled for April 2006.
September 2005 