The Men Who Stare at Goats (3 page)

“Where did this happen?” I asked.

“Down in Fort Bragg,” he said, “at a place called Goat Lab.”

“Glenn,” I said, “will you tell me everything about Goat Lab?”

And so Glenn began.

Goat Lab, which exists to this day, is secret. Most of the soldiers who live and work within Fort Bragg don’t even know of its existence. Those military personnel not in the loop, said Glenn, assume that the rickety clapboard hospital buildings dating from the Second World War, situated down an unpaved track in an overgrown wooded area, are derelict. In fact, they are filled with one hundred de-bleated goats.

The goats weren’t covertly herded into these buildings just so the Jedi Warriors could stare at them. Goat Lab was originally created as a clandestine laboratory to provide in-the-field surgical training for Special Forces soldiers. During this more conventional phase of the goats’ lives, each one was taken through a heavy steel soundproofed door into a bunker and shot in the leg using a bolt gun. Then the Special Forces trainees would rush the goat into an operating theater,
anesthetize it, dress the wound, and nurse it back to health. Goat Lab used to be called Dog Lab, but it turned out that nobody wanted to do all that to dogs, so they switched to goats. It was apparently determined within Special Forces that it was just about impossible to form an emotional bond with a goat. In fact, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), goats have historically made up an unusually large percentage of the estimated million animals on the receiving end of covert experiments within the army. Most goat-related military activity remains highly classified, but from time to time some details have leaked out. When an atomic bomb was detonated in the sky near Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific in 1946, for example, most of the four thousand animals that had been dispatched by the military to float around underneath the explosion on a boat known as the Atomic Ark were goats. They wanted to see how the animals would fare with the fallout. They fared badly. Additionally, several thousand goats are currently being transformed—on an air force base—into a weird kind of goat/spider hybrid. “Spider silk is truly a prized biomaterial that’s really been kept from mankind simply because, up until now, only spiders can make it,” an air force spokesperson explained to CBC news in Canada. “Once a spider-cell gene has actually become part of the goat’s genetic makeup, that goat will produce spider silk on a very cost-effective basis for many years to come. The magic is in their milk. A single gram of it will produce thousands of meters of silk thread that can be woven into bulletproof vests for tomorrow’s military.”

And now there was the work undertaken inside Goat
Lab—the de-bleatings and shootings and so on. Could all this, I wondered, explain how a master sergeant had managed to kill a goat just by staring at it? Perhaps, before he got to his goat, it was already in shaky medical condition: some goats were recovering amputees; others had been cut open, had their hearts and kidneys scrutinized, and were then closed up again. Even the luckier goats—the ones that had only been shot—were presumably hobbling around Goat Lab in eerie silence with their legs in plaster. Perhaps the master sergeant had been staring at a particularly sickly goat? But Glenn Wheaton said he couldn’t remember anything about the health of the goat in question.

“How did the master sergeant get sick as a result of stopping its heart?” I asked.

“To generate enough power,” Glenn replied, “to generate enough force of intent to damage the goat, he damaged himself. Everything goes with a cost, see? You pay the piper.”

“What part of him got damaged?” I asked.

“His
heart.”

“Huh,” I said.

There was a silence.

“Can
you
stop a goat’s heart?” I asked Glenn.

“No!”
said Glenn, startled. “No! No, no, no!”

Glenn looked around him, as if he was afraid that the very question might implicate him in the act and put him in the bad books of some unseen spiritual force.

“Do you just not
want
to do it?” I asked.
“Do
you have the power to stop a goat’s heart?”

“No,” said Glenn. “I don’t think I have the power to stop a goat’s heart. I think that if one trained oneself to get to that
level, one would have to say, ‘What did the goat ever do to me?
Why that goat?’”

“So who did achieve that level?” I asked. “Who was the master sergeant?”

“His name,” said Glenn, “was Michael Echanis.”

And that, said Glenn, was all he knew about Goat Lab. “Glenn,” I said, “are goats being stared at once again post-September 11?”

Glenn sighed.

“I’m out of the military,” he replied. “I’m out of the loop. I know no more than you do. If I phoned Special Forces I’d get the same response they’d give you.”

“Which is what?”

“They would neither confirm nor deny. The very existence of the goats is hush-hush. They won’t even admit to
having
goats.”

This, I later learned, was the reason for the de-bleating. It was done not because the Special Forces soldiers were required to learn how to cauterize the vocal cords of the enemy, but because Special Forces were concerned that a hundred bleating goats on base could come to the attention of the local ASPCA.

Glenn was looking a little panicked. “This is Black Op stuff,” he said.

“Where can I go from here?” I asked.

“Nowhere,” said Glenn. “Forget it.”

“I can’t forget it,” I said. “It is an image I am unable to get out of my head.”

“Forget it!” said Glenn. “Forget I ever said anything about the goats.”

But I couldn’t. I had many questions. For instance, how did all this begin? Did Special Forces simply steal General Stubblebine’s idea? It seemed possible, given the timeline I was beginning to piece together. Perhaps Special Forces feigned chilly indifference to the general’s animal-heart-bursting initiative and subsequently instructed Michael Echanis, whoever he was, to begin staring. Maybe they simply wanted the glory for themselves in the event that staring an enemy to death became a tool in the military arsenal and changed the world forever.

Or was it a
coincidence
? Were Special Forces, unknown to General Stubblebine, working on the goats already? The answer to this question, I felt, might provide some insight into the U.S. military mind. Is this the kind of idea that people
routinely
have in those circles?

After I left Glenn Wheaton I tried to find out everything I could about Michael Echanis. He was born in 1950, in Nampa, Idaho. The old lady who lived down the street from him was “a real grouch,” according to a childhood friend, “so Michael blew up her woodshed.”

He fought in Vietnam for two months in 1970, during which time he shot twenty-nine people—“confirmed kills”—but then parts of his foot and calf were blown off and he was shipped back home to San Francisco, where the doctors told him he’d never walk again. But he confounded them and by 1975 had instead become the nation’s leading exponent of the Korean martial art of Hwa Rang Do, teaching such techniques as invisibility to Special Forces at Fort Bragg.

“If you have to be by a wall with horizontal brickwork, don’t stand vertically,” he’d tell his Green Beret trainees. “In
a tree, try to look like a tree. In open spaces, fold up like a rock. Between buildings, look like a connecting pipe. If you need to pass along a featureless white wall, use a reversible piece of cloth. Hold up a white square in front of you as you move. Think black. That is the nothingness.”

This nothingness was important to Echanis. Within that nothingness, he found that he could kill. A former martial arts colleague of Echanis’s named Bob Duggan once told
Black Belt
magazine that he considered Echanis basically psychotic. He said Echanis was always on the verge of creating mayhem, always thinking about death and the process of death, and that this character trait had lodged itself in Echanis’s psyche around the time of his twenty-nine confirmed Vietnam kills and the subsequent blowing off of his foot.

“Look at your target’s arms or legs,” Echanis would tell his Green Beret trainees. “Don’t look at his eyes until the last second. You can freeze a person by locking on to him with your eyes for a split second. I walk up to a person not looking at him, suddenly I look intently at him. As our eyes make contact, he looks at me. At that split second, his body is frozen, and that is when I hit him. You can talk smoothly. Go into a monotone. ‘No, I’m not going to stab or attack you.’ Then do it. If you’re totally relaxed in eyes, body, voice, it will not occur to the other person that you are ready to move on him.”

In the mid-1970s, Echanis published a book titled
Knife Self-Defense for Combat,
which advocated the controversial technique of noisily leaping in the air and spinning around while attacking an enemy with a knife. This approach was
hailed by some knife-fighting aficionados but criticized by others who believed that the leaping and the spinning might lead one accidentally to stab oneself, and that one should keep one’s footwork simple when armed with a knife.

Nonetheless, Echanis’s superpowers became the stuff of legend. One former Green Beret reminisced on the Internet:

I was open-mouthed and slack-jawed. I watched as he lay on a bed of nails while a trainee broke a cinder block on his stomach with a sledgehammer, he put steel spokes through the skin of his neck and forearms and lifted buckets of sand, then removed them with no bleeding and very little physical evidence of trauma, he had a tug-of-war with a dozen men who could not budge him a single inch, he even hypnotized a couple of the people in attendance. Green Berets were tossed around like rag dolls. The pain he could inflict was surreal. He could hurt someone badly with a finger. Mike, you’re not forgotten. The knife you gave me lies next to my beret. You tempered my soul for life. God bless Mike Echanis!

Echanis spent some time as the martial arts editor of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, the “journal of professional adventurers.” He became something of a poster boy for mercenaries, quite literally, in fact, because he frequently appeared on the covers of
Soldier of Fortune
and
Black Belt.
If you ever chance upon a 1970s photograph of a handsome and wiry American mercenary with a handlebar mustache, lying vigilant and armed in jungle terrain, wearing khaki and a bandanna and clutching a knife with a vicious serrated
edge, the chances are that it is Michael Echanis. All this made him even more famous, which is not a good strategy for a mercenary, and possibly led to his mysterious death at the age of twenty-eight.

There are a number of versions out there of how Echanis came to die. What is definite is that it happened in Nicaragua, where he had hooked up, in a professional capacity, with its then-dictator, Anastasio Somoza. Some reports say that it was the CIA who brokered the meeting between the two men, and that the agency gave Echanis a $5 million budget to teach esoteric martial-arts techniques to Somoza’s Presidential Guard and anti-Sandinista commandos.

Echanis told one Somoza biographer that the reason why he loved being in Nicaragua was that at home in the United States it was really hard to walk down the street and get into a fight. But in Nicaragua, he said, he could get into fights almost every day.

It could be argued that being paid by Somoza to help crush peasant insurrection was somewhat unheroic, but fans of Echanis told me, when I tentatively put this to them, that it made Echanis’s courage all the more outstanding, as the American people were not exactly enamored of Somoza, and the press “made the Sandinistas into saints.”

One version of the events surrounding Echanis’s death goes like this: Echanis and a few fellow mercenaries were in a helicopter, on their way to perpetrate some Somoza-inspired horror. The helicopter exploded, either as a result of a bomb planted by anti-Somoza rebels or because the passengers were messing around with grenades and one of them went off, and everyone on board was killed.

In the other version, told to me by martial arts master Pete Brusso, who teaches at the Camp Pendleton Marine Training Base in San Diego, Echanis was not in a helicopter. He was on the ground, acting too big for his boots regarding his superhuman powers.

“He used to let jeeps run over him,” explained Pete Brusso. “Special Forces would get a jeep, and he’d lie down on the ground, and the jeep would go slowly over him. That isn’t too hard to do. A two-thousand-five-hundred-pound jeep, four wheels, you divide that by four. If it goes slow enough over you, the body can pretty much take it. But if you hit the body with any speed, you’ve got a kinetic-energy shock to it.”

Pete said that Echanis had challenged some fellow mercenaries to drive over him so he could prove that his fearsome reputation was warranted.

“Well, whoever was driving the jeep didn’t realize he was supposed to slow down,” said Pete Brusso. “Oops!” He laughed. “Yeah, so he took internal injuries and died. That’s what I heard.”

“Do you think they subsequently made up the helicopter story to spare everyone’s embarrassment and possible legal recriminations?” I asked.

“Could be,” said Pete Brusso.

But in none of the stories I read or heard about Michael Echanis could I find any reference to him killing a goat just by staring at it, so I was at a dead end regarding Goat Lab.

Strangely, in fact, whenever I broached the subject of goat staring in my e-mail exchanges with former friends and associates of Echanis, they immediately, on every single occasion,
stopped e-mailing me back. I started to think that perhaps they thought I was nuts. This is why, after a while, I began avoiding crazy-sounding words like
goat
and
staring
and
death,
and instead asked questions like, “Do you happen to know whether or not Michael was ever involved in attempting to influence livestock from afar?”

But even then the e-mail exchanges abruptly halted. Perhaps I had indeed stumbled on a secret so sensitive that nobody wanted to admit to any knowledge of it.