The Men Who Stare at Goats (5 page)

Gentle Wind’s publicity material assures potential purchasers and company recruits that “There Are No Messiahs Here … NO MESSIAHS at the Gentle Wind Project. Please do not waste your time looking for any. There are none here.”

Nonetheless, some former members have alleged to me that Gentle Wind’s chief guru, John Miller, has over the past few years ordered his entire staff to go on the Atkins diet and wear only beige, and that the mysterious spirit-world ingredient incorporated into their Healing Bars is actually group sex. The alleged scenario is apparently something like this: John Miller sidles up to a female staff member and says—and I am paraphrasing, based on allegations made to me by former members of the group—“Congratulations. You have been selected by the spirit world to take part in our top secret energy work. Don’t tell your husband because he wouldn’t understand the energy work.”

She is then led into John Miller’s bedroom, has sex with him and various female selectees, and then, the moment it is over, John Miller says, “Quick. Build a Healing Bar.” Gentle Wind and its leaders, including Miller, are contesting these allegations and, in 2004, launched a lawsuit against the former members who made them.

One Gentle Wind customer review—from a couple in Bristol—reads, “We have noticed remarkable improvements to our cat Moya, who virtually changed overnight from a neurotic timid rescue cat into a friendly confident adventurer after we used one of the Gentle Wind healing instruments on her.”

Another customer, however, has noted, “At first I was pleased that the device did have a noticeable effect on my aura [but when I turned it over to the label marked Tranquillity] it left me feeling inwardly unresponsive to the experience. To cut a long story short, I have been using Equilibria’s Universal Harmonizers for the past five months instead and now feel very much myself again.”

Gentle Wind says that over 6 million people in more than 150 countries have used their products. They also told me that they don’t remember meeting Jim, and perhaps it was a different Gentle Wind he came across during his Pentagon-funded odyssey. They could be right, but I have not managed to find another Gentle Wind operating within the new-age or human-potential movement at that time.

Jim Channon couldn’t remember much about Gentle Wind either, although the group must have made an impact on him because he gave them a special mention in the confidential report he later prepared for the Pentagon.

Jim went through Reichian rebirthing, primal arm wrestling, which was regular arm wrestling accompanied by guttural screaming, and naked hot-tub encounter sessions at the Esalen Institute for the Advancement of Human Potential, in Big Sur, where he was counseled by Esalen’s founder, Michael Murphy, the man credited with inventing the newage movement. At no time did Jim reveal to the therapists and gurus he met how he imagined their techniques might be adapted to teach the American soldier to be more cunning.

“It is often ten years,” Jim wrote in his diary at the time,
“before the values developed in Los Angeles find themselves into rural Arkansas. What is developing today on the Coast will be the national value set ten years from now.”

This is how Jim visualized the America of the 1980s: The government would no longer have an “exploitative view of natural resources.” Instead, its emphasis would be on “conservation and ecological sanity.” The economic system would cease to “promote consumption at all costs.” It would be neither aggressive nor competitive. This, Jim prophesied, was the new value system, poised to sweep America.

Jim needed to believe that all this would happen. He was working for what his then chief of staff, General Edward Meyer, had called a “hollow army.” This was a term Meyer had coined to describe the military state of mind, post-Vietnam. It wasn’t only individual veterans who were suffering from postcombat depression and posttraumatic stress. The army, as an entity, was traumatized and melancholic and suffering from a crippling inferiority complex. Budgets were being slashed everywhere. The draft had been abolished, and the army was not an enticing career option for young Americans. Things were in a really bad state. Jim saw himself as a potential new-age phoenix, rising from the ashes to bring joy and hope to the army, and to the country he loved so much.

“It is America’s role,” wrote Jim, “to lead the world to paradise.”

Jim returned from his journey in 1979 and wrote a confidential paper for his superiors. The first line read, “The U.S. army doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful.”

A disclaimer at the bottom read, “[This] does not comprise an official position by the military as of now.”

This was Jim Channon’s
First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.

The manual was a 125-page mixture of drawings and graphs and maps and polemical essays and point-by-point redesigns of every aspect of military life. In Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion, the new battlefield uniform would include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools, foodstuffs to enhance night vision, and a loudspeaker that would automatically emit “indigenous music and words of peace.”

Soldiers would carry with them into hostile countries “symbolic animals” such as baby lambs. These would be cradled in the soldiers’ arms. The soldiers would learn to greet people with “sparkly eyes.” Then they would gently place the lambs on the ground and give the enemy “an automatic hug.”

There was, Jim accepted, a possibility that these measures might not be enough to pacify an enemy. In that eventuality, the loudspeakers attached to the uniforms would be switched to broadcast “discordant sounds.” Bigger loudspeakers would be mounted on military vehicles, each playing acid rock music out of sync with the others to confuse the enemy.

In case all that didn’t work, a new type of weaponry—nonlethal or “psychoelectronic” weapons—would be developed, including a machine that could direct positive energy into hostile crowds.

If all else failed, lethal weapons would be used, although “no Earth soldier shall be denied the kingdom of heaven
because he or she is used as an instrument of indiscriminate war.”

Back on base, robes and hoods would be worn for the mandatory First Earth Battalion rituals. The misogynistic and aggressive old chants (“I don’t know but I’ve been told, Eskimo pussy is mighty cold …”) would be phased out and replaced by a new one: “Om.”

Military marching bands would learn how to become more like traveling minstrels. “Singing and dancing” and “the elimination of the desire for lust” would be as important a part of training as martial arts.

“A Warrior Monk is one who has no dependence on lust,” wrote Jim. “A Warrior Monk is one who has no dependence on status. This regimen is not meant to produce puritanical
fanatics but is clearly designed to exclude the soldier of fortune.”

(The above portion of the manual was, presumably, disregarded by Michael Echanis, who became America’s most famous soldier of fortune in the years between allegedly staring a goat to death at Fort Bragg and dying under mysterious circumstances in Nicaragua.)

First Earth Battalion trainees would learn to fast for a week drinking only juice and then eat only nuts and grains for a month. They would:

fall in love with everyone, sense plant auras, organize a tree plant with kids, attain the power to pass through objects such as walls, bend metal with their minds, walk on fire, calculate faster than a computer, stop their own hearts with no ill effects, see into the future, have out-of-body experiences, live off nature for twenty days, be 90%+ a vegetarian, have the ability to massage and cleanse the colon, stop using mindless clichés, stay out alone at night, and be able to hear and see other people’s thoughts.

Now all Jim had to do was sell these ideas to the military.

I think Jim Channon is a wealthy man. He certainly owns pretty much an entire Hawaiian hillside, with an amphitheater, a village worth of outbuildings, yurts, and gazebos. Nowadays he does for corporations what he did for the army: he makes their employees believe they can walk through walls and change the world, and he does it by making those things sound ordinary.

“Do you honestly believe,” I asked Jim at one point during
our day together, “that somebody can reach such a high level of warrior monkdom that they can actually become invisible and walk through walls?”

Jim shrugged.

“Women have been known to lift up an automobile singlehanded when their child is under it,” he said. “Why not expect the same from a Warrior Monk?”

Jim told me—just as he had told his commanding officers back in 1979—that “warrior monk” might sound like a crazy new military prototype, but was it any more crazy than the old prototypes, like cowboy, or football player?

“A Warrior Monk,” said Jim, “is someone who has the presence of the monk, the service and the dedication of the monk and the absolute skill and precision of the warrior.”

He had told his commanders this at the officers’ club in Fort Knox in the spring of 1979. He had arrived there a few hours earlier and had dragged in as many potted plants as he could find around the base. He arranged them into a circle, a “pseudo-forest.” In the center of the circle he lit a single candle.

When the commanders arrived, he said to them, “To begin the ceremony, gentlemen, we’re going to do a mantra. Take a deep breath and as you let it out sound
eeeeeeee
.”

Jim told me, “At this point, they laughed. A few of them chuckled, a little bit embarrassed. So I was able to say, ‘
Excuse
me! You’ve been given a set of instructions and I expect them to be carried out at high level.’ See? Tapping right into the military mind-set. Second time we did it, the place became unified.”

And then Jim began his speech. He said, “Gentlemen, it is
a great honor to have you in this place of sanctuary where we can mend our wounds and dream our dreams of better service. Together, with all the other armies of the world, we will turn this place around, and a new civilization can be born that does not know boundary lines but knows better how to live in the garden and knows that we are one thought away from paradise.”

The commanders were not laughing anymore. In fact, Jim found that some were almost in tears. Like Jim, they had been crushed by their experiences in Vietnam. Jim was speaking to four-star generals and major generals and brigadier generals and colonels—“the top people”—and he had them captivated. In fact, one colonel present, Mike Malone, was so moved that he leaped to his feet and yelled, “I am mullet man!”

Noticing the perplexed expressions on the faces of his fellow military commanders, he elucidated. “I push the cause of the mullet because he is a low-class fish. He is simple. He is honest. He moves around in great formations and columns. He does damn near all the work. But he is also
noble.
He is like another noble thing I once loved, called ‘soldier.’”

Jim continued his speech: “The only time that rose-colored glasses don’t work is when you take them off,” he said. “So join me in this vision of being
all
that we can be, for this is the place where the First Earth Battalion begins. This is the place where you have the right to think the unthinkable, to dream the impossible. You know we’re here to create the most powerful set of tools for the individual and his team, for that is the difference between where the American soldier
is today and where he needs to be to survive on the battlefield of the future.”

“You know what this story is about?” Jim asked me, in his garden in Hawaii. “It’s the story of the creativity of an institution you would expect to be the
last
to open the door to the greater realities. Because you know what happened next?”

“What?” I asked.

“I was immediately appointed commander of the First Earth Battalion.”

The disclaimer at the bottom of Jim’s
Operations Manual
had read that this was not the official position of the United States military. Nonetheless, within weeks of its publication, soldiers throughout the army began seriously to try to implement his ideas.

Somewhere in a strip mall in the heart of Silicon Valley is a building that looks like a long-abandoned and entirely undistinguished warehouse. Nonetheless, busloads of tourists turn up from time to time to photograph the exterior because this is the building where Silicon Valley began. It started life as an apricot-storage warehouse, but then Professor William Shockley moved in and coinvented the transistor and grew silicon crystals in the back room and won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1956.

By the late 1970s this building—391 San Antonio Road—had a new owner, Dr. Jim Hardt. He was just as much of a pioneer in his field as Shockley, just as much of a visionary, but his science was, and remains, somewhat weirder.

Dr. Hardt still works there, charging civilians $14,000 for a week-long brain-training retreat—“Mention the keyword ‘hemi-coherent’ and get a $500 discount!” says the publicity pack—in a series of tiny offices at the back. They are dark, lit only in fluorescent purple, the clocks have no hands, and the place reminded me a little of Disney World’s Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride.