The Men Who Stare at Goats (6 page)

I had come to believe that Michael Echanis was not, after all, the fabled goat starer. I had decided that Glenn Wheaton had been mistaken, beguiled by the Echanis legend, and that it was another Jedi Warrior altogether. Perhaps Dr. Hardt might be able to provide the answer, for it was he who retuned the brains of the Jedi Warriors in the late 1970s, and took them to a level of spiritual enlightenment within which staring a goat to death was, apparently, possible.

Dr. Hardt sat me down and he told me the story of his “fascinating, yet somewhat melodramatic” adventures with Special Forces.

It all began with a visit from a colonel named John Alexander, who turned up one day at Jim Hardt’s door with a few other military men. Colonel Alexander had headhunted Dr. Hardt, having been deeply moved by Jim Channon’s
First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.
He wanted to know if Dr. Hardt could really turn ordinary soldiers into advanced Zen masters in just seven days, and give them the power of telepathy simply by plugging them into his brain machine.

Dr. Hardt said it was indeed true, and so the quest to create a supersoldier, a soldier with supernatural powers, was set into motion right there in that building in Silicon Valley.

The colonel told Jim Hardt that Special Forces had, ever
since the publication of Jim’s manual, invited one peak-performance guru after another from the new-age and human-potential movements of California to lecture the soldiers on how to be more attuned with their inner spirits, and so on, but it had not been a success. The gurus had routinely been greeted with boos, catcalls, and theatrical yawns by Special Forces.

Now, Colonel Alexander wanted to know, would Dr. Hardt be willing to give it a try? Would he bring his portable brain-training machine to Fort Bragg?

Jim Hardt showed me the machine. You strap electrodes onto your head and your alpha waves are fed into a computer. Knobs are tweaked and your alpha waves are attuned. When this has been achieved your IQ is boosted by twelve points and you effortlessly reach a spiritual level usually attainable only through a lifetime’s diligent study of Zen techniques. If two people are strapped to the machine simultaneously, they get to read each other’s minds.

Dr. Hardt explained all this to Colonel Alexander, and he offered to give him a demonstration, but Colonel Alexander declined. He said there was a lot of classified military information stored in his brain and he couldn’t risk telepathically revealing it to Dr. Hardt.

Dr. Hardt said he understood.

Colonel Alexander felt obliged to tell Dr. Hardt that Special Forces were really quite hostile to the whole idea, which they considered mumbo-jumbo. They would in fact be “uncontrollable” and refuse to “sit still and listen.”

In that case, Dr. Hardt replied, he would accept the challenge only if the soldiers were first sent on a month-long meditation retreat.

“Well,” Dr. Hardt said to me now. “First of all, they wouldn’t call it a meditation
retreat,
because retreat is a no-no word in the army. So it was called a meditation
encampment.
And it was
hugely
unsuccessful.”

“How come?” I asked.

“The soldiers actually
brawled
with each other in the meditation setting,” he said. “They brawled out of boredom.”

And so, by the time Dr. Hardt arrived at Fort Bragg, Special Forces were still “extremely hostile,” blaming Dr. Hardt for their month’s enforced meditation, which they had considered “nonsense” and “a waste of time.”

The small, thin, and delicate Dr. Hardt anxiously surveyed the hostile soldiers, then he gently strapped the electrodes onto their heads, and onto his head too. He switched on the alpha-wave brain-training computer, and the tuning began.

“And then suddenly,” said Jim Hardt, “a tear came out of my eye and it rolled down my face and it splashed onto my tie.”

A tear almost formed in his eye now, as he recalled this moment of emotional telepathy.

“So I picked up my tie, it was still wet, and I said, ‘I telepathically know that somebody in this room is experiencing sadness.’ And I slammed my hand down on the table and I said, ‘We are not leaving this room until whoever it is owns up to it.’ Well. Two minutes of total silence. And then this hardbitten colonel raised his hand and he said, ‘That was probably me.’”

And then the colonel told Jim Hardt, and his fellow Special Forces soldiers, the story of his sadness.

This colonel had sung in his glee club at college. He had sung folk and choral music and, as his brain was being tuned, his mind filled with the memories of his glee club days some twenty years earlier.

“He experienced such joy in that,” said Jim Hardt. “But then he went straight from college to officer training school and he made an intellectual decision to give up on joy. He decided on graduating from college that joy had no role in the life of an army officer and so he consciously and willfully,
click,
turned joy off. Now it was twenty years later, and he came upon the realization that it wasn’t necessary. He had lived twenty years without joy. And it wasn’t necessary.”

On day two of the brain tuning, the soldiers strapped the electrodes to their heads once again.

“And this time,” said Jim Hardt, “both of my eyes were like faucets. And I took my tie and I wrung it. That’s how soaked it was with my tears, and so again I said, ‘Who
is
it? Who is experiencing sadness?’ And again it was two minutes before the
same guy
raised his hand and this time he recounted a story that he had lived through.”

It was the Tet offensive in 1968. The colonel was in a small forward firebase up by the demilitarized zone when the Vietcong attacked.

“And this colonel single-handedly saved their little fire-base from being overrun,” said Jim Hardt, “and the way he did this was by running the machine gun all night long. And then, when dawn came, he looked out at the piles of bleeding, dying bodies that he had caused, and he had feelings that are larger than one heart can encompass.”

At the end of day three of the brain tuning, Jim Hardt studied the alpha-wave computer printouts, and he saw something that amazed him.

“In one of the soldiers,” he said, “I saw a pattern of brain waves which is found only in people who have experience of seeing angels. We call it ‘perception of astral plane beings,’ beings that are discorporate but have a luminous body. So I was sitting across the desk from this soldier who had been trained to kill, and I asked him, in a very calm voice, ‘Do you talk to beings that other people don’t see?’

“And he spun back in his chair. He almost tipped over. It was like I had hit him with a two-by-four! And he was all nervous and alarmed and his breathing was heavy, and he looked left and right, to ensure that nobody else was in the room. Then he leaned forward and admitted it, ‘Yes.’ He had a martial arts spirit guide who would appear to him alone. And he had only told his best buddy about this, and he had sworn that he would cut his throat if his friend breathed a word of this to anyone.”

And that was the end of the story. That was all Dr. Hardt could tell me. He left Fort Bragg, never returned, and said he didn’t know which, if any, of the Jedi soldiers whose brains he tuned had gone on to stare a goat to death.

“Nonlethals only!” yells the evil medical researcher Glenn Talbot. “I repeat,
nonlethals only
! I must have a sample of him. Hit him with the foam!”

In the underground Atheon military base, hidden beneath a disused cinema in a desert somewhere, the Incredible Hulk
has escaped and is destroying all in his path. The soldiers do what Glenn Talbot has ordered. They take up position and spray the Hulk with Sticky Foam, which expands and hardens the moment it hits his body. The foam succeeds where all previous weapons have failed. The Hulk is stopped in his tracks. He struggles, roaring, against the foam, to no avail.

“So long, big boy …”
snarls Glenn Talbot. He shoots the Hulk in the chest with some kind of handheld missile launcher. This is a mistake. It makes the Hulk angrier—so angry, in fact, that he summons enough power to break through the foam and continue his rampage.

This foam is not an invention of the writers of the
Hulk
movie. It is the invention of Colonel John Alexander, the same man who recruited Dr. Jim Hardt to retune the brains of the Jedi Warriors. Colonel Alexander developed the Sticky Foam as a result of reading Jim’s
First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.

The army leaders present at Fort Knox back in 1979 had been so taken with Jim’s speech that they offered him the opportunity to create and command a real First Earth Battalion. But he turned them down. Jim had higher ambitions than that. He was rational enough to realize that walking through walls, sensing plant auras, and melting the hearts of the enemy with baby lambs were good ideas on paper, but weren’t, necessarily, achievable skills in real life.

Jim’s superiors were literal-minded men (hence General Stubblebine’s many determined efforts to walk through his wall), but Jim’s real vision was more nuanced. He wanted his fellow soldiers to find a higher spiritual plane by reaching for the impossible. Had he accepted the offer of leading a real
First Earth Battalion, his superiors would have demanded measurable results. They would have wanted to see Jim’s soldiers
demonstrably
stopping their own hearts with no ill effects, and when they failed, the unit would most probably have been shut down, in ignominy, without anyone really knowing it had existed.

This was not what Jim had in mind. He wanted his ideas to float out there and take root wherever fate decreed. The First Earth Battalion would exist wherever someone read the manual and became inspired to implement its contents however he chose. Jim imagined it would be assimilated into the fabric of the army so successfully that the soldiers of the future would act on it without knowing anything about its fantastic provenance. And so it was that Sticky Foam became an early, real-life, First Earth Battalion weapon.

The foam has had a rocky history. In Somalia in February 1995, United Nations peacekeeping forces were attempting to hand out food when the crowd began to riot. U.S. Marines were brought in to calm things down and aid in the UN’s withdrawal.

“Use the Sticky Foam!” ordered the commanding officer. And the Marines did. They sprayed the foam not into the crowd, but in front of it so that it would harden and produce an instant wall between the rioters and the food. The Somali crowd paused, looked at the bubbling, expanding, hardening, custardlike substance, waited for it to solidify, climbed over it, and carried on rioting. All this occurred in front of the TV cameras. That night, news broadcasts across America ran the footage alongside a clip from
Ghostbusters
in which Bill Murray was slimed.

(One of the deployers of the Sticky Foam in Somalia—Commander Sid Heal—later warned me against portraying the incident as an unmitigated disaster. He said they had hoped it would take the rioters twenty minutes to figure out how to scale the foam, but instead it took them five minutes, and so the worst you could say was that it was a three-quarters disaster. It was, however, the first and last time that the foam was deployed in a combat situation.)

Unperturbed by the Somali incident, the U.S. penal authorities introduced Sticky Foam into prisons in the late 1990s to subdue violent inmates before they were transported elsewhere. The practice was quickly discontinued, however, because it was impossible to move the foamed prisoners from their cells once they’d been immobilized. They were just stuck there.

But now, unexpectedly, the foam is enjoying a renaissance. Bottles of the stuff were taken to Iraq in 2003. The idea was that once U.S. troops found the weapons of mass destruction, Sticky Foam would be sprayed all over them. But the weapons of mass destruction were never found, and so the foam remained in its bottles.

Of all Jim’s ideas, the most fruitful was his insistence that military operatives and scientists should journey to the wildest corners of their imaginations, unafraid to appear harebrained and half-baked in their pursuit of a new kind of weapon, something cunning and big-hearted and non-lethal.

The foam is one of hundreds of similar inventions mentioned in a leaked 2002 air force report—
Non-Lethal Weapons: Terms and References
—which comprehensively details the latest endeavors in this field. There are a number of acoustic weapons: the Blast Wave Projector, the Curdler
Unit, and the low-frequency Infrasound, which, according to the leaked report, “easily penetrates most buildings and vehicles” and creates “nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage or death.” (Jim Channon’s successors seem more laissez-faire about their definition of the term
non-lethal
than he was.) Then there are the Race-Specific Stink Bomb and the Chameleon Camouflage Suit, neither of which has gotten off the ground yet, because nobody can work out how to invent them.

There is a special pheromone that “can be used to mark target individuals and then release bees to attack them.” There’s the Electric Glove, the Electric Police Jacket, “which jolts anyone who touches it,” the Net Gun, and the Electric Net Gun, which is the same as the Net Gun but “will release an electric shock if the target tries to struggle.” There are all manner of holograms, including the Death Hologram—“used to scare a target individual to death. Example, a drug lord with a weak heart sees the ghost of his dead rival appearing at his bedside and dies of fright”—and the Prophet Hologram, “the projection of the image of an ancient god over an enemy capital whose public communications have been seized and used against it in a massive psychological operation.”

The First Earth Battalion’s Colonel John Alexander is named as a coauthor of the report. He lives in the suburbs of Las Vegas, in a large house filled with Buddhist and aboriginal art and military awards. There were also, I noticed, a number of books written by Uri Geller on his shelf.

“Do you know Uri Geller?” I asked him.

“Oh yes,” he said. “We’re great friends. We used to have metal-bending parties together.”