Book Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Okay, so it's been two days.

And I've already finished another book.

To be fair, Jon Ronson's writing is very readable. The topics are often absurd, seemingly larger-than-life, but that's the sort of thing he becomes involved in. My first experience of his writing was with The Psychopath Test which was an interesting look at psychopathy and the traits which give it away, looking less at the condition itself (these are, again, more of those "popular science" books I love) and more at how it affects people and how people treat it. Likewise, this look at the US military and its more... shall we say, "unusual" tactics in warfare, is approached in typical Jon-Ronson-style from the strange angle of its PsyOps division, the shady area of army intelligence concerned with psychic viewing, new age thinking and, as the title of the book suggests, staring at goats. Yep, this is The Men Who Stare at Goats.

If you've seen the movie you might think you know it all, but this book is wholly non-fiction (and is also disappointing in its lack of George Clooney killing goats with his mind). It concerns the soldiers who first came up with the bizarre unit after the Vietnam war and follows the trail of names down to the men and women who were trained by the creator, and the people who were then trained in psychic viewing by the soldiers who left to spread the word. At times it's hilarious, at times horrifying; Ronson's style bounces around from mood to mood as he travels around, following the threads of his story. With Ronson's books you don't exactly get a clear storyline, rather a maze-like narrative of names and places to follow which gets only more confusing at it goes along. But the beauty of his writing is that it all ties together neatly, end points returning to starting points, everything coming full circle so we finish with the voice of one of the men who created the whole thing.

And who are these men? They are the Jedi warriors of the First Earth Battalion, commanded by Major General Stubblebine and created by Jim Channon, a Vietnam survivor who discovered that most of his comrades deliberately fired high during the conflict. To combat this, he envisioned a new kind of army, one which used non-lethal methods to disarm enemies and keep the peace. The Men Who Stare at Goats sees the use of this division turned to the dark side by military officials, looking at the peaceful methods which were subverted and used for psychological torture, but also examining the successes of this secretive operation as they worked undercover in various conflicts.

This is gonna be a short review because, although first published in 2004, I don't really want to spoil this book. Jon Ronson's books are filled with absurd, strange-but-true stories, accounts from the people who were there, who made it all happen. Always heartwarming, mostly funny, sometimes dark, it's hard not to feel for the people Ronson talks to.