The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson (2004)

"America fundamentally wants to think of itself as being good, and that we're fundamentally right in what we're doing, and we have a very compelling responsibility for the free world. And looking at some of these issues is troubling, because if America does have a darker side it threatens your hold on your view"

Jon Ronson's first published book is a hilarious and deeply unsettling look into the clandestine world of military intelligence and the tactics deployed in the name of it. The quote above is from a man who remains convinced that the CIA murdered his father as a means to keep him quiet about some of these clandestine activities. Before reading this book, I would've likely written this theory off as nonsense. Upon finishing it, I am pretty much certain that the CIA did exactly that. 

However, before we get to any of that, we should start at the beginning - which spawned the title of this book. Ronson began his forray into the weird space where the military meets the ethereal by becoming aware of a man named Jim Shannon, author of the book 'First Earth Battalion Operations Manual'. Jim's book posits that new age, sometime spiritual, sometime cerebral, tactics can be applied in combat situations. Basically saying that there are ways to unlock the powers of the mind to gain an advantage in military situations. This could include playing confusing noises, weird music, influencing their thoughts telepathically or trying to gain the love and respect of the enemy through acts of kindness, before presumably blowing them apart once trust has been gained. The department, seeming to exist but not exist, is known as PsyOps and one of the more bizarre rumours around their capabilities is that, somewhere out there, a man once killed a goat stone dead just by looking at it. 

Thus Ronson goes in search of this man, and not only turns up a vast array of interesting characters along the way but begins to learn just how much of the First Earth Battalion's ethos was being deployed in the post 9/11 'War on Terror'. And so begins an endlessly fascinating and quite terrifying journey into the darker reaches of what it takes to keep us all free and safe. 

Being that Jon Ronson is the writer and main protagonist of this journalistic odyssey, and given the kooky subject matter at hand, the book - initially at least - is often laugh-out-loud funny. There is a particularly funny section about the effectiveness of flyers in the propaganda war between the US and Iraq. However, no matter how much humor there is it quickly gives way to much more serious and troublesome matters. If you drew a venn diagram, wherein one circle was the military-industrial complex of the western world, and the other was the far out, new age, eastern-inspired philosophies of people like Jim Shannon, the intersection where they meet is where this book resides. Ronson begins to realise that the idea of staring a goat to death might not just be folly after all, and there are likely much darker arts at play than that. 

From the horrors of Abu Ghraib, to Guantanamo Bay, even going as far back as the days of MK Ultra, his thorough and endless research on these topics start to paint a quite worrying picture. During a meeting with a seemingly innocent Manchester man, who spent 2 years wrongfully imprisoned in the Guantanamo, he looks Ronson in the eye and says the words "you don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes". He, it seems, is not wrong. There is seemingly no end to the rabbit hole and the more Ronson pulls at the threads, the weirder and scarier things seem to get. The story of the Olson family, which takes up the majority of the end of the book, is a movie in itself. I won't spoil it here but the delve into Operation Artichoke leaves quite a mark on the psyche and forces the reader into some pretty difficult questions. 

What does it take to keep us safe from people hell bent on doing us harm? The answer is not a pleasant one, it seems. When you look at things from a macro level, numbers and figures of dead and injured don't really resonate, but when you boil things down to an individual level, there are often dire consequences of these actions and, as a result, some serious moral quandaries to be considered. Knowing this, what makes this book so compelling is that everything is presented in such a graceful and elegant way, it makes those tough pills not easy to swallow, that's the wrong term, but I suppose makes them palatable enough so that you can begin to comprehend the idea of swallowing them. This is Ronson's gift. He writing style is, of course, funny and insightful but everything is so thoroughly well-researched and understood that it comes across as conversational and makes highly complex matters that much easier to understand. Which probably makes the whole thing scarier, truth be told. 

We don't necessarily ever get round to answering whether it's true that a man killed a goat, or could kill a goat, simply by staring at it with enough intent. By the end, it doesn't really matter anyway. What does become apparent, however, is that there are many other activities going on behind the scenes of our lives of privilege and freedom that we probably shouldn't know about and there are plenty of things happening that make the goat thing seem trivial by comparison. As a result, this book serves as an outstanding dive into the machinations behind the war on terror, leaving plenty of room for philosophical debate along the way, and is an expertly put-together, funny, poignant and unflinching look at who we are as a society, post 9/11. It is a weird, wonderful, and wild ride that packs a surprising emotional punch. It should come with a warning as, by the end, you'll find yourself questioning everything you know and, almost certainly, trying to move inanimate objects with your mind. Good luck. 

JB.