by Jon Ronson
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.
So I called Glenn Wheaton again.
“Just tell me whose original idea the goat staring was,” I said. “Just tell me that.”
Glenn sighed. He said a name.
Over the next few months, other former Jedi Warriors gave me the same name. It kept coming up. It is a name few people outside the military have ever heard. But it was this man who inspired the Jedi Warriors to do what they did. In fact, this one man, armed with a passion for the occult and a belief in superhuman powers, has had a profound and hitherto unchronicled impact on almost every aspect of army life. General Stubblebine’s doomed attempt to pass through his wall was inspired by this man, as was—at the other end of the scale of secrecy—the army’s famous TV recruitment slogan, “Be All You Can Be.”
You’re reaching deep inside of you
For things you’ve never known.
Be all that you can be
You can do it
In the Army.
This slogan was once judged by Advertising Age magazine to be the second most-effective jingle in the history of U.S. television commercials (the winner being “You Deserve a Break Today, So Get Up and Get Away, to McDonald’s”). It touched the Reaganite soul of college graduates across the nation in the 1980s. Who would have believed that the soldier who helped inspire the jingle had such a fabulous idea of what “All You Can Be” might include?
Although this man was filled with the kindest of intentions and thoughts of peace, he was also, I would later discover, the inspiration behind a really quite bizarre form of torture undertaken by U.S. forces in Iraq in May 2003. This torture did not take place in the Abu Ghraib prison, where naked Iraqi detainees were forced to masturbate and to simulate oral sex with one another. It occurred instead inside a shipping container behind a disused railway station in the small town of al-Qā’im, on the Syrian border. It was really just as horrific, in its own way, as the Abu Ghraib atrocities, but because no photographs were taken, and because it involved Barney, the Purple Dinosaur, it wasn’t greeted with the same blanket coverage or universal revulsion.
All these things, and the goat staring, and much more besides were inspired by a lieutenant colonel whose name is Jim Channon.
3. THE FIRST EARTH BATTALION
It was a Saturday morning in winter and Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon (retired) was strolling through the grounds of his vast estate—it stretches across much of a Hawaiian hill-top—yelling above the wind, “Welcome to my secret garden, my eco-homestead. Fresh strawberry? There’s nothing like eating something that’s just been alive. If the ships stop coming, if history disappears and the world crushes us to death, I shall feed myself. I invite the wind! The wind will come if you ask it to. Do you believe that? Come to my banyan tree. Come this way!”
“Coming!” I said.
The banyan tree was split down the middle, and a crooked cobblestone path wove its way through the roots.
“If you want to pass through these gates,” said Jim, “you must be part mystic and part visionary and therefore able to create your best shopping list. So welcome to my sanctuary, where I mend my wounds and dream my dreams about better service.”
“Why are you so unlike my mental picture of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. army?” I asked.
Jim thought about this. He ran his hand through his long, silvery hair. Then he said, “Because you haven’t met many of us.”
This is Jim now. But it wasn’t Jim in Vietnam. Photographs of him back then show a clean-cut young man in military uniform, wearing a badge in the shape of a rifle surrounded by a wreath. Jim still has the badge. He showed it to me.
“What does it mean?” I asked him.
“It means thirty days under combat conditions,” he said.
Then he paused and pointed at his badge and said, “This is real stuff.”
Jim can remember exactly how it all began, the one precise moment that sparked the whole thing off. It was his first day in combat in Vietnam, and he found himself flying in one of four hundred helicopters thundering above the Song Dong Nai River, toward a place known to him as War Zone D. They landed among the bodies of the Americans who had failed to capture War Zone D four days earlier.
“The soldiers,” said Jim, “had been cooked in the sun and laid out like a wall.”
Jim smelled the bodies, and in that instant his sense of smell shut off. He regained it some weeks later.
An American soldier to Jim’s right jumped out of his helicopter and immediately began firing wildly. Jim shouted at him to stop but the soldier couldn’t hear him. So Jim leaped on him and wrestled him to the ground.
Jesus, thought Jim.
And then a sniper fired a single shot from somewhere into Jim’s platoon.
Everyone just stood there. The sniper fired again, and the Americans started running toward the one and only palm tree in sight. Jim was running so fast that he skidded face first into it. He heard someone behind him shout, “VC in black pajamas, one hundred meters.”
About twenty seconds later, Jim thought, Why is nobody shooting? What are they waiting for? They can’t be waiting for me to instruct them to shoot, can they?
“TAKE HIM OUT!” screamed Jim.
And so the soldiers started shooting, and when it was over a small team walked forward to find the body. But, for all the gunfire, they had failed to hit the sniper.
How had that happened?
Then a soldier yelled, “It’s a woman!”
Oh shit, thought Jim. How do we deal with this?
Moments later, the sniper killed one of Jim’s soldiers with a bullet through his lungs. His name was Private First Class Shaw.
“In Vietnam,” said Jim, “I felt like tire rubber. The politicians just waved me off. I had to write the letters to the mothers and the fathers of the soldiers who were killed in my unit.”
And when he got home to America it was his job to drive out into the countryside to meet these parents and give them citations and the personal belongings of their dead children. It was during these long drives that Jim replayed in his mind the moments that had led to the death of Private First Class Shaw.
Jim had yelled for his soldiers to kill the sniper, and they had all, as one, and with every shot, fired high.
“This came to be understood as a common reaction when fresh soldiers fire on humans,” Jim said. “It is not a natural thing to shoot people.”
(What Jim had seen tallied with studies conducted after the Second World War by military historian General S. L. A. Marshall. He interviewed thousands of American infantrymen and concluded that only 15 to 20 percent of them had actually shot to kill. The rest had fired high or not fired at all, busying themselves however else they could.
And 98 percent of the soldiers who did shoot to kill were later found to have been deeply traumatized by their actions. The other 2 percent were diagnosed as “aggressive psychopathic personalities,” who basically didn’t mind killing people under any circumstances, at home or abroad.
The conclusion—in the words of Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman of the Killology Research Group—was that “there is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98 percent of all men insane, and the other 2 percent were crazy when they got there.”)
For a while after Vietnam, Jim suffered from depression; he found he couldn’t watch his daughter being born. He couldn’t see anything that reminded him of pain. The nurses in the hospital thought he was crazy because this kind of thing hadn’t been explained in the media. It was heartbreaking for Jim to realize that Private First Class Shaw had died because his fellow soldiers were instinctively guileless and kindhearted, and not the killing machines the army wanted them to be.
Jim took me into his house. It looked as though it belonged to some benevolent wizard from a fantasy novel; it was full of Buddhist art, paintings o
f all-seeing eyes atop pyramids, and so on.
“The kind of person attracted to military service has a great deal of difficulty being … cunning. We suffered in Vietnam from not being cunning. We just presented ourselves in our righteousness and we got our butts shot off. You might get some cunning out of other agencies in the American government, but you’d have a hard time finding it in the army.”
And so it was, in 1977, that Jim wrote to Lieutenant General Walter T. Kerwin, the vice chief of staff for the army, at the Pentagon. He wrote that he wanted the army to learn how to be more cunning. He wanted to go on a fact-finding mission. He didn’t know where. But he wanted to be taught cunning. The Pentagon agreed to pay Jim’s salary and expenses for the duration of the journey. And Jim got into his car and began to drive.
Steven Halpern is the composer of a series of meditation and subliminal CDs, sold over the Internet, with titles like Achieving Your Ideal Weight (“Play this program during mealtimes. You chew your food slowly. You love and accept your body fully”); Nurturing Your Inner Child (“You release any resentment or hurt toward your parents for not meeting your needs”); and Enhancing Intimacy (“Your body knows just where to touch me. You love holding and cuddling me”).
“For over twenty-five years,” reads Steven’s web site, “his music has touched the lives of millions, and is used in homes, yoga and massage centers, hospices, and innovative business offices worldwide.”
It was at the beginning of Steven’s career, in 1978, at a new-age conference in California, that he met Jim Channon. Jim said he wanted somehow to use Steven’s music to make the American soldier more peaceful; he also hoped to deploy Steven’s music in the battlefield to make the enemy feel more peaceful too.
Steven’s immediate thought was, I don’t want to be on a list.
“Sometimes you end up on a list, you see?” said Steven. “They monitor your activities. Who was this guy? Was he posing as someone who wanted to learn the good things, but was planning to use them against me?”
I was struck by how vividly Steven recalled his encounter with Jim. That, Steven explained, is because people who work in the ambient-music field don’t get approached by the military all that often. Plus, Jim seemed to walk the walk in terms of inner peace. Jim was very charismatic. And anyway, Steven added, these were paranoid times. “We’d just come out of Vietnam,” he said. “It turned out that some of the most violent antiwar agitators were double agents. It was the same in the UFO community.”
“The UFO community?” I said. “Why would government spies want to infiltrate that?”
“Oh, Jon,” said Steven. “Don’t be naive.”
“Why, though?” I asked.
“Everyone kept tabs on everyone,” said Steven. “It got so paranoid that UFO speakers would start by asking all the government spies to stand up and identify themselves. The more you know, the more you don’t know, see? Anyway, there was a lot of paranoia. And then some guy came over and said he was from the military and he wanted to learn about my music, and that was Jim Channon.”
“Why do you think he approached you in particular?” I asked.
“Someone once said that my music allows people to have a spiritual experience without naming it,” Steven replied. “I think that was it. He said he needed to convince the higher-up military brass, the top ranks. These are people who had never known a meditative state. I think he wanted to get them into it without naming it.”
“Or maybe he wanted to hypnotize his leaders with subliminal sounds,” I said.
“Maybe so,” said Steven. “They’re very powerful things.” Steven told me a little about the power of subliminal sounds. One time, he said, an American evangelical church blasted the congregation with silent sounds during the hymns. At the end of the service, they found their donations had tripled.
“Tactical advantage, you see?” said Steven. “You want to know why evangelical churches are making so much money while regular churches are failing? Maybe that’s your answer.”
And recently, he added, he visited a friend’s office. “As soon as I walked in there, I felt irritated. I said, ‘Your office is making me feel irritated.’ He said, ‘That’s my new subliminal peak-efficiency tape.’ I said, ‘Well, take it off.’” Steven paused. “I spotted it right away,” he said, “because I’m attuned. But most people aren’t.”
Steven told Jim Channon about the power of subliminal sounds too, and Jim thanked him and left. They never met again.
“This was twenty-five years ago,” said Steven. “But I remember it as if it were yesterday. Jim seemed such a gentle soul.” Steven fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “You know what? Now that I think back, I’m not sure I ever asked him what he planned to do with all that information.”
Almost all the people Jim visited during his two-year journey were, like Steven Halpern, Californians. Jim dropped in on 150 new-age organizations in all, such as the Biofeedback Center of Berkeley; the Integral Chuan Institute (“Just as the bud of a flower contains within it the innate form of the perfect flower, so do we all contain within ourselves the innate form of our own perfection”); Fat Liberation (“You CAN Lose Weight!”); Beyond Jogging; and, in Maine, the Gentle Wind World Healing Organization (“If you attended school in America or a country with similar education practices before the age of ten to twelve years, you suffered severe forms of mental and emotional damage… . The Gentle Wind healing technology can help”).
Gentle Wind presumably offered Jim, as they have offered all who’ve passed through their gates, their Healing Instruments, the magic ingredients of which have always been a closely guarded secret, although a clue offered by the company is that they are derived “from the Spirit World, not the human world.” Imagine something that looks like a largish bar of white hand soap painted to look like a computer circuit board. That is Gentle Wind’s Healing Bar 1.3, “Requested donation $7600.” Although pricey, it “represents the new leading edge of the healing technology, significantly surpassing the Rainbow Puck III and IV” and includes “well over 6–60 MHz minimum of temporal shifting combined with millions of predefined etheric modifications.”
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 th
at 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.