A New Age Army

I recently ran across a fascinating little tidbit relating the "New Age" movement to the US Army. Its called the First Earth Battalion, and its an Army program which aspires to make soldiers into "warrior monks." Here's the story.

In 1979, Jim Channon, a Liuetenant Colonel who had done service in Vietnam, proposed to the Army, specifically Army Intelligence, a set of ideas he had developed about training the soldier of the future. He called this proposed new Army unit the First Earth Battalion. It is unknown whether or not the Army actually created an official Battalion of this name, but it is certain that they tested and adopted many of his ideas.

He had spent the seventies tooling around the states, mostly the west coast, to the places which are credited with having been the forerunners of the New Age movement in America, such as the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. It was this extensive research which Channon had gathered that eventually was distilled, through his perhaps unrealistic yet reaching mind, and put into form in the First Earth Battalion Manual.

The manual is called "The Journal of Non-Lethal Combat: First Earth Battalion," and is a tour de force explaining all of the methodologies and ideals of the FEB. Among them are yoga, tai-chi, macrobiotic diet, primal scream therapy, meditation, chakra work, animal tracking, etc. The ideals behind the FEB are that we need to move past war as a way of solving our problems, and that if soldiers focused on helping others, such as planting gardens, or building houses and schools, then the earth could ascend to a higher consciousness. From the manual:

"Chinese monks were often attacked by robbers. They developed a new fighting system based on using the force of the attacker against him. Likewise the soldiers of the First Earth will learn martial arts with the same ethical basis. No Earth soldier shall be denied the kingdom of heaven because he or she is used as an instrument of indiscriminate war. The conscience will be developed together with the ability to neutralize the opponent."

Also:

"Just like many systems… when a nation or government becomes old, it is so full of its ideas [that] it has no room for new ones. Well, there are New Age ideas with great power for the first body that decides to systematically use them. THE EARTH BATTALION WILL HEAR THEM ALL."

Channon wrote that soldiers should do things such as, when entering a hostile or enemy territory, carry a lamb in and set it at their feet, and, glassy eyed, hug them, while a speaker on their pack is playing indigenous music and words of peace. If the enemy is hostile still, then the music should change to disconcerting sounds such as out-of-key acid rock, animals being slaughtered, or some such thing (interestingly enough, the FBI blasted the Branch Davidians 24 hour with tapes of rabbits being slaughtered, jets engines, monks chanting, and the Nancy Sinatra song "These Boots Are Made for Walking." The military also uses these tactics against prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, and god knows where else.) Of course, according to the manual, if the enemy continues to be hostile, you shoot them in the head. The idea, though, is to use psychological force, instead of brute force, and to prepare one's mind to be capable of high psychological powers.

One has to read the manual to get the full effect. It outlines basically every aspect of how to become a "warrior monk," and how to effectively change the world after doing so. As nutty as all of this sounds, it sure would be better than the current paradigm in the US military, which, sadly, is still DIVIDE-LOOT-RAPE-TORTURE-CONQUER.

One of the more interesting things that came out of the FEB that the US Army actually spent years testing, and is apparently still testing, is the power of psychic powers to inflict harm on an enemy. At Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Army Intelligence had a room with a goat, and men would sit and stare at it, trying to "hone in" and stop the goat's heart, psychically. Allegedly, this happened at least once in the eighties, although the guy who dropped the goat suffered "sympathetic damage" and had heart problems as a result. A book was written by UK documentarian and author Jon Ronson, called "The Men Who Stare at Goats," about this phenomenon. Actually, it is being made into a feature film right now with George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, and Ewen McGregor.

More on New Age high wierdness to come!

Happy Trails!