Blast from the Past – First Earth Battalion Manual
This article hails from November of 2009 and references a topic which was still poignant at the time. I’ve been fascinated by Jim Channon since I first learned about him decades ago and occasionally I reference the document mentioned below. I hope you go down the rabbit hole that is the human potential movement and see some of the promise I do and some of the danger.
For those of you who have read the book or seen the movie, “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, you will be familiar with the First Earth Battalion Manual. It’s real and so is its author LTC Jim Channon. There was a time when the Army was looking into a variety of ways to do things differently after our nation’s experience in Viet Nam.
The manual is really a blueprint for such thought and is worth reading if for no other reason than for its historical value or as an intellectual exercise. You can access it here.
As for the movie. Find it and watch it. It is entertaining but witness it with an open mind. Names have been changed and characters (I mean this both in the real and figurative sense) have been created in many cases from an amalgamation of those in the book. Additionally, the screen writers took a great deal of poetic license in the creation of the “New Earth Army Battalion”. It is a mishmash of intelligence organizations, the DoD remote viewing program, and the short-lived Trojan Warrior program conducted at Fort Devens. While I wouldn’t call it an anti-war movie as it is much more slapstick than poignant, it is in the vein of “Catch 22” or “M*A*S*H”, exposing the goodness of men in uniform surrounded by the insanity of war.
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