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Because Ronson follows the story wherever the questions lead him, you might find yourself on one page laughing at a man who claims to be able to stop a hamster's heart with his mind, and then a few pages later contemplating the very definition of torture. It was in this context that individuals within the intelligence community successfully pushed for the creation of a super-secret military unit, one that would experiment with honing and weaponizing supernatural and paranormal powers--the ability to walk through walls, turn oneself invisible, read minds and, as the title suggest, kill goats just by staring at them. He touches on everything from an elite unit of psychic warriors testing their powers on livestock in a small building at Fort Bragg, to the Heaven's Gate cult, to an alleged CIA murder, to modern psychological torture techniques used in Iraq and Guantanamo. And in the end, it's more a story of Ronson trying to get to the bottom of this concept of "soldier monks" (as one person calls the paranormal soldiers) than it is a concrete story about the soldiers themselves.
After the Vietnam War, as this story goes, the U.S. Not as cohesive as Ronson's THEM: ADVENTURES WITH EXTREMISTS, and ultimately probably not as successful, but overall a wild and entertaining ride that surprisingly leads to some very topical issues. It's these last turns that give the book some weight. military was re-examining its tactics.
Ronson wanders from source to source, some well-informed and some undoubtedly whack-jobs, and story to story. Morale was low, and they badly needed to develop some new strategies and weapons to regain superiority. Ronson states in the first sentence of the book, "This is a true story." It's a much-needed statement, because the book so quickly delves into unbelievable weirdness that it's easy to forget that this is a journalistic endeavor and not a total farce.
I hope the movie is as good as the book, especially that it was film in my Municipality of Bayamon, Puerto Rico.Anyways, read the book and then go and see the movie. I read this book, and I couldn't put it down. It is that interesting.
A definite must read. I feel he just tells the story and the truths are laid out by the people he interviews who actually lived it. I am going to buy his other book "Them" on Friday. I feel this book is written in a very entertaining style, yet, its truths are something we all should be made aware of. Jon Ronson doesn't inflict his opinions on us.
One of the trained elite should write a book under a false name just to let the world know, not of their missions but what and how they advance human ability. But I'm very glad this book came out and others will follow. This book was a fun read, had some good info but I was hoping it would open up to the bigger stories of the elite (black ops) at fort bragg who are trained with much more super human ability, are all over the world and are in for life. So hope their is a book 2 or someone comes out with all the black dirt and info on the human ability, people need to know how to train and be super human for everday life not just to kill when told to.
It explains a lot of the craziness that went on and possibly much of the insanity that has happened recently in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanimo Bay.You might say it takes you from the Peace Movement to the Bowel Movement.(referencing the mythical "brown note" that the Army has been searching for, not the quality of the book) The book follows the U.S. Army's introduction to what later became known as the New Age movement.
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