I am so pissed off . . .

Pretty much every time I see a movie that features an "ex-green beret", I'm amazed at the breadth of skills and capabilities they have - ex-green berets know how to fly helicopters and jet aircraft, fire LAW rockets in an enclosed space with no effects from the backblast (I think there must be a backblast suppressor switch they haven't told the rest of us about), they have martial arts skills to rival Bruce Lee's or Buffy Summers' and they're frankly much better shots than I am (especially with machine guns fired from the hip - these guys routinely make kills that would make a sniper envious, whereas I can't hit a wall from inside a building shooting like that.) I can tell you from personal experience that they're not teaching that stuff to us in the Q course.

I've always suspected that there's a super-secret ex-green beret school run by the government that does teach those skills. It's always been my greatest hope that when I finally quit running around and playing army, a mysterious stranger in a grey suit is going to arrange for me to attend this course (probably held at Area 51) so that I, too, can officially be an ex-green beret.

Now I find out here in the Guardian (a British newsrag so left wing that it pisses the Trotskyite wing of the Communist Party off) that the Army has been holding out on the training again. And this time, it isn't ex-green berets at all - I'm apparently the only SF soldier out there who doesn't know how to walk through walls and how to stop a goat's heart from beating by staring at it. The article notes that:

I tracked down a former Special Forces psychic spy to Hawaii. Glenn Wheaton, retired sergeant first class, was a big man with a tight crop of red hair and a Vietnam-vet-style handlebar moustache. He told me how in the mid-1980s Special Forces undertook a secret initiative, codenamed Project Jedi, to create super soldiers - soldiers with super powers. One such power was the ability to walk into a room and instantly be aware of every detail; that was level one.
Level two, he said, was intuition - making correct decisions. "Somebody runs up to you and says, 'There's a fork in the road. Do we turn left or do we turn right?' And you go" - Glenn snapped his fingers - "We go right!"
"What was the level above that?" I asked.
"Invisibility," said Glenn. "After a while we adapted it to just finding a way of not being seen."
"What was the level above invisibility?" I asked.
"Uh," said Glenn. He paused for a moment. "We had a master sergeant who could stop the heart of a goat ... just by wanting the goat's heart to stop. He did it at least once."

This pisses me off - if anyone needs to know how to deal with hostile goats, it's the guys serving in Afghanistan.

Not only is psychic goat-killing a practical skill, it's now going to be absolutely necessary to the self esteem of any SF soldier. Personally, I just know that I'm going to get busted out as a phony the next time the subject comes up: "So, you were a green beret?" my new aquaintance will ask. "Well, we prefer to be called special forces," I'll reply modestly, glancing down at the floor and blushing slightly. "Yeah, well, let's just see you kill that goat over there."