Psychedelic Marine

by alex seymour

  Thanks to the training methods, everything I had accomplished physically when I was twenty was still doable two decades later. For years I’d been running regularly and in the gym several times a week, and now there was no sign that my body was not up to the task. Beyond the physical conditioning, I spent many evenings and the odd weekend learning new tactics with new weapons. Abseiling, shooting, unarmed combat, mountain climbing, amphibious assaults, yomping (trekking with full kit), navigating—the key requirements and skill set of the modern marine had not changed much, and apart from the odd arched eyebrow from some of both the younger and the more seasoned guys, I slotted back in quickly and without any drama.

  The marines immersed me in new and risky activities on a regular basis, and I loved it. When we have new experiences, our bodies release a feel-good hormone, dopamine. When we face something risky, they release a stress hormone, cortisol. Those two together are a potent combination, and that’s before you include the surge of endorphins thanks to all the rigorous exercise. In an age of increasing self-medication, these natural highs were working wonders. Judging by the faces of the marines around me, this heady biochemical mix was a sustaining daily fix.

  For the most part, the men the marine reserves were successfully putting through commando training were older—much older than regular recruits. About half of them had already served time as regulars, and so many of them were well into their mid-to-late thirties. Training and working with them was a real eye-opener. They were not just broiling bundles of testosterone. A significant portion of them were well educated. When we weren’t operating tactically, two men in the troop insisted on conducting their private conversations entirely in fluent Spanish. One marine was an architect; another had a PhD in astrophysics and worked as a research scientist at Cambridge University. The troop boss had a master’s degree in finance, and my section commander was a thirty-eight-year-old quantity surveyor with two degrees, formerly bored out of his mind by his day job.

  Furthermore, another marine had a PhD in astrophysics and had lectured at a prestigious central London university. This man, I won’t embarrass him by mentioning his name, had to develop a fatherly-like patience with us, as he fielded our ignorant queries into the nature of his civilian work and entertained us with the esoterica of the cosmos during our rare downtime. Our downtime came as we finished a training session, perhaps on urban combat, and the next team went through their training cycle. We’d pass the time amusing ourselves by sitting at the feet of this particular marine-doctor of astrophysics, asking him to explain complex cosmic phenomena in plain language. He’d patiently pitch in with the latest theories in theoretical physics of how the cosmos was constructed or the way it operated. We listened, but most often we baited him: “Explain string theory in layman’s terms and in less than ten sentences. Ready? Go!”

  Put on the spot like this, he always stepped up, even though we couldn’t really understand. It was amusing to experience the contrast between his mini field lectures and the close-quarter battle instructor’s training we had listened to only a few minutes earlier, such as the advice he gave about clearing a room. You only exit a room and announce it is “cleared” once you’ve checked that the enemy corpses in the room are definitely dead and no longer a threat. And the best way to do that is using the eye punch—by poking your thumb into a corpse’s eye socket to make sure he is really dead. The distance between lethal combat and the subatomic world was beyond reckoning.

  Surrounded by this company of men, I felt at home. All of them, despite their educations, had chosen to abandon—or reject—their careers and comfortable lives to take up arms full time and learn how to kill other men for a cause they believed in. Not a choice widely accepted.

  Not long after I had reenlisted, the reserve unit I joined was approached by the ex-sergeant major of Zulu Company, 45 Commando. He was a magnetic character who had chalked up twenty-two years of service, two Afghan tours, and an MBE (Member of the British Empire). He announced that the regular marines were asking for volunteers to serve full time on the next deployment to Afghanistan with either 42 or 45 Commando. I was stoked. I did not hesitate for a second to volunteer, and so before I knew it, I was filling in a form for a twelve-month full time contract to serve on the next operational tour in Helmand Province. That same sergeant major was now here in California at the Mountain Warfare Training Center, where one day he gave a speech, quoting words attributed to George Orwell: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

  After a year training with marine reservists, we finally got our orders: we were to be close-combat marines in fighting companies in 42 Commando. That was my old unit, from my first enlistment, as a grav (gravel belly—a marine from a rifle company) in 42 Commando. It was like coming home. Within that command I was deployed full time to a regular company, M Company, known as a fighting company composed of 150 marines.

  Although I was happy to be “going home” to 42 Commando, my concern was about being accepted by the younger men. I was more than twenty years older than most of them. But I needn’t have worried. In the new unit I quickly made friends, among the first of which was a young Scotsman called JJ, a reservist who had been mobilized back into the regular marines with me. We met when we were issued our desert kit, and we hung out together while waiting to be posted to our units.

  He was a firecracker. At twenty-two he already had more than five years’ service as a marine. He had been everywhere with the corps. His civilian job was as a teacher in a Scottish school, and he loved it— really loved it. He had joined the marines as a reservist at age seventeen and had completed his basic training and commando course, earning his green beret at age eighteen while in his first year at university. He had all the attributes that a good Scottish boarding school is known to cultivate: self-assurance, leadership, integrity, self-discipline. Ridiculously, instead of the corps posting him to 45 Commando, which was based in Scotland, he had been posted to 42 Commando, five hundred miles from home. He took it on the chin and became dependent on me for lifts back to London, where he would stay with his father on weekends. His father was the most senior minister in the Church of Scotland and Honorary Chaplain to the Queen and lived in a flat attached to a church in Kensington. For us to get to London and back to Plymouth each weekend was an eight-hour round-trip, plenty of time for us to get to know each other. We’d laugh as he’d tell me about his turns on the dance floor surrounded by his mates, dancing to Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man.” I’d lap up stories of him carousing around his hometown, Edinburgh, with his university friends. Like me, he had a passion for music festivals, his favorite being RockNess.

  Before we headed off to Afghanistan, we had six months’ training with 42 Commando in the UK. After that, we would pull a six-month tour of duty “in theater.” Pre-war commando training in M Company consisted of icy river swims, backbreaking log runs and lung-ripping distance runs, speed marches in full fighting kit, combat marksmanship, IED hunting, gathering HUMINT (human intelligence), battle tactics, and prisoner-of-war handling.

  The fitness regime was harsh, but I had known it was going to be tough. Between my two enlistments, I had the dubious honor now of having been both the youngest and the oldest marine in the unit. The early morning speed marches that went on mile after mile after mile, in groups of up to one hundred men, up and around the infamous Killer Hill, were one of the closest things that the marines have to a psychedelic experience. The perfectly cadenced boots of one hundred men, crunching in unison, became a hypnotic beat that subsumed your sense of self. The subliminal message was: It’s about us. Together we are better and far more powerful than you.

  At the end of one speed march, I stood in the front row of one hundred men, all of them dripping with sweat, mist rising off their backs. The company commander, private-jet smooth and no spring chicken himself, approached me. He leaned in, peering closely, inspecting the beginnings of wrinkles
on my face. He frowned and said, “Fucking hell. How old are you?”

  “Forty-two, sir.”

  He rolled his eyes and shook his head, pinched his nose and blew snot out onto the deck.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Fine, sir.”

  I felt better than fine. I still had a choice at this point: I could stick with this outfit or go back “outside,” back to closing corporate deals. The endorphins, the camaraderie—there was no comparison. No way was I going back. I was born to do this, in the perfect place at the perfect time.

  What’s more, this was even better than my first enlistment. Standards had not dropped since the 1980s but had risen. The caliber of the men the marines were recruiting was excellent. These young men seemed to be better listeners and less egotistical than recruits had been when I was last a marine. None of them displayed the old-school hard-man sensibilities just for the sake of posturing. In the late 1980s a lot of the “old sweat” marines had narrow views. Aged nineteen I spent three months living above the Arctic Circle in temperatures often down to –25°F, undergoing arctic warfare training, wearing six layers of clothing, and sleeping in snow holes and a tent sheet. As we sailed home after that training, I had been accosted by some unhappy, heavily mustachioed Falklands War vets. They took umbrage that my hair was too long, saying I looked gay, and threatened to pin me down and shave my head. The irony was that where I came from in West London, their cropped hair and walrus mustaches made them the ones who looked like gay Village People stereotypes. But it didn’t matter now. I was surrounded by the new generation. Now the old guard was out. The ubermacho culture that certain marines exhibited in the 1970s and ’80s was now practically nonexistent. The young marines still passed all the same tests as former generations of marines had—still delivered the results—but there was no need for superfluous macho posturing. Each man was judged on his actions on ops in the field.

  I didn’t have much time for reflection. The physical was front and center. The daily runs around Dartmoor’s hills were punishing, and I only just managed to keep up with the men, whose average age was about twenty-one. Even the sergeant major was younger than me. Morale was high, and the younger marines viewed me as a curiosity. I felt I could still contribute and add an element of maturity to the team. My progress reports in M Company validated this. We learned to trust each other and worked well as a team, and that was all that mattered. We would be ready for our arrival in theater in “Ganners” (Afghanistan).

  Another marine I befriended was Jason, a twenty-nine-year-old who had joined the corps five years previously. We bonded over stories of hedonism and debauchery, spinning dits (stories) about our adventures in clubland. I was pleased to have found a kindred spirit. Essentially, he was someone who could distinguish between fulfilling his duties within a dedicated military life and enjoying the downtime. We both liked to dance and party. He was a good bootneck (marine) and exemplified the core attributes and ethos listed on the marines website: unselfishness, determination, good sense of humor, cheerfulness in the face of adversity, high physical fitness. He had it all.

  He told me stories about his first tour in Afghanistan. Once, in a mountainous area, a NATO unit, which shall remain nameless, came under attack by the Taliban. Back then, tactically, the Taliban were much more willing to attack en masse in the conventional sense of close combat, even though they were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, many of them using ancient rifles and rusting weaponry. Describing the lopsidedness of this battle, Jason said, “It was like the Ewoks fighting with bows and arrows against Imperial storm troopers.” Instead of a lone Taliban gunman being gunned down, as was typical by 2011, previously much larger groups of enemy died when they engaged. But the element of the story that most struck me was that some troops had become so enraged during the battle that in the minutes after combat, one or two of them went around smashing in their dead enemies’ heads with bricks and rocks. Killing them with bullets and grenades wasn’t enough—those Taliban had just tried to kill them, and they weren’t getting off that lightly just by dying. As uncomfortable as I felt by this, I also imagined the Taliban doing the same to the marines—and to me—if the tables had been turned. I didn’t realize how naïve my judgments were then, as it wasn’t long before we all discovered that what the Taliban were doing was cold-bloodedly worse.

  The recruiting copy on posters and billboards around the country reads: “Royal Marines: It’s a State of Mind.” The inference being that having the correct state of mind will enable you to accomplish what you set out to do in life—in this case to survive and win in battle. Although I was fully a marine in body, heart, and mind, I also was not one-dimensional. Far from it. Unbeknownst to any of my marine commanders or buddies, I was a keen explorer of states of mind that were the antithesis of military culture. And that is the flip side of this story.

  3

  Infinite Insight

  This is the secret that can’t be told.

  TERENCE MCKENNA

  I n the 1960s and ’70s, people took psychedelics and became anti-war. Not me.

  I started altering my consciousness using alcohol. Who hadn’t? By the time I was twenty-one, I’d been drinking for four or five years. Plymouth’s notorious Union Street was a haven for men seeking a drunken night out. Violence broke out almost every night when everyone spilled out of the clubs. I was no different and got into fights. In retrospect, none of them would have occurred if alcohol had not been involved. Nine times out of ten, the violence was caused by somebody’s ego being bruised, so that person felt he had to defend himself or attack.

  By 1989 ecstasy had become popular in the bars and clubs of Plymouth and London. Strangers smiled at and hugged each other in chemically induced waves of warmth and affection. Although I explored consciousness-altering substances as a civilian, it wasn’t until I was almost forty that I first smoked DMT as a white powder made from the roots of Mimosa hostilis, an Amazonian DMT-containing plant. The experience came a couple of years before I reenlisted and was called up to Afghanistan. On the Internet DMT was often called spice. The mind-expanding, and some might say mind-blowing, effects last only eight or ten minutes, but that’s long enough to change your life. After one short, spellbinding experience, my entire view of the world changed—and much for the better. More importantly, my view of death changed, too. In fact, the shift from fear of death to a belief—a certainty—that our souls, or consciousness, survive physical death was a significant contributing factor in my decision to go to war. DMT, or rather the reality I experienced through using it, prepared me to face my own death. Some might call it a spiritual awakening, but I’d define it as a consciousness awakening.

  I had heard of DMT back when I was twenty, having read about it in i-D, a UK magazine. I made a mental note then that if I ever got the chance to try it, I would. Back then, pre-Internet, information about and access to DMT was rare. But twenty years later it seemed to be everywhere. There was a lag of a few months between finding an opportunity to try it and actually taking it, and during the interim I did some research. The Internet was a trove of information, although decidedly mixed in terms of accuracy and reliability. Some of the sites or video clips about DMT had been viewed more than three million times. Things had really changed over the past two decades. One book in particular held my attention. It was by an American researcher who in the mid-1990s was one of the first to receive US government approval to study the effects of DMT in a clinical environment. It was called DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Dr. Rick Strassman.

  With the proper dose, set, and setting, DMT is safe, and I was psychologically prepared to experience it. I was with two good friends, one of whom acted as our guide. David warned me that I was about to experience one of “the strangest, most perplexing, confounding, incredible, mysterious, mind-boggling, and amazing substances known.” Using DMT, he said, was serious business, not something to undertake lightly or recreationally. “This is for the serious seeker,” he explained, “although you
won’t really understand until you do it.” Explaining some of the science behind DMT, David also told us that one of the reasons the DMT experience felt so natural was because DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) occurs naturally and endogenously as a neurotransmitter in our brains.

  The three of us were tucked away in a safe location in a rural log cabin. After I made myself comfortable on a large, brown leather beanbag, David loaded the recommended quantity into the pipe. The advice was to lie back, close my eyes, and relax. Purportedly, three hits on the pipe is the magic number, so three hits it was. Breathing the first one in, I held the smoke in my lungs for eight or nine seconds, exhaled, and then repeated.

  I’d barely let out the second inhalation when my vision started to dissolve; I had just enough time to take in the third lungful before everything I knew and understood about the real world completely transformed. The next several minutes changed my life forever. In the space of a few short seconds, I was shot—cleanly, smoothly—out of this dimension and into another that was beyond comprehension. Leaving the confines of my body, I was no longer bound by three dimensions; I was tumbling into a void that rapidly morphed into the most spectacularly beautiful sight I had ever seen. Colored lights swirled kaleidoscopically through ever more dazzling geometric shapes, which propelled me through the universe at warp speed, approaching the speed of light, entirely alert, completely lucid. After a minute or so I found I could, to some extent, control the sublime vistas by changing the focus of my thoughts, all the while remaining fully cognizant. After about two minutes I had the unshakable sense that I was not alone. I had moved beyond the colors and geometric shapes into a different space, full of sentience, sensing a presence that hinted at an infinite and boundless love, possessing an awesome intelligence and power. Is this God that I’m experiencing for the first time? I felt safe, protected. This must be what it feels like to be dead. At one point I had resigned myself to the fact that I actually was dead and wouldn’t be returning to my body or Earth’s 3-D existence. But it didn’t worry me—I was glimpsing heaven. My ego had been utterly vaporized, and an entirely new aspect of consciousness was made apparent. I became aware that my left-brain rationality had put me in a semidormant state for my entire life up until this moment. Is this what it feels like to be truly conscious? The third eye of esoteric lore had blossomed, burst into life with the brightness of a lighthouse in the very center of my mind, revealing me for the first time as a soul-being, as opposed to a thinking rational human.