1970: Military Prison Acid Experience (1,500 words)

I was in a military prison the first time I took LSD. It changed my life.

I joined the Air Force in Sept. 1969 after buying hook, line, and sinker into a recruiter's story that I'd never have to carry a weapon if I enlisted. Country bumpkin that I was, I'd never heard of the conscientious objector option. In my heart, I believed the Vietnam War was wrong, but knew I'd never have the guts to flee to Canada once my draft number was called. The Navy or Air Force seemed the best alternative.

Fate played a dirty trick when I was chosen to be a military policeman and had to undergo war training for another two months after six weeks of basic training. When that training was completed, I was sent to Beale Air Base near Marysville-Yuba City, California. My job was guarding B-52 bombers. Over the next few months while walking around those massive "weapons of mass destruction," I began thinking seriously about the war and what I would do when I got my order to fight. In that career field, the odds for being sent to Nam were exceedingly high. I was also smoking a bit of dope, reading many of the underground newspapers that were being passed around, listening to the lyrics of Dylan, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and other antiwar musicians, and talking to some of the soldiers who'd returned from the war. Kent State was the final straw. I knew then that if there was an enemy, it was the U.S. government and not any Asian country. My order came shortly after Kent State. I was supposed to take a month of leave, report to a base in Texas for another month of war training, and ship out to a base in Southeast Asia where B-52 bombers were taking off and bombing Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam.

I took the month off, but never went to Texas. I was in a car wreck, returned to Beale, tried to claim whiplash, got laughed at by the military doctors, and started hanging out with two soldiers involved in the antiwar movement within the military. They were putting out a small underground newsletter. We would hang out in their room smoking dope, discussing revolution, listening to music, and putting together stories for the newsletter. They were the ones who turned me on to applying for conscientious objector status.

My commanding officer found out what I was up to and decided to court-martial me. When given the order one more time to proceed to Nam, I said, "I don't think I'm mentally or physically capable of killing another human being." I never said a direct "no," which made a big difference in the outcome of the court martial. I was charged with the military crime of "willful disobedience to a lawful order," which carried a maximum punishment of five years of hard labor and a dishonorable discharge. At the court martial, I was found not guilty, but guilty of the lesser crime of "negligent disobedience" to a lawful order. I was given a six-month sentence.

I spent the first six weeks in the jail at Beale Air Base. Then I was transferred to Lowry Air Base in Denver, Colorado, where the Air Force sent non-violent criminals in the hope of "rehabilitating" them and sending them back to duty to serve out the rest of their four-year obligations.

The Lowry program, to me, was a kind of brainwashing program. The prisoners were herded into barracks that housed up to 100 people. The routine was somewhat like basic training, but included rehabilitation classes we had to attend to get our heads straightened out. Some of these pumped a lot of patriotic nonsense into our heads and there was constant psychological pressure to admit our crimes and see the need to serve out our "bad time" (prison sentences) before going back to duty. If we didn't follow the program, we'd be stigmatized for the rest of our lives with bad military records and would never find a job or be able to live a decent life. The prison psychiatrists, chaplains, and authorities were professionals who knew what they were doing. Most of the prisoners were too young and inarticulate to put up much resistance. Also, there was the constant threat of being sent to the federal prison in Fort Leavenworth (with the accompanying imagery of brutal guards, time in the "hole," physical violence, etc.) if we didn't play the game.

I was, as far as I know, the only "political" prisoner among the 500 or so prisoners on the base. All the others were busted for drugs, being AWOL, theft, and other non-violent crimes. I stubbornly refused to admit I'd committed a crime. I insisted I was incapable of being rehabilitated. The psychiatrists, however, succeeded in twisting my words around, showing the inconsistencies and lack of logic in my arguments, and began to put a lot of doubts into my head. People like me, they said, could be kept in the program indefinitely, even after completing their sentences. The threat seemed real and scared me. I was probably more confused about my life, my future, what I'd done, family relationships, and my place in the world than I'd ever been.

There were many hippies and counterculture types in Denver in 1970. Some of the prisoners who'd passed through the rehabilitation course and returned to active duty could go into town during their off hours. There were a lot of drugs on base and they found their way into prisoners' hands, as well. I'd made friends with several "heads" in the prison and we were able to sneak away occasionally for some tokes off a hash pipe. During the two hours of "free time" the prisoners were allowed at night, we could listen to music, read books, write letters, or just chat. Some of the prisoners had their own stereos with headphones.

One day around halfway through my prison sentence, one of the "heads" turned me on to a hit of windowpane acid. I took it early in the afternoon before attending one of our psychiatric lectures and workshops. I started coming on in the middle of the class. It was excellent acid and I had no problems dealing with it. All the typical physical symptoms and sensations were there, but what I remember most distinctly is a feeling of absolute acceptance of everything. All was as it was supposed to be and all events of the past were as they were supposed to be and all events in the future would be as they were supposed to be. Each of the prisoners, the psychiatrists and guards, the mountains surrounding us, the physical objects in the room, and the buildings had its own significance and meaningfulness. It was my first experience of cosmic awareness and interconnectedness, my first experience of seeing and feeling the cosmic humor inherent in all things, and I just sat there in my chair (surrounded by about 30 other prisoners) with a big shit-eating grin on my face, completely absorbed in the experience, the new thoughts and emotions, and the awareness that everything would be OK.

Later on when we prisoners were marched in the snow to the chow hall about a half-mile away, I observed the most incredible sky and sunset I'd ever witnessed. The cold wind penetrated my skin and stirred my thoughts and emotions. I felt at peace (as if I belonged to the prison) and at one with everything and everyone. That night, well beyond the peak of the acid trip, I spent two hours engrossed in the sounds of a Grand Funk Railroad album playing repeatedly through the earphones of a fellow "head's" stereo. That feeling of confidence, acceptance, and appreciation for each moment of one's life continued throughout the remainder of my prison sentence. I continued peacefully and passively to resist the military's attempts to rehabilitate me, but at the same time I harbored no ill feelings toward them. In the overall scheme of things, I realized they had their roles to play, too. They gave up on me and released me with an "undesirable" discharge when my prison time was up.

For the next several years I continued my psychonautic adventures and lived a life of abandonment to the winds of fate. I probably took more than 75 acid trips and came away from each one with the same sense of acceptance that I experienced first in prison. I have never held any bitterness about the prison experience, and consider it an integral and important part of my life education. I believe the many paths I have followed were necessary steps in determining the current path I am on. Fear has not played a large role in my life; rather, the acceptance of chaos and confusion as the norm has played the larger role. Whatever happiness and peace I have in my life now has stemmed, I believe, from that first prison acid trip. It taught me how to smile, no, how to laugh at the absurdity of mankind's attempts to control things.

 

---

 

Thanks for posting that.
It puts some things in perspective...

 

Destiny.

 

thats a good story

 

i love this story. would be nice to place it in ´Back to the garden´ as wel

 

haha i always thought gandalf was a tripper

 

hahaha no doubt about that

 

Nice to hear you came out of there without getting brainwashed. LSD surly helps one see past the BS.
Windowpane back then, was great indeed.

 

great story, I have had similiar experiences with shrooms, it's like total comfort and warmth but not alien at all

 

Great story Shadows.My experiences were with window pane also---can definately relate.

 

I'm glad to see this story has resonated with all of you. I did a quick google check of "Captain Clearlight" and "windowpane." There's an interesting five-page storyabout him in a 1996 issue of SF Weekly. Worth checking out, I think.