Marine vet credits LSD and MDMA with helping him “come home from Vietnam"

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The treatment involved a series of Schedule I drugs—including psilocybin (the hallucinogen in “magic mushrooms”), DMT (the active ingredient in ayahuasca) and LSD—meaning they are banned by the federal government and believed to have a high potential for abuse and no medical value. “For four days I was at it: The first day it was ayahuasca, the second day mushrooms,” Parsons says. “The third day, I just played golf. I'd never putted so good in my whole life, before or since. I mean it was like the green was saying ‘Hit it is here, Bobby,’ and it would go right in.” On the fourth day, Parsons took “good old-fashioned LSD.” The drugs helped him relax and “talk through a lot of stuff. Tears. It was not easy,” Parsons says in his gruff voice. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is “not a happy, pleasant thing,” he says, explaining that he relives many of his traumatic experiences during a session.

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...his family, friends and employees saw a change in his demeanor. He was nicer, softer, even kind. “I’m worried about Dad,” Parsons’ son said at the time. “He’s been calling me more and he’s so nice to me. I worry that he found out that he’s going to die shortly.”

But Parsons wasn’t dying. For the first time since he learned how to kill and remain calm under enemy fire, Parsons actually felt like his old self. “What I will tell you,” he says, “it’s been 50 years since the war and I finally came home.”

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On March 1, 1969, Bob Parsons was carrying a rifle through a rice paddy in the Qu?ng Nam province in Vietnam. As an 18-year-old grunt with Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, the Maryland native was painfully aware that dying 9,000 miles from home was a very real possibility.
“I wasn’t there four hours before I saw my first taste of grisly combat,” the billionaire founder of GoDaddy says in his distinct Baltimore accent.On his first day operating off of Hill 190, the North Vietnamese threw a grenade at his battalion, but it didn’t go off. A soldier picked it up and tried to hurl it back, but it exploded and he “got pretty mangled,” Parsons says. The next night, the squad’s point man was walking on a dike when he hit a tripwire, detonating another grenade. The soldier’s legs were shredded and Parsons carried him to the medevac unit. His team went on ambushes every night, slogging through paddies, covered in leeches and mosquitoes. One pitch-black night, a month after arriving, Parsons was second point man on an ambush, moving through a village, when he hit a tripwire.

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