Читать книгу Voices of Long-Term Sobriety - Группа авторов - Страница 13

April 2002

I JOINED THE Navy in 1943, and that’s when the drinking started. Right after boot camp, I was sent to a service school and was allowed liberty. The Navy still had hammocks then, and after a night of learning to drink beer, it was very difficult to stay in the hammock. After service school, I reported to an LST and participated in the invasion of France, and after the invasion was sent back to Omaha Beach. There wasn’t any drinking on the beach except for the bottle of scotch I had taken with me prior to the invasion.

Then I was assigned to the staff for the boat units that were formed for taking the army across the Rhine River. I traveled from unit to unit as they advanced with the army through France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, and found a wide variety of booze was available. I made my acquaintance with Cognac and Calvados. There was a song popular at the time that began “Mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy”; our version was “Mares eat oats and Calvados and headaches in the morning.”

Drinking got me into various situations during the war that could have been serious, but I always seemed to get away without any disciplinary action. One occurred during the Battle of the Bulge when we were in Liege and had just come back from the front. My buddy and I were out after curfew, drinking, wearing our normal uniforms, which consisted of army khakis and a Navy foul-weather jacket. We were locked up for the night after we told some MPs that we were filling submarines with helium and flying them up to the Rhine River and were on our way back for another one. We were released in the morning to the officer-in-charge, and when we got back to headquarters, the admiral’s yeoman said, “We received a report listing several charges against you and recommending that you be court martialed.” But he added, “The admiral hasn’t seen this, and mail gets lost during the war, so keep the report as a souvenir. But behave yourselves on the next trip.”

That was the pattern during my whole naval career. There were many things I could have gotten punished for, but somehow I always got away with them. In fact, I received five good conduct medals. But this wasn’t the case back home. The drinking got worse from year to year until my wife left me to go home to her mother. Then one morning, in the spring of 1959, being unable to function aboard ship, I tried to commit suicide by drinking what I thought was a potent poison. I also put on a Broadway show while doing it, and the Navy sent me to a psychiatric ward. The only thing I learned from that was to never drink poison again, as I hated the process of having my stomach pumped. I spent the next three months in the Navy psychiatric ward. At that time, the Navy didn’t have alcoholic treatment centers.

Then the miracle began to happen. I was put back on active duty and transferred from the hospital to the admiral’s staff in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in August 1959. This is not how the Navy usually fills vacancies on an admiral’s staff, but I think my Higher Power stepped in and started leading me out of the alcoholic life, as I seemed incapable of doing it on my own. Soon after, that my wife, who with our five children was living in Connecticut, went to bed one night totally depressed with her lot in life. Her brother, an Air Force pilot who’d been killed in a plane crash in 1954, appeared to her in a dream and said she would be in Hawaii on the 24th of November. She awoke the next morning full of hope and peace and, against the advice of her family, doctor, and priest, made arrangements to come to Hawaii. She and our five children sailed on an Army transport, arriving in Hawaii on November 24.

I went back to AA. I had previously gone to a few meetings in Boston in 1957, but when the ship left the Boston area, I started to drink again. In Hawaii, I met a wonderful group of people at what was then the Hickam Group. My sponsor called me every morning and made arrangements to pick me up that evening to go to a meeting. The women in the group gave my wife a tremendous amount of help and love at the same time. AA became the most important thing in our lives. My home group met on Wednesday and Saturday nights, and except for the rare time when I was on duty one of those nights, nothing was ever scheduled to interfere with the meetings. Most meetings were open, and my wife went to them with me four or five times a week. She also got involved with the new Al-Anon group that was getting started. There weren’t that many AA meetings in Hawaii at that time, and probably about 100 or so people in AA, but it was great traveling to different parts of Oahu during the week to catch a meeting, especially taking part in the discussions on the ride to the meeting and on the way home. Besides going to meetings, five or six of us would meet once a week, alternating homes to read a chapter of the Big Book or the “Twelve and Twelve,” and spend a couple of hours discussing it. There was no time limit on these informal get-togethers.

Then one night at a meeting, I experienced the biggest thing that ever happened: the light came on inside my brain and I realized that I was an alcoholic and just couldn’t drink. After that, I no longer thought of a drink—or of the waterfront bars in foreign ports with the dim lights, music, and excitement—as being attractive. Instead, I knew that a drink would lead to a drunk with the usual consequences: with me broke, looking for a place to sober up, and trying to get out of trouble. The acceptance of being an alcoholic and knowing without a doubt that I couldn’t drink were the starting points of enjoying sobriety.

One day, I was complaining to my sponsor about some problem in my life and he said, “Things are bad, but bad in relationship to what?” That statement has stayed with me all these years. When I have a problem or situation in my life, I remember that statement. Nothing that has happened to me over the past forty-one years is as bad as the day the Navy put me in a locked and padded cell, took away my belt, shoestrings, and razor, and assigned personnel to look through the peephole in the cell door every ten minutes.

In the summer of 1963, after four years of sobriety, I was transferred to the Washington, D. C., area. The first thing I did was find a home group that met on Wednesday and Saturday nights. I stayed real active in AA for several years, attending several other meetings a week, and sponsoring newcomers. I also was able to give a talk about AA to the psychologists at the local Army hospital, and it was the seed planted for the start of an AA group there.

After forty-one years of sobriety in AA, life and my involvement with AA have slowed down quite a bit. I still go to two meetings a week, one at the local mental health center which is only a mile from the house; I enjoy walking over there on Tuesday evenings. I have eternal gratitude for Alcoholics Anonymous for the years of sobriety, peace, serenity, and joy of living that I have been able to experience.

When I first started in AA, I began each day asking God to help keep me sober that day, and ended each night by thanking him for another day of sobriety. I still end each day that way, as I have done almost every night during the past forty-one years. It is a routine for me, but every once in a while I pause to reflect on what it really means. I do it every night so that God won’t change his mind, as I truly believe he helped lead me from the pits of alcoholism to the AA way of life.

Bill H.

Alexandria, Virginia