Lyle P. at the 19th Annual Man To Man Conference – 2002

My name is Lyle Proust, and I am an alcoholic. I have a timer. Last time I spoke, I forgot it. And I told the group, I said, you know, from time to time I will look at my wristwatch, but unless I put my glasses on, I can't see it. And I never thought to do what Chuck did right down to start time because I never remember the start time so it's a prop. Some housekeeping things I just want to say thank you for having me here what an honor it is to be asked to come to this group and thank you to Mike for the long drive from the airport Well, there was a lot to see It just gave us a little longer meeting I don't remember all the places we saw And the committee here for all the work they've done You've just taken tremendous care of myself and the other speakers And I'm frankly not used to that kind of care And that kindof hospitality and I've only been to maybe three other men's groups and I told my wife this morning when I was talking to her I said this one really is special this has an ingredient that maybe I perhaps can't define but it's really special and were that not so I wouldn't say that I just simply wouldn't say anything but I said I really like this men's group I want to offer a couple of comments before I get into the story and that is that I'm a fairly astute observer, and so for the past few days that I've been here, I've watched and listened to a lot of the comments and the banter back and forth. And my background is Irish and Comanche, which makes for an interesting drinking combination. You know, I stand out on the back of the deck out here, and I look around and I say, this is all Comanche country. And we were a buffalo society and depended upon the buffalo for food, clothing, and shelter. and I didn't know until I got here that you white people have a sheep society so I've been listening and I plan to come back next year, not so much for the fellowship, but to learn more about this sheep thing. It's quite fascinating. I haven't noticed anything in there that pertains to food clothing or shelter. It's one of those cultural differences, I guess, that we missed in our uncivilized state. But I thank you for letting me leave here having learned something different. You know, when I got to treatment, I heard somebody say if you can't remember your last drunk, maybe you haven't had it. And it's pretty easy for me to remember my last one because national television celebrated it and international TV celebrated it. I still see bits and pieces of it, usually on A&E Channel or Discovery Channel, when they're doing some kind of a special on transportation industry and drug and alcohol situations. And the thing that I see, they take one shot, one particular film clip, and it's always the same. And it's me walking into a courtroom accompanied by my wife and an attorney followed by the other two defendants and their attorneys. And I had said one time to my wife, I've seen this a number of times it always pops up at some time that I'm not expecting and I said at one point I said you know that's painful I said every time I see that you know I said evokes a real internal pain watching that clip and my wife said that she shared that also, and it surprised me a little bit. And I said, really? I said well what's it like for you? And she said well, she said you know I'm just sure that everybody that sees that is going to think that I only own that one dress. It felt like saying I feel your pain. You know, I'm supposed to talk about what it was like, what happened, and what it's like today. So let me really start with what happened. And I figure you get what you pay for, so I'll start, stop, go back, catch up. Sometimes I connect, sometimes I don't. But, you know, you get that. You get what your pay for and that's nothing. So anyway, March 7th, 8th, and 9th for me are three very intense days. My sobriety date, and depending on who you talk to and how you count it, the date of my last drink was March 7th of 1990. I drank very heavily the afternoon and evening of that day, and it was like any other day. You know, I didn't intend to stay there and get drunk. I went over with a couple of crew members to have a few drinks. And that in and of itself was pretty unusual for me because I was a solitary drinker, especially on the layovers because I knew it was verboten. And that was a very dangerous activity. So I didn't like to have anybody around me when I was drinking. Plus, most of them were amateur drinkers, and they didn't drink as fast as I did, and that was embarrassing for me. I felt sorry for them. And I liked to go in someplace, have a drink, but I wanted to stay out of state if I didn' t like to stay or left. So it was unusual that I would be out with two crew members on this particular day. March the 8th was the morning of the arrest. March the 9th was the day that I got home after the arrest and ended up in treatment that evening. So I have three days, March 7th, 8th, and 9th, that are very intense days for me. They're kind of like three days of the Kennedy assassination or more recently 9-11 where I can look at my watch at any given moment on any of those days and I know exactly what was taking place at that moment. We had a hard afternoon of drinking and an evening, and there were some things that took place in the bar. The very things that I tried to avoid, which was the reason I went alone, and that was drawing attention to the fact that we were crew members and that we were drinking. March 8th, we flew an early morning flight from Fargo, North Dakota North Dakota to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. We landed at 7 a.m., and I walked off the airplane into a waiting group of airport police, FAA officials, company officials, and I have never been able to adequately paint the word picture of what that was like. When I was going through the big book recently with Esponsi, i saw the words in there the phrase that uh that covered it very succinctly and very clearly pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization i thought you know that says it right there um i'm not going to keep my airline anonymous for reasons that i hope you will understand as i go through this story but at that time my airline had no alcohol program it's the only major carrier that did not have a program for alcoholic pilots and i can assure you they have one now and a very good one and a good one but one of the uh very despotic um heads of the company in years past had been approached by members of the other airlines to institute this alcohol program and he was very profane man and he used a lot of expletives and told him to get out of his office that we didn't have any alcoholic pilots if we did with fire. And that was his approach. Throughout the course of that day, March the 8th, I watched my life absolutely come apart. It was like somebody ran up through a shredder. And for 12 hours that day we were detained, we were questioned by FAA people, We were issued an arrest warrant by an FAA official. We talked to Airline Pilot Association attorneys. We were taken to two separate medical facilities where we gave blood. At one of those facilities, a reporter saw three uniformed pilots escorted by two uniformed police officers, and he assumed there was a story there, and that's how the press got it. And it went all over the country like wildfire. And it stayed on the front pages and in the major news networks for some three weeks. And it was extraordinarily painful for me. Eventually, that afternoon, we were deposed by company attorneys, and we were driven back to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport at 7 o'clock that night. An assistant chief pilot drove us back, and it was silent. the car i remember looking outside in the in the dark which was just heavy heavy gloomy black night thinking you know my whole life is destroyed this is the end of it because anything that had to do with alcohol at this airline was immediately fatal it was irreversible and it was uh non-appealed it was fatal and i knew that i was not able to get home that night throughout that day i had these interesting things i had what was were in and out of body experiences where i literally felt like i was watching this happen to someone else that i that it could not be me this couldn't be happening to me the reality of it just it just couldn't take place and then i would have those moments where i'm sitting around and i look around the room and i think my god this is happening it's happening to me it's happening right now there is a doctor who works with pilots a number of them that i know over the years at airline workshops brilliant guys i mean really brilliant guys his name is dr lynn hankinson he talked about this one time he said denial he said thank god we have it and and that got my attention i thought thank god rehab it i thought that was our first struggle our first battle he said denial is a mental mechanism that protects us when the trauma is so great that we can't handle it and i thought you know that's exactly what was taking place with me that day i couldn't handle this i just couldn't and um i went after they had taken us back to the airport back to a commuter place and i was sick i was just got sick heart sick and I couldn't stay still and I just, every nerve inside of me was just coming unraveled and I went to the phone and I called my wife and she wasn't there and suddenly I remembered that I was supposed to be home that night. I was suppose to have landed in Atlanta and she had been out there for some four hours waiting on me to come in and had still not gotten home and I got a message out And all I could say was, there's been a disaster and I think I've lost my job. And I'll be in on the first flight in the morning. And I did that. And I walked through Minneapolis Airport the next morning in uniform to get on an airplane to go back to Atlanta. And every time someone would take, would turn or look at me, the shame was just beyond overwhelming. And everytime they looked at me I just, I thought, oh God, they know. I'm so ashamed. So ashamed. And I got on the airplane, and I had a first-class pass and was sitting there. And someone, there was a man and a woman that got on, and I don't remember now who made the comment. The captain and the flight attendant were both at the forward entry door. And I heard one of them say, yeah, we just heard about it. I thought, oh, God, they already know. They already know." And, of course, I knew this thing was going to sweep the airline like wildfire. I'd seen guys fired there before for drinking, and all of us would become real careful for about six months, and I would. And then we were back to business as usual. And I knew how those stories just swept the airline. Little did I know it was going to sweep the nation. I did not know that at that time. At any rate, I got home, and I've never told a story, but what I haven't said is I saw my wife sitting at the curb and I felt like I literally had to climb over the curb to get into the car. and I could not look at my wife and all I could say is, honey, I'm so sorry. And she pulled away from the curb and she said, who better than I could possibly understand how you feel right now? And we drove home in silence and she took me home and I got out and I went inside and I called a doctor that I knew. Some two years prior to this we had a daughter that we had adopted and she had run away and for reasons that I'll go into here shortly I did not handle it well I didn't handle it well at all and we had been seeing this doctor pretty much on a weekly basis for some two years and he was an extremely good therapist I had just pulled his name out of the phone book and was lucky and got a good doctor and he Was the only person I knew to call and I called him and I said I have to declare an emergency and I need to see you right away. And an hour later, I was in his office and I walked in and I told him what had happened. And I remember the look of shock and surprise on his face and he said, God, Lyle, he said this is horrible. He said this was just horrible. But he said maybe this is what had to happen. Maybe this is What Had To Happen. It was one of several comments I would hear that day that I would not understand at that moment. And he left, and he came back, and he said, I have an appointment for you to go see this other doctor at 6 o'clock tonight. Now, this was a Friday. This was May the 9th. And he told me a little bit about this doctor. I'd heard him referencing before just in some of the meetings we'd had that this doctor had a lot of letters behind his name, was very prominent in the Atlanta area, was himself a recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict, and worked with uh in substance abuse area was certified in addiction medicine and um i was struck by the fact that this was a six o'clock appointment on friday night and so that uh that told me that this was very serious that they were treating us very seriously because i didn't simply didn't know any doctors that that saw patients at that time of the night i mean you know i figured on fridays they'd be on the golf course by one and here's the doctor gonna see me at six o´clock that night so when my wife came home we drove over to see this doctor and uh he took me in his office my wife waited outside in the waiting room and and i don't remember a single thing he said to me i don'T remember any questions he asked me i do remember that i was totally open and honest as best i could be at that moment and i answered his questions as best I could with no guile no disguise, no attempt to color or change anything. I was simply not capable of it. I was absolutely shredded. And I remember, the one thing I do remember is him looking at me and him saying, Lyle you're an alcoholic and you need to go into treatment tonight. I have hated that word ever since I first heard it and at this point I'm going to go back and try to recap a little bit and then hopefully I will be able to remember where i was and come back and connect the dots but by way of uh catch up let me tell you that i was born in september 1938 in wichita kansas and um grew up uh in an alcoholic family and both parents were alcoholic um and both of them died from this disease i don't remember either of them ever mentioning alcoholics anonymous or getting to any of these rooms yeah that doesn't mean they didn't but i they certainly didn't stay and i don'T remember any referenced anywhere along the way to Alcoholics Anonymous. We didn't have a lot. We grew up relatively poor. Life was kind of a struggle. I remember being a happy kid, though. I remember a happy childhood until the first divorce came. And then all I remember is just a complete immersion in alcohol. Now that's probably not an accurate recollection, but It's my recollection. And both parents were married and divorced three times within a short period of time, and there was a lot of conflict between myself and step-parents or step-siblings, none of whom I remember, none of them I know the location of or don't even know if they're alive or dead today. But I would move when I would clash or have this conflict, I would go to the other parent and move in there with whoever happened to be an addict. house at the time and would stay for some period of time until I clashed again, and then I would go back. And if I timed it just right, there'd even be a new step-parent, new set of step-siblings. I heard Dave talking last night about playbook, and I thought, yeah, that would have been handy. But nonetheless, this was going on when I was in high school, and I was really a pretty good student when I applied myself, but nobody was watching, And so I did what kids do, and so I just goofed off. And I remember my senior year, I had three study halls and a typing class. And I didn't have anything to study. My kids weren't quite that lucky. I stayed on top of things. But I graduated from high school when I was 17, turned 18 a couple months later, and this was in 1956. And there were two things that we traditionally did at that point in time. I also grew up in the Indian community during the World War II housing project and was quite active in the powwow circus and was all over Oklahoma in the summertime. And I would remember going to a lot of small towns for the powwows and seeing drunk Indians up and down some of these streets, and that always disgusted me and shamed me. I was ashamed of it and repelled me. And the picture I had of my parents, I had nothing but disdain and contempt and disgust and a very repugnant attitude towards anything alcoholic that I'll never be like that. And I've heard similar stories all over the place. And so at any rate, I turned 18. You either got married to your high school sweetheart Not a lot of folks from where I was coming from went into college. A lot of us went in the service out of the plains of Kansas. The Navy seemed to hold a real fascination for most of them, and so off they'd go to the Navy, and there was an Air Force base there, and some would go to Air Force and few to the Army. About that time I had a buddy that came back from Marine boot camp, and boy did he look sharp in his uniform, and he and I sat around the bar one night and we drank beer beer, and he regaled me with these horror stories of boot camp. God, one after another after another. I mean, these things were grim, and they were horrible, and they were severe. And I suppose a good psychiatrist could look back on that because I said, God, I just can't wait to go do that. Actually, I wasn't sure I could. I really wasn't Sure I could. So I went as a challenge, and my first night there. I said, boy, you've made the worst mistake of your life. Bad deal. But I'll tell you, 13 weeks later, I was in solid. Of course, I went in. I just wanted to be one of the crowd, and they instantly made me a squad leader. And so I drew some unnecessary attention as a result of that. And I had done very, very well in that 13 weeks. I really fit in. And it was tough. It was structured. Tremendous amount of esprit de corps among us, the recruits, as we formed a common front against our drill instructors, which was never adequate. They seemed to have the answers. And they were impressive, impressive men. God, they were impressives. And never told us to do anything that they couldn't do with ease. And I used to just baffle me. But at the end of the boot camp scenario, there were, I don't know, 65 or 70 of us in this group, and they awarded three sets of TSC strikes, and I got one of them. And I was just enormously proud over that, three of us out of about 65 or 60 guys. I had fired the second highest on the rifle range, and when I'd gone there, I'd never even shot a high-powered rifle. And I had done real well. About four and a half years later, I came in, was now a Lance Corporal and a big E-3. And they said, the commanding officer said, they have a new program out called Marine Aviation Cadet and you're the only one in the unit that's qualified to go. I had some extraordinarily high entry scores and I don't know where those came from. I heard an Indian guy one time in Albuquerque, big guy by the name of al talking and i was sitting there and he was talking about his alcoholic parents his mom in particular and he began to cry which was unusual especially for an indian guy and uh he said you know i have to remember that my mom wasn't drunk all the time that she gave me some very important things that were good and i need to remember that and i went up to him afterwards i said thanks for saying that al I do too. I need to remember those things, that while I may have received some genes that predisposed me for alcoholism, my parents gave me a lot of good stuff. They gave me all the right things. They gave a lot to me about being honest. They taught me a hell of a work ethic. They said you always get to work ahead of the people around you and you stay later, and you work harder while you're there. And I had learned a lot of good things from my parents before the alcohol took them and they died young my dad died a really horrible death and it was a long lingering one and um uh but i remember you know that that that i didn't just get some things that were negative from now i got many many good things from them and uh and that's that's a very important part of of who i am and uh so i had these very high test scores and so I am but I was quite concerned because I knew that this flight training program required two years of college if you're coming in from the outside and that many of these guys are going to have their degrees and these are the guys I'm going to be competing and running against I tested all day I took a whole battery test it took a day and I passed them and I was I really wanted to fly I always wanted to flying but I knew that was way beyond my reach wasn't going to happen for me and now suddenly i've got this opportunity the question was did i really want to take it because i don't deal with failure very well i do not like to fail and uh i had decided that i would go ahead and risk this i was up and down back and forth for a while on this i thought no i gotta i gotta make the the effort i went home to wichita and there was a powwow and they had a special dance for me because i was going away and that imprinted me very much and um as i left i thought you know i've got an opportunity none of them are gonna have you know that if i'm successful i'm gonna get to fly i'm going to get a set of gold wings and i'm to be an officer i'm going to be a commissioned officer in the marine corps and those guys during all my enlisted time i had held him in just such high esteem and awe i thought wow is it possible that i would ever be a marine corps officer and a pilot but i was driven with this um this idea that i cannot go back i just simply can't go back and say i didn't make it i failed i washed out and they had told us when we lined up they said look to your left look to you're right one of those guys will not be here when you complete 18 months from now and i didn t want to be one of those guys and i saw them washing out all the way through the entire 18 months guys would be packing up and leaving with their heads down ashamed and discouraged and disappointed and i remember the looks on their faces throughout the entire 18 month process i always ended up right at the top right near never number one but always in the number two slot always to my shift a complete total shock dismay and surprise and i would think somebody screwed up the scores administratively somebody jumbled something because I shouldn't be here. I just shouldn't be here, and I was never able to transfer any level of confidence as I would move from one of them. We had four phases of training that we had to go through, and then I was never able to transfer any confidence from one phase to the other. I was assured that the next one, which was more advanced and more intense, this will be the one that gets me, but I never let up, and I continued to work hard. When I went to the final phase of training, I left the Florida area, of the Pensacola area, and I went to Texas for advanced jet flight training, a little town called Beeville, Texas. And I got there on a Friday afternoon, and a bunch of my buddies, we had gotten separated along the way, and, uh, I showed up, and we're all going to get together and reunite and have a good time, so flying was done for the weekend, and-and we go to the officer's club, and were throwing down some beers, and they want to go in town because it was It was a local raiding party against the local girls, and the cadets were the most aggressive of the bunch. So I was going to go with them, and I was never real gutsy with the gals unless I'd had a lot to drink. And then, of course, I turned into... I always used to say Rock Hudson. I thought, well, that's maybe not a real good example. And Indian guys don't like John Wayne particularly, So whoever it was that was smooth-swabbing to boner, that was me after I'd had it. So we go into this little town, had a little drive in, and we go in there and they go over to talk to this group of girls and I'm hanging back a little bit and I notice the driver's not talking to anybody so I go up to the driver and she turns and looks at me and gosh, she was beautiful. And, boy, I saw these gorgeous brown eyes. And all I could think of was, I looked at her and said, you've got the prettiest brown eyes I've ever seen. And I'm waiting for the glib stuff to come, and my brain just kind of went bang, slammed shut. And I's looking at her, and I've got this, oh God, I feel like an ass. And I'M reading her face, and it's, I think she agrees with that. So I turn around and I walk, I just walk away. I'm like, I'll have a few more drinks. And then try this again when I'm a little quicker and smoother. Then I never went back, but I did see her get out of the car and go indoors to the restaurant. They had a restroom in there in a restaurant, and I see her, and I'm going, God Almighty. A cute butt. She had turquoise shorts on, pretty legs. And I thought, you know, and I never had a real long shopping list, and I thought wow, what a package. And the next day I was in town with a cadet buddy of mine setting up a check-in account because I was going to be there about six months, and we're on our way back to the base, and I see her and her girlfriend zip into this same restaurant. I just happened to look over and see them. I didn't think I'd ever see her again. And I said, there's that girl. And we pulled in there. Of course, I'm sober, and so we went in and bought them a cup of coffee and talked nice to them, and she gave me her name And they eventually said, well, okay, you can call me. And so we began to date. And two weeks, and she pinned my wings in bars on me on February the 25th of 1963. It was her 20th birthday. Wow, what a day that was. God almighty. You know, I keep looking at these wings. I can't believe these gold wings are mine. And I got gold bars up here. I'm a second lieutenant. I'm thinking, what? You know it's almost dreamlike. And I've got this girl. And so he came home to Wichita. I drove up from D-Ville through Texas up to Kansas, and we got married about two weeks later. I was on leave. And March the 9th that I mentioned earlier when I was being diagnosed as an alcoholic was my 27th wedding anniversary, and she and I just passed 39 years together last March the 8th. And one time I was speaking, and I said, And I'm one of those rare alcoholics who doesn't speak about marriage in multiples. And there was a little chuckle, and my wife was in the crowd. And afterwards she said, you know, I heard the comment. She said, I just want you to know that's certainly not your fault. I've never thought of her as particularly quick-witted and glib but she followed it up with a statement and she says, as a matter of fact the only reason I stayed with you is because I couldn't stand to admit I'd made a mistake I tell you, she is a she's a super gal She is 59 now. She's physically beautiful. She is beautiful internally. I have discovered there was so much more to her than that cute butt and those legs and those brown eyes. God, what a delight she has been. And we launched our Marine Corps career, and I stayed in for another seven, seven-and-a-half years. Well, I had a terrific career. terrific career. I had a lot of accomplishments, a lot of things that I was very proud of. We immediately had two small sons eight days less than a year apart and no I'm not Catholic neither is she and we just were having a good time and birth control wasn't real effective at that point in time so we had these two kids that were eight days left in a year part And I left for Vietnam. They were 18 months old and 6 months old. I went over with what I think is probably one of the finest squadrons in the Marine Corps ever put together, a group of just truly superb guys, and we still have our reunions every two years. And some of them didn't come back, but we always have our moments, and we remember those guys. And I came back from Vietnam, and I'd flown a lot of missions and had medals and some decorations and all of that. and spent another two-and-a-half years as a flight instructor in Kingsville, Texas. But as I looked at this, and I had gotten a regular commission, which were very competitive back in those days, and I didn't think that I would get one based on my educational status. And I competed and got the regular commission when I was in Vietnam. But as time went on and I began to look at this— and I dearly loved the Marine Corps, I loved the flying, I love the people, and I really wanted to stay in for the rest of my life. But I looked at it and I said, you know, I'm going to end up spending a minimum of four, probably closer to six years away from my family. And my family, I had always made that devout commitment that my family was never going to be like the one I grew up in. We're just not going to have that. We're going tobe solid, stable, secure, loving. I wanted a stay-at-home mom. I didn't care what the finances were. I wanted her home for the kids. And so finally, in a very painful decision, I sat down at the 11th hour and I resigned. And I went with Northwest Airlines. I received my discharge July 15th of 68, and by August 5th of 58, I was in class at Northwest Airlines。 I had a nearly 22-year career there before the wheels all came off, and I had good reputation there. I loved what I did. I was good at what I do. I loved to fly, and I have a good reputation. And I picked the airline, of course, based on crazy things like where am I going to live. I didn't do any equity-to-debt ratio studies or any of that stuff. And little did I know that I picked an airline that was subsequently known by the sister airlines as Cobra Airlines because you never knew when they were going to strike. And then I went through six labor disputes, strikes, unemployment periods in the first ten years. My career goal then shifted from becoming a captain to getting a W-2 form that had all the months of the year in it. which I didn't think was going to ever occur. But things settled down, and I had made captain when this thing happened. After we had gotten to Northwest, we had talked about adopting a child even before we got married. And so that's what we did. And it took us 14 months, and it was a long, hard process because we already had natural children around, and we adopted a little Chippewa girl. And she came to live with us when she was 17 days old. Beautiful little girl. Beautiful little girls. Every father's dream. She couldn't walk past me without me saying, Don, come over here and give me a hug. And she'd come over and I'd look at this little girl and I would say, thank you for being my girl. And she would say thanks for being my dad. And the idea was that Barbara would have this daughter and I had the two boys naturally. But what I didn't know of course was what little daughters do to their dads. She absolutely took my heart. She was the center of my universe. And I had passed up being a captain And as she grew up, and she was coming through school because I didn't want to be gone. I wanted to be there while she was home. And as he was approaching her senior year, I said, okay, it's time for me to be a captain. So I went to Chicago to take a special test that I had to do before I could submit a card for this. And she chose that afternoon to run away from home. She knew what was going on. This was a planned deal I didn' t know about until later. The next day, I'm getting ready to come home, And the very minute Barbara answers the telephone, I know something's wrong. I know. So I demanded to know what it was, and she said Dawn ran away. And I reacted in a state of panic, you know, call the police, call this, call them, you know look here, look there. And I got on the airplane to come from Chicago back to Atlanta, and in that intervening two-and-a-half hours all of that changed because by the time I landed I hated her worse than anything. God, I hated er. And I came home and I told my family, I said, I'll never, I do not want to hear her name spoken as long as I'm alive. Never. I don't want to here one word about her name. And I said not only can she not, I said I don' t, cease looking for her. I said she can't come home. I said i don't care if she crawls up on the porch and is dying. She will not come in this house. The hatred and the rage were just beyond description. And within two days I had given away all of her furniture, cleaned out her room. Everything was gone. I found things that she had made for me through the years as she came through school that I deeply treasured and cherished. And I smashed them and broke them and threw them away. And I went to the bank where their adoption papers were, and I ripped those up. And I Went to an attorney and gave him $500 and disowned her. And then I tried to annul the adoption, which I could not do. And so this is the way I was. And Barbara, of course, was hurting horribly. and I was saying I don't want to talk about it I don' t want to hear her name I don''t care where she is I don ''t care what happens to her in the midst of all of this I decided that Barbara probably needs some help with this and I said fine I said ok I was a very benevolent dictator and that's when I picked the phone up and called this man he was a great therapist And I was lucky. I don't believe pilots are created equal. I don' t believe plumbers are created equal. I don''t believe doctors are. I don ''t believe factory workers are. I think we ran the gamut as to our talents and our abilities, and I got a good guy. I remember going there, and we had our introductory session with him and told him just briefly why we wanted to come and see him. He made the comment as we were wrapping up, there had been no talk about anything. This is just basically, this is why we're coming, and this is kind of how we want to do it and how often we want see you he says by the way as long as you're coming to see me I don't want anybody drinking drinking has not even been mentioned and I thought now that's a real wacky deal and we got in the car Barbara and I said what do you think he means by that she says I don' know so I'm trying to sort this out because it makes no sense and I say well i said he must mean on the day we're coming and uh and so that's what we did that made sense to me you know he doesn't want us drinking on the way we're going in so we didn't drink on the day we went in and um had no problem with that we didnít talk a lot about the drinking not because i tried to shy away from it but because i simply didnít think it was relevant and um i didnít like talking about my daughter and um I was trying to do what I could do at that time as best I could do it, but I remember one time something came up about my daughter and I looked at him. I had never formed these words or this thought consciously that I was aware of. I looked out at him and I said, I'm going to tell you something I'd rather hate than hurt. And he looked at me and he said, Lyle, you survived a childhood doing that. But he said if you continue that it will destroy you. And every time I say this I can still see the seen just like it was five minutes ago he was looking at me and i was looking at him and i didn't respond to that i just looked at him and but going through my mind is well yeah you may be a phd but i'm an airline pilot and i'll tell you what he probably knew what i was thinking and he was absolutely right it damn near killed me And so I had drank real hard over this for two years, real hard, usually alone in my room. You know, Father Martin talks about feelings. He says they're neither good nor bad. They're positive and negative. And he said, but the worst of all are, he talks about justifiable anger, and then he talks abut feeding and fueling and nurturing feelings. And that's exactly what I did. And I would get a bottle, and I would drink alone in our room, and I was thinking about this girl over and over and over and over and over the self-pity the martyrdom about everything I had done for her and look what she had done to me and it wasn't until and then I would just I would just just stoked and it was sometime later when it was explained to me he said you know every time your parents had a shift or you went from home to home the thing you experienced was abandonment betrayal and you know what I had never labeled that and the minute he said it i thought that's exactly right i had never identified that and he said and when your daughter did this the person you love more than anything at this moment it requires a horrendous amount of anger to block that amount of feeling and that's Exactly what took place so he was the man that i called when when all of this happened and i saw this doctor and he said you need to go into treatment tonight and i remember when he told me i was an alcoholic not having an emotional feeling about that not being repelled or disgusted because in that brief period of time the only thing that i knew was that i my life was destroyed and it was because i was in a bar drinking when i wasn't supposed to be i could connect those dots that's all i was able to do cognitively in that 24-hour period that was going on and he says you need need to go into treatment tonight and i said to him i said you know i said i knew you would tell me that and i'm okay i'm not resistant to doing that really and i thought i'd like to go home and just please let me just pull the drapes and i felt later why did i say that because the shame was just unbelievable and i let barbara hang on to me please just let my mind uncoil just let me absorb what's happened he said you need to get a treatment tonight and i thought to myself i go this is my first lesson in willingness i didn't recognize it at that moment but i later did and i said why did i come here if i'm not going to do what he told me to do and i know one thing whatever his bill is going to be i will never again have the money to pay it so i looked at him and said okay so i drove to the treatment center clear back across atlanta and uh following his directions he phoned an order in for me and i remember as we turned the final corner to go down the hill to this hospital there was a sign there and when those headlights hit that sign it said anchor hospital a hospital for alcoholism and other chemical dependency that's like when we do the fourth step of the our first step or our life story but it's seeing the words and when the headlines hit the headlights hit the that sign and it was just like somebody hit me in the gut. It was like I said to Barbara, I said, God Almighty, 51 years old, I end up in a treatment center. And I said hell of a way to spend our anniversary, huh? And very softly she said, might be the best one we ever had. And I could not, I didn't even attempt to try to sort that out. I couldn't deal with that. and I had this brief flash of all the things that I had accomplished in my life and it was like somebody took this giant eraser and in one stroke wiped him out I saw a report later by this doctor and his summarizing paragraph was and this was some years later he said given the background history of this man it was unlikely to believe he would ever be a productive member of society and I saw that and I thought Jesus that's a little dismal but then I got to thinking well hell the only information he had was what I gave him so I had I had a lot of these things that were neat deals maybe perhaps even against the odds and they were all gone they were they were they were they were all gone so I drove down and I went into the treatment center and Jesus 45 minutes and I haven't even gotten into prison yet. So I got to move on. So I went through a very intense 28-day treatment center, or treatment experience. You know, some of the things, there was nothing funny at that time, although given some time and distance, several things become funny. But I remember walking out the next morning, Saturday morning, it was a slowed down routine. The patients liked it. I didn't like it because I'm in this strange, bizarre place And I'm looking around, you know, and I'm thinking, what am I doing here? What kind of place is this? And I had walked out in the same clothes that I'd come into, and I didn't know that this place was five minutes south of the Atlanta airport. And a 727 from U.S. Airways took off, andI instantly turned to look at it. It was very close. And as I looked at it, you now, the thought hit me, you'll never fly again, you'llnever see the inside of a cockpit. And I began to get sick, and l felt it coming, and I was choking it down and swallowing. And I turned and I walked away. And I walked over, there were some chairs sitting out there in this wreck area. And they were, oh, I don't know, a foot, two feet apart. And there was a guy sitting over here in this chair. I just sat down. I didn't want to know anybody. I didn' t want them to know me. I just sate. And this guy says, and I don' t know who he's talking to. I think I'm maybe in this nuthouse area. I knew I'd seen one flew over the cuckoo's nest and I'm going there, you know. So anyway, this guy said, andI don' T know whohe's talkingto. He says, You know, if I only had a month to live, this is where I'd want to be. Now, I've just had one night there. And I said, I didn't even look at him. I just said, really? And he says, yeah, because every goddamn day here seems like a year. It was apparently his version of one day at a time. You know, I don't remember ever talking to that guy again. I had a very intense experience there. And I did not know when I went in there. I mean, the night at a million hours, I laid there just tortured, tortured, tortured, I couldn't sleep. They medicated me, which they were loathe to do. My blood pressure, all my vitals were off the page. they were going to it was supposed to help me sleep and didn't um and i just laid there god almighty i just went my mind was just like a a rat in its box in the dark and ijust bounced and bounced and bouncedand uh then all of a sudden i began well then within a day or two the media had it so now everybody knew who i was and the hospital had two tv sets i wouldn't go near either one of them i just couldn't there was too it just hurt too much by way of side trip here in june of 96 jay leno called my house and apologized for some of these jokes and that's another story i haven't got time to go into but that was kind of neat but at any rate it wasn't so neat at the time but um the um then all of a sudden i get word that there are legal consequences no one knew about legal consequences nobody at the airline pilots association knew about legal consequences. But there was a law in the books that made this what I had done, a federal felony crime. And first I began, I went through six crises where they took me out of groups or gatherings to tell me the latest bad news and every time they did it was like they sucked the air out of the room. I couldn't breathe. I felt like I was being crushed to death an inch at a time. It was killing me. And I would go back and I would try to work on this acceptance thing. I was doing everything they told me in treatment. i didn't debate argue or resist anything because i had nothing left and it was a god-given gift i didnít see it that way right then but i did later the but Iím struggling with this acceptance thing and then they come and they take me out again and Iím getting where Iím flinchy if Iím in a group and the door opens and i see a staff member i go please no and they look around and they see me and they go like this and i go oh i donít want to go outside and finally i step outside this one time the sixth time and it's a doctor out there and i'm going oh god they've never had a doctor before we go down to his office and we sit down he said well after so far minnesota indicted me uh north dakota had they re-indicted me twice um the penalties were doubling uh i'd never been in jail uh i couldn't go to jail there was no way i could survive jail and i am dealing with this stuff and he says to me that morning he says i have to tell you He said, a federal grand jury has just indicted you and you're looking at 15 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, and an attorney is coming on Sunday and needs $50,000, which I didn't even remotely have. And I remember just going numb, numb. I had no feeling anyway. And he says to me, he says, I have to ask you if you're going to hurt yourself. And I said, no. Now, I want to tell you also that I was suicidal in those first few days. I didn'T think I had the capacity to be suicidal. I had a reputation for being pretty tough and pretty hard, and even to this day, friends of mine don't really believe that I was suicidal. I wasn't flirting with the idea or romancing it. I had decided that I needed the pain to stop. I wasnít thinking about anything except the pain. I was beyond any threshold I thought a human being could endure, and I wanted the painto end. But someplace in there, I had this God-given moment of clarity that said to me, ìIf you do this thing, your family will never survive it. This will be worse than what has already happened, and they will never survive that. So I gave up on that idea. What I tried to do was will myself to die, and I thought I could do that. And I don't know if that's a Native American thing or what, but I really, really spent a lot of energy trying to will myself to die and couldn't do that, and someplace in that process began to think more about living than dying, and I don' t know where that was. At any rate, this is bad stuff that's happening, really bad stuff. I got out of treatment and I came up and I was indicted and of course the media is everywhere the media is everywhere but I have the benefit of treatment and I worked diligently in treatment I worked as hard as I could in treatment I did everything and more that they asked me to do in treatment because the only thing I saw at that point in time was I saw very clearly by this time I knew what was coming it was mandatory prison No chance of suspended or a probated sentence. I already knew that, been told that. So I knew I was going to prison. And how I was gonna handle this and all these other things was totally, completely, entirely dependent on how well invested I was in this 12-step program and the power that it contained. And I was working as hard as I could to get as much as I good because I knew what was coming. So we went through this three-week trial and I saw my picture on television sketch. I didn't think that would ever happen to me. The 6 o'clock news has pictures of other people, not me, and there I am. Within my family, I had been the standard bearer for duty, honor, country, character, honesty, integrity, and now I'm at the very height of disgrace and shame and humiliation. I'd shamed my family. My heritage. Everything that I'd been associated with. my Marine Corps, my airline profession, my airline. And I wasn't used to that and I had a hard time with that. Everything I had ever done I had tried to bring honor and dignity to, whether it was my heritage, whether I was putting on a Marine Corps uniform or the way I conducted myself, my airline profession and my company. I had always tried to do just the opposite and I Had reaped this horrible opposite result and I HAD a hard, hard time dealing with that um not only that but you know i've got my kids who are grown watching this now watching their dad go through this and um and that was difficult at any rate we went through the trial i went back we found guilty very quickly as i knew we would be i went black later for the sentencing and um the judge had leaked it to the press that he was going to up the ante there's sentencing guidelines i was talking at a meal with some of the folks about that bottom guidelines were 12 months, the top were 18 months. I was a captain. I had settled on 18. I had made peace with that. However, I'd had two dreams in which they were both clearly identical, in which I was standing there waiting to be sentenced, expecting 18 months, and he said five years and the gavel came down, and both times I woke up just absolutely terrified. So I walked into my attorney's office with my wife, and she said, I've got to show you this letter. They're upping the ante, and the prosecutor hadn't asked for this, which meant that the judge wanted to do this which meant that it wasn't going to be just two or three more extra months this was going to be significant we went in for the sentencing and I was trying as hard as I could to think of something to say and I couldn't I was just too scared but I stood up when it was my turn and I looked directly at this man and I talked about gratitude gratitude to be sober and I need to go back and catch up real quickly during the time I was in treatment And I walked into a group, not intending to talk, not intending not to talk. But for some reason, I began to talk about my daughter. The door was closed, and there were eight or 10 of us in there. And I broke down and cried, something I didn't think was OK. I had not even cried at my parents' funerals. And I cried. For the first time ever, I dealt with the pain honestly. And I felt like my whole heart and this big area of my chest was ripped out. And I sobbed in front of these people. and they came and they hugged me but I felt naked I didn't want to go out in the hospital population but it was the beginning of a hugely important healing process and shortly thereafter I wrote to my daughter I didn' t know where she was but my wife sent the letter the hospital had no visiting privileges because they thought this was an incredible breakthrough so they allowed my daughter to come up she had gone to Tampa, Florida she'd gotten married I didn''t know her last name I had a granddaughter I didn'T really know anything about except a couple of things my wife had leaked about it so i meet my daughter for the first time in two years in a day room of this treatment center and i'd forgotten how little she was and how wonderful it felt to put my arms around her telling her how much i loved her instead how much I hated her and she had been scared to come up because she knew about my temper and she knew how I felt about this six months after she had run away my number two son had flunked out of college again for alcohol and drugs he'd had problem forever i knew he had a problem i didn't think i had one but i knew he did and i kicked him out of the house and told him don't come back and i wrote to him and said let's put this family back together again so he showed up the doctors found out about this and they said we never get to see this can we please come if we just stay to the side i said sure so they were there they saw this that doctor told me later he said i don't know what happened to you the therapist that has seen me for two years he said you were impossible he said I had written this off it's never happening you were too unyielding too unbending you were too rigid he said i had said this was never going to happen and here it is and it happened because of treatment and because of what i learned in that place going through that process and so today i have a relationship with my daughter and these grandkids that i never would have had had it not been for this program and my ability to change That son will have eight years in this program in November. At the sentencing, when I talked about gratitude, I said I was grateful for the things that happened within my family. I was thankful to be sober. I accepted responsibility that I could not change what happened yesterday, much less months before. and the judge sentenced me to 16 months in federal prison, two months less under the guidelines than he could have. And I was stunned by that. It wasn't like I was just happy and wanted to go toe-dancing off into federal prison. But it was a lot better than what I was expecting. And he told us at that point in time, he said this is a very complex, first of its kind case, a lot of legal issues, I know there are going to be appeals, I'm going to allow you three gentlemen to stay free until appeals are exhausted. The other two guys opted for that, and I said, I'm going to prison because I had learned to live life on life's terms. Whistling in the dark had no place in my life anymore. So I did. That judge says to this day, he said, no one has ever done that before or since. Not in my courtroom. I have never seen anyone do that. So I went to prison. Served 14 months of good conduct time 424 one day at a time had a lot of experiences in there I don't talk about it because it doesn't got anything to do with this particular phase of my life all I say is there are two groups of really, really sick people in prison and the sickest group goes home every night every now and then somebody will come up and say well I'm a corrections officer I'll say well if you're in this fellowship obviously you don't fit that category and if that's not good enough why don't you call your sponsor the other thing is i made 12 cents an hour in there and the thing that really irked me about that was there was no 401k plan i was coming out about the time the other two guys were going in now i had been stripped of my fa medical license because the diagnosis of alcoholism that was fair i should have the fa did something i'd been fired a week from the day i went into treatment that was fair. They should have fired me. I had been stripped of all my FAA licenses. That was fair. I wasn't fit to hold them. I'm a hardcore believer in acceptance of responsibility. I do not believe in being a victim, and anybody in this program who still thinks they're victim has nothing i want uh being a victim it is my belief that being a victim is a matter of choice it's a matter of an attitude i adopt and i can choose to be a victim or i can choose but i cannot be both i'm not even a victim of alcoholism because i've done something about it there's no place in my life for victimism, and I hear it around me all the time, and it just makes me want to throw up. It's always about he, she, them, their, it, except in this program where we learn that we have to look at ourselves. So I'm grateful for that. And I was never to fly again. The judge put sanctions on me that made it impossible I would ever fly again and closed the door. I had been stripped of everything. Within a month of this whole, within a month OF the arrest, we were broke all the investments what we had managed to get over the years iras 401ks savings investments a little piece of real estate it was all gone everything was gone so we had nothing and i was never to fly again at some place i began to think about flying again because there was a meditation in one of my books that said before any dream can come true there must first be a dream and then the trick for me was to keep that in check with reality i checked with the faa and was told by an Airline Pilot Association attorney, they said if you want to fly again, you'll have to get your licenses from the ground up beginning with a private license. I'd never had a private licence. I came out of the Marine Corps and was given a commercial with an instrument. For most airline pilots who go through a monitoring process via their airlines, it takes four to six months to get the medical back. It took me two years and four months to get it back. And I didn't think that was possible. I thought they'd bury it. I've had wonderful experiences that I simply don't have time to go into, but I have seen the impossible come true over and over and over and ever by simply staying in this program doing what I was taught one thing at a time, one day at a time, and one step at a times. You know how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. When I looked at the licensing stuff for two days, I just had to sit and be still and be quiet. I thought it's not possible. Not one pilot that I knew thought it was possible to go back and start at the beginning and get licenses literally from the ground up not one person and had i looked at the panorama of it all i would never have attempted it but i said okay i'll start with a private and i told my wife i had an experience at the hospital i was working in the treatment center after prison that changed my whole attitude i said this is all about attitude if i make this an ordeal it will be an ordeal but i'm changing my attitude i'm going to do what i can to make this enjoyable and fun and exciting and i did my best to do that and i worked over 2 000 questions problems time-consuming exercises and i passed four written exams and my average score was 94. guys would say oh man it's wasted effort you know anything over 70 is wasting again not when you're coming from the bottom where i am i'm gone for the high ring not the low ring the flying was impossible i looked at that the cost is impossible my wife said we've got furniture left why don't we sell the furniture and she said i don't know that you'll uh ever fly again commercially but i think it's important let's sell the i had another miracle occur about that time a northwest pilot that um had a flight school i knew nothing about it and he said i want you to come up to minnesota and live with me go through my flight school so i had to coordinate that with corrections people because i had 13 conditions of probation i couldn't violate any of them so i went up there checked in with minnesota corrections and i spent 44 days with this man i flew 78 hours in 30 days i got four licenses i got two of them in one day that's a short version of a hell of a lot of work and i don't think it had ever been done before some three months later this is almost three and a half years or this is three and A half years after the arrest Three months later, the same night that my licenses actually came in the mail, I get a phone call from a pilot at Northwest, head of the pilot union. I had not resisted or fought my termination. If I had no legal grounds, I could have gone through the process and resisted, but I thought they were right to fire me. So I had não resisted that, and he called and he said, you're not going to believe this. He said three hours ago, John Dasberg, president, CEO of Northwest Airlines, made a personal decision to reinstate you to full seniority. I couldn't believe it. So November the 1st of 1993, I went back and signed a last chance agreement and there was a large crowd and it was a very emotional event and I couldnít believe that these people were taking me back. The company I had so horribly shamed and disgraced, and that this man had the extraordinary courage to risk his career by doing this. And I have never to this day understood that. So I went back, never to be a captain again, like I could care. And was given back my career, was given black a retirement, was allowed to walk among my peers who overwhelmingly welcomed me back. obviously there were a few that resisted i'm told it was a small number i have no idea what that might be but i had extraordinary experiences everywhere i went with people coming up and shaking my hands and i'm glad you're back but the miracles continue and each time there's one i say to myself there can never be one that will surpass this that's always been my thought nothing can beat this and as i approached my final year i got another phone call I said, guess what? John Dasberg, president and CEO of Northwest Airlines, thinks you ought to be a captain. So I checked out as a 747 captain and ended my final career for my final years as a Boeing 747 captain. The judge, the man who wanted to sentence me later, he told my lawyer, he said that morning he said, I plan to sentence him to four years in prison until he said what he said. And I've been told by another federal judge in treatment that never happened we never changed from the bench ever and other people in the legal profession have reinforced that corroborated that and it happened that morning that judge who had such strong feelings about all of this and rightfully so he was justified in feeling that way in some way that i do not know or understand has become probably the strongest supporter i've ever had and i have not seen that man since i stood in his courtroom he told me in january of 99 he said if you want to pursue a presidential pardon i will support it and i have never supported a petition for pardon in my 16-year judicial career so i sent away to washington for the papers i didn't do it the mark rich way and I didn't have a hundred thousand dollars for Hugh Rodham so I did it the old-fashioned way I sent away, I got the papers I filled out this huge stack of papers I went through an exhaustive two year process thinking what are the chances one in a thousand, one in five thousand but the impossible seems to occur within the confines of this program when I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing on January the 20th well initially I saw these things come out Dan Rostenkowski and I thought okay, this is political payback, you know merit has nothing to do, then I see these other lists I'm going to forget it so I tell Barbara let it go Let me let it go. First I got angry and frustrated. I said, look what we've been given back. How much can I possibly want? Let it go, and like everything else when I let it go, guess what happens? I come in on January the 20th of 2001 after taking my wife to our all-time favorite thing, a home expo. and i walk in the answering machine is beeping eight messages that's unusual one maybe two possibly and the first one is from the producer of the nightline show our story appeared on the program two weeks before i retired and it was a very powerful um program because i trusted this lady and so there's a number of treatment centers tell me they use that today in their program but it was her voice and she was so excited I didn't even identify herself but I recognized her voice. She says the pardons list is out, you've got a presidential pardon, you got a president pardon and the other voices reaffirmed that. This amazing thing, this presidential pardon which just has for a federal felony conviction has an enormous impact, just an enormous on the quality of my life and I'm going well what can beat that and then Mike alluded earlier to some people that were pushing me about this story thing here and I wrote it really to get them off my butt and I really did because it was awkward, I was starting to run into these people and I can't lie because I'm bound by this program and I am trying to drag my feet past the publishing deadline and so finally I said screw it, the easier softer way write the book, write the story, send it off and I forgot about it. I wrote it in 1998. And a year ago this month, I get a letter from the GSO in New York and I'm thinking, why am I... I had forgotten about it and I know they don't send mail out and so I open it up and the second sentence is we're pleased to inform you and I walked inside and I said, Barbara, look at this. I didn't tell anybody about that except a former counselor who I've done a number of AA things with and he was there when all of this was coming down on me so hard so heavy so overwhelmingly he was the one he was always there and I called him his name's Ed his version of it when he picks the phone up he said this is Ed I love him I love Him so I called Him and I said Ed you're not going to believe this I read him the sentence in the letter he said God Almighty God Almighty he said do you remember he said do you member when all that stuff was going on and it just kept coming down I kept telling you if you stay sober through this it's going to make a hell of a book now I didn't find much solace in that I said yeah I remember he said god dang he said I didn' t mean the book Talk for 71 minutes, and I need to close. I heard Father Martin, and I've been fortunate to go there and spend time with him. I'm just like a kid around Babe Ruth when that happens. My mouth is open. I'm in awe of that man. But I heard him close talk one time, and if I can remember it, I'm going to share that with you, not in the same way that he does it, but because I believe it speaks to the essence of the process of living. He, in turn, had gotten it from somebody that sent it to him on a card, so it's a pass-along thing. But it says this, I do not wish you joy without a sorrow, nor endless day without the healing dark, nor brilliant sun without the restful shadow, nor tides that never turn against your bark. I wish you strength and faith and love and wisdom and goods gold enough to help some needy one I wish you songs but also blessed silence and God's sweet peace when every day is done thank you so much for having me here God bless you Thank you.