The Agony of Pretending Everything Is All Right – Sandy

Hi, and we're lucky to be here tonight, too, because this guy just got in. He was held on the ground two hours in Chicago. But at any rate, while I was asked by Bill also, Bill is getting awful cautious about the anonymity here of late, and he asked me to say that if there's any members of the press or other media here that did not divulge the last names of any of the speakers here tonight or any of people participating in this program. The speaker that we have here tonight, why, he's come a long ways. He comes from Alexander, Virginia. Bill told me a few things about this guy, and one of the things that he told me was that he's a real gone golfer. I don't know much about this game of golf. I have friends that play it. Some of them even get up at 6 o'clock in the morning. They're really afflicted with this disease. But I heard about one cat the other day that just about does it, lets it all hang out. This fellow, they tell me, was out on the golf course about 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning, and this golf course was adjacent to a major highway. And he was about to launch into a swing, and a funeral procession started past. Thereupon he removed his hat, stopped the swing, stood with his head bowed until an entire procession had passed. After the procession passed, my fellow golfer come up and said, look, sir, that's the most noble and most generous and the biggest gesture I've ever seen any golfer make on this golf course. And the guy put his hat back on his head and resumed the swing and said, why not? After all, she was a good and faithful wife for 15 years. Some of the other things that I'm going to tell you here tonight, this man is an ex-marine pilot. He is also in the real estate business. And he, let's see, there was something else I was supposed to say. Let's see, I think that he has been dry since December of 1964. Without taking up any more of your time, here he is now, Mr. Sandy B. from Alexander. Hi, my name's Sandy and I'm an alcoholic. I'm real happy to be here. I'm not going to go into the day I had getting here. It was about eight hours in an airplane from Washington, which is back in the old days. That's about as fast as they flew when I went through primary training in the SNJ. I think I could have driven here as fast As I got. But I'm delighted to be here, and it's funny what happened. I was exhausted when we pulled up out there. And just walking into this hall, I'm just full of life again. And this has been happening to me at halls and AA meetings, and it's the magic of the program. I don't know how to explain it. I don' t know where this energy suddenly just flows in, and I feel great. It' s just marvelous. And that' s what AA has done for me over the years since I' ve been in. Any time that I' v had the privilege of talking at one of these gatherings, I always like to assume that there are some people out there who are new to Alcoholics Anonymous, who may be attending your first state convention. Maybe you're in your first month or first two months in AA. And anything I have to say, I hope that you will listen to it. People who've been around a long time know more than I do. But I know that if you've been in AA only a month, I know more then you do. I know tha. There's no way that you know more den I do And I know more about you than you do. That's the amazing thing. There's no doubt in my mind I know more about it than I do. I know about you and you do because since I've been in here, that's what's happened. I've be learning about me. I thought I knew it all and I knew nothing. And it's been the most wonderful educational program that I've ever encountered. And so as I said, anything I might have to say is directed to you because if you're like I was, You're in a transitional period, and I remember this period, and I like to label it, I was a temporary member of Alcoholics Anonymous at that time. I was making my mind up. I don't know if you remember that feeling. You're here, but you're here under duress, and there really isn't evidence to support the fact that you belong here, and you're here until you can find some better way because you've heard, either directly or indirectly, that this program involves not drinking. I heard that very early and that was a very frightening thing when I heard this program involved not drinking I liked all the other things it had to offer but the not drinking part was extremely frightening to me I could not imagine a life without drinking I remember this period when I sat at meetings the best of all I mean it's so clear in my mind when I was debating whether I was going to stay here or not I had a big sponsor who was getting me to meetings every night he was telling me not to drink and I was sitting at the meetings but I didn't want to listen I was afraid that if I listened you people would talk me into something a little premature before I really needed it. And I was afraid that I would suddenly be raising my hand saying, yes, I want to stay here forever. And, you know, I wasn't sure that I needed this program. It wasn't positive. And as a temporary member, I had to kill an hour at these meetings. And when you're not listening, you've got to do something. And I can remember what I would do in order to occupy myself during that hour. One of the things I would doing is estimate the audience. And I would this in a manner that is befitting someone for the college education. I wouldn't count the people that were there. I would count the rows and count the number of people in each row and then multiply the two together. and if you remember how well your brain worked in those early months and there was 14 rows with 16 people in it that took the whole hour to work out how many people were at the meeting I had a built-in sensor in my bottom that told me exactly how many minutes and seconds it was until this was over and I could get out of there and get away, and finally I put my hour in. So you can see in the beginning that I was a reluctant member of Alcoholics Anonymous, attending meetings every night, being driven back and forth, and sitting out there not reading any of the literature, not talking to any of you nice people, and most of all, not listening. So in essence we can say I was doing everything wrong except one thing, and that was the not drinking part. For some unknown reason, I wasn't drinking and as I look back on it, if you're going to do one thing right, that's the one to do, you know. Little did I know, I was doing a beautiful job at working this program because I wasn' t drinking and by not drinking, I gave myself a chance at this life. But I found as I sat out there after a month or so that I still didn't feel that I belonged here. I disqualified speakers as they stood up in front of me. If a man was elderly, I would say, What does an old man know about the kind of problems that I've got? Or if the person was younger than I would, I would saying, What does a young guy know? He hasn't even been around long enough. Or if it was a woman, I would ask, How could a woman know anything to help me? You don't know anything about my problems. And I had millions of reasons for not listening to anyone. And I realize now I was afraid to listen. I was scared to hear the truth about myself. And I think we're all afraid when we come into AA of finding out the real truth about ourselves. During this period, as I said, I did nothing correct except not drink. And, you know, I've been around now about eight and a half years, almost nine years. And I haven't been drunk since my first meeting. And I'm convinced deep in my heart that I owe it all to not drinking. I mean, that's my... That's it. I've had the bad times. I've head all, you knows, troubles and all of this, get these kind of things. And I don't know, I think I probably had emotional problems that have been equal import to those who've had slips. And the only difference between a person who hasn't had one and one who has is one of them drank. I mean, that's it. That's the big book called that last-ditch maneuver. That's that instinct that causes us to pull our hand out of the flame without thinking about it. Hey, my hand is in the flame. We just pull it out. And that's what this basic training of AA gave me in the beginning was, don't drink. Boy, it was hammered in so hard that I may do some other crazy things, but I don't know if I'll ever take another drink. That was hammering in so far. Getting the not drinking down path, sometimes, in my opinion, I don' t know how it is out in this part of the country, But up in the Washington area, sometimes we'll be off onto some of the advanced techniques of finding a spiritual solitude. And nobody will mention the not drinking, you know. And some new guy is in there and he's listening to this advanced solitude and he shagging and doesn't know where his family is and, you knows, a little uptight about his job and he doesn't relate too well to that. And I could see where I might have misinterpreted this thing, that the way it was supposed to work was that I was to take the 12 steps while I was drinking and have a spiritual awakening at which time I would feel like stopping. And this was the way that I Was Going to Back Into This Program. If there's anybody who's been trying that and it hasn't been working too well, check your drinking. I mean, that's all I can suggest. If you keep finding yourself getting drunk every so often, Well, it's probably from drinking. That's the last time I'm going to mention that, but I swear I'd love to get that out of the way in case I forget it. We had a real good fellow up there, Charlie B. up in Washington, who is a lawyer. He just retired from the government. And they asked him what's the best way of working the steps. And he said, well, I said, the best way I know is that when all else fails, don't drink. And I don't know if you know those days I was talking about when everything fails, serenity prayer isn't even working and all you're trying to do is hang on and not go backwards. And that always rings true with me because the greatest gift I feel that a new person can give themselves or a person in doubt can give themself is time, another day. It's amazing how the picture changes just by going to sleep and getting up tomorrow and taking another look at it. Give ourselves that time. And that's what I was doing in the beginning. That's all I was do, and was giving myself another day without booze. And things started happening. In spite of my resistance to this program, in spite of mine not wanting to listen, it started reaching in, and it started touching me, and speakers would get a sentence in that I would relate to in spite if not wanting. And the next thing, I had a little bit of hope that maybe this program could work for me. And I was willing, in the emptiness of my living room, to sit and weigh the evidence and see if there was a possibility that I belonged in Alcoholics Anonymous. When I came into AlcoholicsAnonymous, I was an active duty Marine Corps officer. And my current duty station, temporary of course, was the psychiatric ward at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. This is where I had been quite erroneously assigned after having a convulsion. And I had explained this away to myself that this was really nothing, it would go away, I would soon be released and I would be on my merry way and we certainly can't count that as any evidence that I have a drinking problem. I mean, you know, just being locked up in a psycho ward in itself is hardly any clear-cut indication you have a problem. You recognize the rationalization, I hope, that us alcoholics are so beautiful at using. And I used rationalization from the first day that I drank right up until that day that I decided, after I was in AA, to honestly take a look at things. I used rationalization on the first night that I drank, which was in my freshman year in college. And I drank because the crowd drank. That was the reason I started drinking. That's the reason why I started smoking. I started smokey because the people around me said, Hey, Sandy, the crowd is smoking now. And I went, oh, I see. Well, I don't think I want to. And they said, oh you can't be in the crowd if you don't smoke. And I said, all right. And you all remember your first cigarette and your coughing and hacking and finally you killed yourself and now you could blow it out of your nose and everything. You really knew how to smoke. Then you could come around and go, hey boy, I'm smoking. And I was in. And before I started drinking I would categorize myself as sort of a tall, skinny, nervous teenager with no place to go, no real direction, no ideas about life. I was a natural-born follower, just waiting for somebody to say, hey, let's do this and hey, lets do that, sort of aimlessly wandering around. I had a rather strict religious upbringing that taught me a rather terrifying God that had me so terrified I was going to do something wrong at all times that I didn't know which way it was up. And I had very little peace of mind before I started drinking. A lot of people get up here and say that they had a great deal and alcohol took it all away from them. Well, I wasn't going anywhere before I decided to go to the bar. I started drinky, so I don't really... I can honestly say I'm glad I'm an alcoholic because if I didn' t become an alcoholic, I'd be a tall, skinny guy wandering around out there with no direction and no purpose and wondering what life was all about, only I never would have had anything to drink. I still would be all messed up and never would've found what was here in Alcoholics Anonymous. And so I drank because the crowd said, hey, Sandy, we're all drinking now. We're not drinking Cokes anymore. We're older than that. We're drinking booze. And I said, well, I don't know if I want to get involved in that. and the pressure, the pressure. And so that was the reason that I took my first drink. I took our first drink in a large room. It was sort of a fraternity or some kind of a social event at the college. And when I walked in the room, I was always nervous and in crowds. When I walked into a room, I had a guilty feeling that I was taking up space that belonged to somebody else. You know, any moment a guy was going to come along and say, okay, move over. There's a real person coming in. You just get out of the way. And I also had the feeling that all the people in the room were hostile. I always had that feeling. Everybody was hostile.I could see it in their eyes. And l was in this room. There was 50 people there standing around talking and l felt they were all talking about me and saying why does that guy leave? Why are they hostile, you know? And l had a drink. And the beautiful thing happened. That drink didn't do anything to me, but you should have seen what it did to all those other people. It changed every person in that room into a friend of mine immediately. That drank went down and I looked around the room and it was like a whole new crowd appeared. The people all of a sudden weren't hostile. They were smiling at me and they were going, welcome. You're our favorite person here. That's what they were saying with their eyes. I could see that. And I was just welcomed in with love from all these strangers. It was incredible the change that that booze rendered on that crowd of people. And I just felt comfortable with other people for the first time in my life. And I just enjoyed it. I felt physically that little high and that wonderful glow and that sense that nothing is wrong anywhere in the universe, you know? I was at peace with myself, with these people, with God, with everything. I mean, this was that wonderful effect that alcohol had. And I had that feeling for about an hour. And that hour was absolute ecstasy. I just walked around for an hour and it was a wonderful feeling. And of course I got that feeling from a few drinks, and naturally my brain said, if you get this good a feeling from two or three, how about 15? And so at the end of the hour, my tranquility and my ecstasy was cut short due to throwing up, which a lot of us experience, I understand. And if I left a throwing up out of my talk, I could sit down now. I mean, it took up a good part of my life, I'll tell you. It's the only thing I got better at. You know how it was near the end? We just practiced in the morning. Nothing came up. He's just in there practicing. In case you ever eat anything again, you know, you'll still know how to get rid of it. So booze demonstrated its allergy to me an hour after I started drinking it. And I was sick all night. I had that first night spinning rooms and nausea. And the next day I sat in a classroom with 200 other people and a professor was lecturing. And the other 199 were sitting there taking notes and listening, and I was sitting there in shock. And I was doing something that little did I know but I was going to spend a lot of time doing this. i was sitting on my chair and i was focusing 100 of my mental and physical energy to staying on the chair that's what i try to do i was saying a little prayers like just god let me stay here and be counted present that's all i want is just uh stay here and don't let me fall off the chair and don t let me get sick and you remember those feelings as the booze is wearing off for that first time the temperature in the room went up to 180 then it went down to 30 below and then there was nausea the gas was pumped in the rooms oh it was a miserable day it lasted all day long that recovery from the first night's drinking and all of a sudden it was five o'clock and the same crowd is back and they said sandy we're gonna go out and drink again tonight are you gonna come with us and my body says, no, no no, but my brain said wait a minute body you're making a hasty decision let's evaluate the facts here before we make a snap decision now let's take a look at this and I stepped back and took a look and whenever you hear yourself or someone else say well, let's step back and take another look at this. You know what's coming. A big snow job is coming. That's what's come. Because I was going to re-explain this thing to myself. That's that I was gonna do. I was one of these people who had conversations with his body. I don't know if any of you had that, but boy, I did over the drinking years. And as the physical progression set in, the body had a lot of things to say about what was gonna happen. But in the beginning, the brain was in control. And the brain said, sure, you've been a little bit sick last night. You weren't feeling too good today. But when you stop and look at it, that's a small price to pay for that hour you had yesterday. And I said, it is? He said, yeah, because that hour was exquisite. And this stuff was kind of rough, but it sure doesn't come anywhere near equaling that hour. And I said, you know, you're right. And I drank again the next night. And I think I told myself that same story, and I think all alcoholics tell ourselves something similar to that story until we get into Alcoholics Anonymous. And as the years went along and this disease progressed, and it progresses a day at a time, it's just like growing old. We can't see it happening. It doesn't look any different one day from the next. But as it progressed, there was two things that were quite apparent. The hour was getting shorter and the trouble was getting worse. That was the two thingsthat were happening. I thought that was my worst day I had ever encountered and little did I know that wasmy best day drinking, that my first day. And from there on, it was downhill all the way until I got into AA. and as the years went along, I was still telling myself this is a small price to pay for all the fun that you're having from drinking. And you have to do this if you have a conscience because your conscience keeps coming up going why did you get your teeth knocked out again last night? Why are you lost? Where is your car? What is wrong with you? And you've got to answer this little voice that's inside of us this little survival instinct that wants us to change, it wants us to give up this way and we have to explain our actions and we do this, I did, through rationalization through changing the facts around so they come up with a conclusion that it has nothing to do with my drinking I don't know what kind of logic that is, I don's know how we come by it but we come buy it and we re-explain things and it got as i got into having blackouts i can remember one incident when i got into the marine corps and i got into flight training imagine this is a great choice for an alcoholic but i flew i was a jet pilot for the whole time of my alcoholic career in the marine corp and i was going through training down in texas and i had gone over into one of the mexican border towns and have been drunk for three days and lost uh three or four hundred dollars and my wife didn't really expect me to be gone that long um now i didn't know where the guys were that i was with i had had my teeth knocked out again i uh and i was locked up in jail and so i was released on a sunday morning with no money and i got out into that hot sun on a Sunday morning and my conscience starts talking to me It always did, when I felt the worst. It always had to come up then. And it didn't go into a long harangue anymore. They just asked one word. It just said, well... Oh, wait a minute. Don't bother me now. I don't feel good. This is a little bit of trouble right now, but ten years from now, it'll be another funny story, you know? And I put off my conscience by telling it that when I found the guys that I was with, they would tell me that I had a fantastic time. And my conscience bought this. And when I found the guys, I said, geez, you know, hey, hey. Remember we were down in Mexico Friday? Yeah. Well, did I have a good time? And they said, did you have a great time? Did you have good time. You were jumping on tables and you were swinging around there. You had a ball. And I said thank God because I paid a hell of a price for it. and I'm glad that the equation equals out, or I might have had to do something drastic. And so the strange thing was that in a relatively short period of time I was willing to balance the equation with a rumor. That was what I was going to balance it with, that this was a small price to pay for all the funds that those guys said I had. That's what I wasn't willing to accept. And the reason I was unwilling to accept that was that somewhere in there, I don't really know when I became or lost control or had a choice. I don' t know if I ever had a choice, but the reality of the situation was that alcohol was a necessity and was going to be with me, and it had to come out that it had nothing to do with my drinking in order for me to survive because in my mind there was no life without booze. There wasn' t a day go by that I didn't drink. Drinking in itself was a pleasure, and drinking made everything else more enjoyable. Therefore, drinking was done with everything, and it was, I just could not imagine a day without drinking. I associated not drinking with boredom. I figured if you didn't Drink, then you would sit around going, why doesn't something happen? You know, that was what I connected not drinking with. Nothing would happen. If I was sitting in a bar, and often you see in a movie a couple of guys will say, let's leave this bar. Nothing's happening here. And I never remember saying that to myself. I would say, nothing's happening here. I must not be drinking fast enough. And then I would drink faster and something would happen, a police car would arrive, a guy would come. Things would happen but I I wouldn't continue to just sit there with nothing happening. I mean, action happened with booze, but there was never that I drank and nothing happened. I'll say that for alcohol. It was consistent. I never drank and Nothing Happened. Somehow I made it through flight school and got along for a few years flying in fighter squadrons and photo squadrons. and I was pretending to be interested in the career. I was pretending that I wanted to advance and to get into more responsibility, but I didn't. I really didn't want to advance. I didn' t want responsibility. I didn''t want the little responsibility that I had. All I wanted was a way of life where I could go to work, do something rather simple, and then reward myself at the end of the day with drinking, And that was the way I saw it. The job was more or less the toil that you had to put in in order to deserve the drinking at the end of the day. And that's the way i looked at drinking. That was when life started. There was no life in the daytime. There was just, even though it was flying jet airplanes, there was no light. Nothing happened until five o'clock when you poured the booze in. And that is when real life started as far as I was concerned. The rest of it just didn't matter to me. And it was somewhere along in this time that my body started telling me that maybe it would be a good idea if I started drinking a little earlier in the day. And I said, no, no way can I do that. And the body said, well, if you don't, there's going to be trouble. That was the basic message that was coming up from the body. It didn't come up directly like that. And it came up in the forms of, take a look at your hand. And I looked at it and it was trembling a little. And the body said, that's just a warning. That's just the warning of what's coming later. And I couldn't drink during the day at that time. I could not see flying and drinking. I just couldn't imagine doing that. Everything else I could imagine but not that. As I look back on it now, I would have been a lot safer doing that because, I don't know, we get in the early morning when that booze is wearing off and we're shaking and sweating. I sometimes think I'd be in better shape with a drink in me than when I got into the plane sometimes. But I fought this until I was having terrifically physical problems. I no longer could make it through a day without a drink. The end of the workday had to come sooner I mean, it was a necessity. There was no way that this ending was going to be any different. I was fighting it. I didn't want to stop, you know. But each day I found myself finding a reason for quitting earlier, leaving at 5, leave at 4.30, leave it 4. And it was simply because my body was saying we have to have a drink now. It was becoming such a necessity that it was soon to become part of my daily life. And the funny thing is that I was kidding myself all the way to the bar. I would look at the clock at 3.30 in the afternoon. I would see that I had an hour to go, and I didn't think I could make it. And I would try and stay occupied. I would trying not look at a clock, go get involved in some other projects, to go do something to take my mind off of that clock because it seemed as if time had stood still. And after what seemed like an eternity, I would sneak another peek at the clock and it would be 3.31 and only one minute had gone by, 59 more minutes before I could get that drink. And it seemed like in eternity until that hour would be up and I could sit in that car and drive as fast as I could to the officer's club, run up to the bar and then tell the bartender, go ahead and wait on him, I'm not in a hurry. I'm waiting for somebody. And then I'd wait a couple seconds, and I'd look at my watch, and I would say, well, I guess he's going to be late. Give me a triple martini on the rocks. And then, I'd get that vodka, and bring it over, and it was almost like the body was just anticipating what was going to happen. The body was an absolute nervous wreck. The brain was in total disoriented. it, and yet it knew that in just a moment all this agony was going to be over with. In just a minute the real magic of life was going to take place when I poured this stuff in my mouth. And it did, and it never failed. And it's funny how that would happen. I'd pour that booze in, and that warm feeling, it used to start with me, it would race down and go down and calm down my feet to start out with. And then it would start moving up those leg muscles and calm those muscles down. You remember how those muscles at night used to contract and restrict and tighten up, and you'd wake up in the morning and think you've been in a marathon running all night. I'd wake up, I'd be exhausted from those muscles just tightening up and relaxing. And the booze would suddenly go over those muscles and just go, relax. And I'd go, oh, does that feel good? My legs feel so good. And now it would work its way up into my stomach, which was a burning volcano down there of acids intermingling, and it would go into that volcano like a fire hose and just go cool, and the whole stomach would just settle down, and I could just feel, oh, to stop that burning felt so good. And then it would work its way out the arms, and it will go right out to the hand that was holding the drink, where I was really holding it with two hands, and all of a sudden I'd go, who has a problem holding a drink steady and look at how that hand suddenly calmed down and then the last place but the most important place that it went was up to the brain which was so nervous and so upset and so confused and it just went peace and there i was for the first time that day i was a whole person everything was all right i had that moment of ecstasy that everything was fine And that was the purpose of life, was to get in that condition. That was the Purpose of my whole existence, was to experience this altogether feeling, which at this time was only lasting a few seconds each day. That was a magic moment. Then I went into some resentment about something. But I had that magic moment of ecstasy that I was devoting my whole life to. And I look back on it now, and it's almost like a life insurance policy in reverse. If there's any insurance salesmen out there, I come up with a term when I think about that as reverse insurance, where I worked very hard all day in order to earn some money, and I walked into a store, and I gave a guy some of my money, and he in turn gave me something that would guarantee that my tomorrow would stink. That's what I did. It was a sort of a guarantee that the future would be rotten, is what it was. And when I give the guy the money, he gives me the booze, and I drink it, and tomorrow is so bad that I have to go back and do it again. And when we get into that cycle, there's no way to get out because at this point, the reason that I was drinking is because I was drinky. That's the reason I was dranky. And there isn't any way to getting out of that except to die or have a convulsion or something because there's just no end to it. I was having withdrawals in airplanes. The physical symptoms were coming in very rapidly. I was getting extremely uptight. I was losing my peripheral vision, my heart palpitations. I can remember flying a couple times out of Cherry Point, North Carolina, in a Crusader where I flew around for an hour with my hand on the ejection seat because I thought I was going to pass out. And this is not happy flying. This is not, you know, this does not make you look forward to today when you jump out of bed in the morning. This caused a great deal of anxiety and my subconscious started coming up with little thoughts like, You ought to stop flying. Your life is too valuable to go up with you. That was the basic message. Because I knew what an unreliable pilot I had become, and then we're talking this plane only had one seat in it. I was the only passenger. And I just didn't like that too much. But, you know, we couldn't admit defeat. We're funny, us alcoholics. We have the feeling that tomorrow it's going to change, that at any moment we can rise to the occasion and all these troubles will go away. Us alcoholics are the only people I know that can be lying flat on our back and feel superior to the people looking down at us. And we're looking through that foggy veil at those forms up there, and we're going, hell, tomorrow I could get up and take any one of their jobs away. Boy, if I felt like it, I could just get in there, oh, I Could Do This and I Could do That. But I don't feel like it today. Today I need a little drinking, but tomorrow, boy, I could do anything tomorrow. And that's what I was always promising myself, that tomorrow would be when I would change everything and I'd become a good father. My family, I think, was up to four children then and ended up being six. And I would be all these wonderful things, which I never became until I made a beginning at it here in AA. I finally turned myself into the doctors, which I do only when I think death is imminent. I have a great fear of the medical profession and I did because I was really in terrible shape and I knew that I could kill myself easily but I lied about my drinking, I lied about all the problems, I just told them about the heart palpitations and the trembling and all that i was examined for two weeks under very close observation and my diagnosis uh for the high blood pressure the trembling hands and all these attacks in the airplane was left up to the psychiatrist because they could not find anything physically wrong and the diagnosis was the childhood dislike of airplanes and that was the uh that was the official Navy diagnosis of my problem and I knew that that was wrong. I knew, that wasn't my problem but I was afraid to complain and so my wings were taken away from me. My career was just stopped. They said you're no longer a pilot. We're going to give you a new job and I was retrained in radar. I became a GCA controller and for those of you who don't know what that is, that means I was on a radar scope bringing my friends in in bad weather when they couldn't see the runway. And it requires the most exacting skill and the mind has to be super sharp at all times and of all places to send a guy who's about to have the DTs. It was wild. I was sent overseas for my last overseas tour as an officer in charge of one of these units, and I soon realized that my ability to control was very limited, and I never went near the scopes. I was just sort of in the background in charge. You know what a guy in charge is over there doing nothing. So I never killed anybody or had any accidents or anything on my conscience, and and I'm very grateful for that because I certainly was in no condition to do that kind of work. But I was no longer flying, and my last excuse for not drinking during the day disappeared. And, of course, I had all of the great resentments and all the poor me's. Look at that, 12 years of flying, and they took my wings away, and I've been a captain for eight years. And I'll tell you, if any of you have been in the military, that's a long time to be a captain. You ain't going anywhere when you're a captain, for eight year. You're on your way out, but you don't know it. I was a very senior captain, I'll say that much. And the reason was that all of my contemporaries had been promoted three years earlier. That's why I was so senior. And my last excuse for drinking during the day was gone, and so I was overseas, and I came across the idea of using vodka. I had heard somewhere that vodka didn't smell. I was terrified that somebody would catch me drinking during the day, but I needed to. The shakes were getting bad. I was in terrible shape in the mornings. And so I got some vodka. I was living in a Quonset hut with three other guys, and I took a slug of vodka at one noon. I went into this guy, andI said, Hey, Frank, do you smell anything? And he said, Yeah, vodka. And I'll never forget that. There went my whole secrecy of my drinking. And I kept changing brands. I went from Smirnoff's and Gilby's into Pabov, some Russian brand. And I think they got tired of me breathing in their face, and finally they said, no, we don't smell anything. And I said, oh, thank God, I've got the right brand. Now I'm safe. And I was walking around in a daze with the fumes of alcohol coming through my uniform and my hair. You know how you are when you don't clean up for weeks on end. But at least I had this beautiful security blanket that I had pure breath, and nobody could smell the booze coming on my breath. And so this was when I started into a physical decline that brought my drinking to an end in a big hurry. My body decided, in addition to shaking and dry heaving every morning, unable to make a decision to not get my mind to work in the morning, I really was one of those guys who got up in the morning and couldn't decide which sock to put on first. You know, sat there terrified of making a mistake or putting a left sock on the right foot or something like that and go out there and somebody's going to see it and go, hey, you've got a left stock on the Right Foot, you know. And I was terrified of the world. The paranoia had set in so badly that I was just daily life was absolutely terrifying even though I was drinking during the day. And so in addition to that, my body had decided I could no longer consume food of any sort. I mean, I kept cutting down. You know, I said, well, how about a little pork chop? And my stomach would go, no, no pork chop. Well, I've got to get something in there. I'm weak. I don't have the strength to make it through the day. And occasionally I'd get a reprieve and I'd be granted a cup of soup. You know what I'm saying? Try a cup or two and see if it'll stay down. And I'd get a little bit of that down. It was just one of those years that I hope I never go through again. That's the only way I can put it. I lost 65 pounds in that year. I had malnutrition at the end of the year, extremely bad. My teeth were just about to fall out. I couldn't go to the dentist. I don't know if any of you had that fear, but no way was I going to go near that dentist's office. And on my annual physical every year, the dentist would look in there and have a heart attack. He'd look in their, he'd say, you've got to get about 15 hours of dental work. Those teeth are just coming apart. I'm scheduling you for an appointment next Tuesday morning at 9 o'clock. And I'd say fine, oh yeah, we've got get this worked up. And then I'd, no way I was going to make that appointment. I knew that. There were several reasons I wasn't going to be able to make it. I didn't know how to make an appointment. One of them was it takes a basic amount of courage to show up in a dentist's office, which i didn't have the second one was i knew that man was going to get his mouth right in my or his nose right in your mouth he's gonna say you've been drinking and uh how was i gonna say to him and the third and most terrifying reason was that i knew somewhere during that appointment he was gonna say okay captain would you reach over there and pick that little paper cup up with filled with water and rinse your mouth out and you know how they always fill that little paper cup up over the brim i mean they filled it right up over the top and my way i shook there was no way that i could get my hand anywhere near that paper cup and i had visions of that going all over him and all over me and so i never went to the dentist i just rescheduled every month i reschedule for another appointment and then a whole year would go by i'd be back the guy would look in again and these were the little things that were exciting in those days so at the end of the year i had malnutrition i had lost all this weight and i looked back on it and uh realized that at that time i had to be one of the few captains on active duty who was not a prisoner of war who had malnutrition i mean just you know with all the food around money in your pocket you got malnutricion what else can you be except an alcoholic or crazy or both i mean uh just you just don't walk around not eating but there was no way i could get any hard food to stay down so i was trying to live on vodka and orange juice and vitamins you know and get uh and i really was had very little energy could barely make it through the day my hope was to just not be noticed you know just show up at work and uh sort of uh arrive on time and then disappear where is he i don't know he was here an hour ago he looked very busy. He had a clipboard and a pencil. He must have some project. I think he said he was going up there, and I had a hell of a time keeping my lies straight as to where I was going and where I was because I needed to have a couple ounces of vodka about every two hours, and we didn't have any wheels over there except bicycles. And I'd get on my little bicycle and ride back to Quonset Hut and get a little vodka and go back and make it for a couple more hours, then I'd start to shake so bad that I'd have to go back and get some more. And life was becoming an absolute nightmare, and I withdrew from even my closest friends. I couldn't talk with them about my problem, and it just was like withdrawing into a shell, and i was just a shell. I could not look anybody in the eye because I was terrified that they could see inside, and that somebody would go, hey there is nobody in there! You know? There was nothing left. I just knew that somebody was going to look in and say, there's nobody in that body. He's gone. There's no man in there. There's not self-confidence. There is no self-respect. There was nothing but a frightened person who doesn't know where to go or what to do. That's what was in there was a frightened person who didn't know what to go and what to. And this frightened person who hurt so badly every day and knew nowhere to go had to do what I think is the hardest thing that alcoholics do, and that is to pretend that nothing is wrong. That, to me, is the agony of being an alcoholic, at least with some other sickness. You can walk around going, oh, my arm hurts. Oh, it hurts. It hurts. But us alcoholics, when we're not sure if we're going to make it for three more steps, are pretending that everything is all right. And we see somebody in the morning, they go, hi, Sandy, how are you this morning? And we tell our first lie of the day, and we say, I'm fine. Fine. You don't know if you're going to make it ten more minutes. You're fine. The agony of pretending that everything's all right is very hard to explain to non-alcoholics, but I once heard a man say, If you want to try it, get up in the morning someday and take two thumbtacks and punch them into the palm of your hands all the way in and walk around all day going, Hi, how you doing? Hi, hi. and see how long you last without finally complaining about those thumbtacks being in there. Somehow during that year, I convinced myself that everything was all right. I was still telling myself the lie that this is a small price to pay for the fun I'm having from drinking, that tomorrow everything is going to be all right, that I'm going to get out of this alive, and when I get back to the States, everything's going to Be All Right. And there were days when this was very hard to do. I remember one day in particular, I fell asleep in the afternoon. I had forgotten to buy booze, and I slept for three or four hours. I slept up until the package store was due to close. And I got out of bed, and I had gone well beyond the time limit that I needed booze. And I was shaking violently. I was shaking so bad that I could hardly just get my shirt to button. And I had three minutes to get over to the package store to get vodka, or I wasn't going to get any. And I can remember the agony of trying to get dressed, and I got all my clothes on, and I had a minute and a half to go, and my shoes were knotted. I had taken them off with the knots tied, and I'd been in the mud and the water, and the leather had shrunk. And my hands were shaking. I thought I was watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. I'm looking at the clock, 55 seconds. I got a fork. I'm trying to get those knots undone in the shoes. But I thought, I was going to have a heart attack over a shoelace and trying to put it on. I was trying to keep those things on. I get on a bicycle and race over there, and a guy was just closing it, and I got him to give me a bottle of vodka. And I got back and poured the vodka down, and it went in, and all of a sudden I was doing, I wonder what I was so upset about about 15 minutes ago. But I wonder what the problem was. And my conscience had no part of it that day, and it said, wait a minute. There you are, a grown man, 33 years old, a captain of the Marine Corps, a father of six children, you're standing around with a damn fork in your hand trying to take a knot out of a shoelace about to have a nervous breakdown and you don't think anything's wrong? You've got a problem and you've got to do something about it. And I'm going, tomorrow, tomorrow I'm gonna do something about it. And the boy said, today you're gonna do something about. You are going to do something about it and I got on my bike and I went over the PX and I bought a pair of loafers. And I thought it was a brilliant solution to the problem. I really felt enthralled with that solution. And it was insane to think of that solution, but it's even more insane to accept it as the answer to that problem. Fortunately for me, my body gave out before my brain went all the way, and I'm sure there's been some damage up there. I don't know how much, but I'm sure there's been some. And it went after I was sent back to Quantico to become the next Commandant of the Marine Corps. I was send to one of these career schools. And while I was attending class at this school, diligently working my way up, I had a convulsion. And this stopped my progress up the ladder towards becoming the Commandant of the Marines. Marine Corps because convulsions are very hard to have quietly over in the corner you just you just don't fake a convulsion if you were you remember those things they really get everybody's attention it really gets the problem out in the open and people are going get some air that guy get him you know and I was taken up to the Bethesda Naval Hospital to find out what caused the convulsion believe it or not alcoholism has not yet reared its ugly head I was still clean but after 20 hours of being up in the gentleman's section in that beautiful tower at the Bethesda Naval Hospital I went into the DTS which let the cat out of the bag as to what had caused a convulsion and I came to I don't know a week or so later and I had been in a straitjacket and I've been fed intravenously and it was a bad recovery from that particular episode and I came to in a bed with sides on it like a baby you know so you won't fall out and hurt yourself and I didn't know where I was it took the longest time for my brain to start clearing up and thinking again and eventually I was let out of that back lock section maximum security out to where there was other people and I think it was three days before I would talk to anybody and finally I went over to a man who looked like he would be kind he was old he had white hair and he was small and I said that looks harmless so I went over and I went where am I and he said you don't know where you are and I I said, no, I don't even know who you are. He said, my name is Commander Brown, United States Navy, and you're in the psychiatric ward at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. And I said my God, what are you in here for? Because this man looked as healthy and as nice as could be. And he looked me square in the eye and he said, I happen to have schizophrenic tendencies with paranoiac overtones. And he said what about you? And I said, well, I'm drunk. And that man never spoke again to me. He looked at me like I was dirt, like I didn't even exist. That was the end of the conversation and he walked away to his equals. And later on I was approached by a much younger man, a JG in the Navy. And this time I had looked at the foot of my bed on that metal tag that's on the foot of the bed, and I was prepared when he asked me why I was in there. And I stood up and I said, I happen to have chronic alcoholic syndromes. That sounded a little classier than what I told that commander. And the JG looked at me and he said, oh, a drunk, huh? And he didn't have anything else to say to me. And I realized in my mind that the position that I had skyrocketed to at age 33, with a degree from Yale University and making it through flight school and all the good things and never wanting for anything, the position I had staked out for myself was low man in the nut ward and I had a hell of a time telling me that that was a small price to pay for all the fun I was having out of my drinking but I did it as my health returned I felt more and more resentful about being in there and about a month later I really felt like the bottom fell out of the world because a corpsman came An 18-year-old corpsman came in and said, all you drunks fall in. Right face. And I was at an AA meeting. And I sat out there and these guys had come in from the Bethesda area to share their experiences with us. They had talked the Navy captain into letting AA come into the hospital. This was their first contact with the military there. And I resented it. I just hated sitting out there. I just, it was awful. And I went up afterwards. A little red-headed guy was running the meeting and I said, well, I think it's marvelous that you have the answer to alcoholism. And if I ever run into a guy with a problem, I'm going to send him around to see you. Typical alcoholic arrogance. And this man was the first person to ever hit me with the truth. And it really hurt because he looked me right in the eye and he said, wait a minute, buddy. He says, which one of us is going to put our overcoat on and go out and get in the car and drive on home to our family. And which one of us is putting his little blue bathrobe on and is getting that elevator and go upstairs and get locked up like an animal? Now, who the hell are you? And you ought to see resentment. I got in that elevator, and I started resenting him bad. I resented him awful bad up in the room and hanging around there. I resended him until he let me out four months later. I kept that resentment going every day. I nurtured it, and I never let it die. Boy, you get a good resentment like that, you don't let it get away from you. And I kept it. And as soon as I got out of there, they told me if I ever had another drink, my career was finished. And I thought over what they said, and I said what he meant to say was if I never get drunk again, my career is finished, not if I have another drink. And so I got even with this guy by having a beer. And they told мне that if I had a drink, I'd get drunk. First drink gets you drunk. And I had that beer, watched the football game. I was an outpatient from the nut ward. I had to go back the next day. I went to bed that night. Nothing happened. And I drove in the car going back up and I thought about the fact how I had had a drink and nothing had happened. They were wrong. The first drink doesn't affect you at all. I was so excited by the fact that this drink had had no effect on my life that I thought of it all day. I sat there at lunch and thought about the fact that drink had had no effect on my life whatsoever. And all the way home, I thought about that drink and how I'm not an alcoholic. I had a drink, and it didn't do anything to me. It didn't affect my life at all. I'm completely free of booze. I was so excited about the act that that drink has no effect upon my life, I couldn't sleep that night. I thought of that drink all night long and how it had no affect on my light. For three days I thought about how joyous it was that this drink had meant nothing to me. It had no effect on my life whatsoever. I was overjoyed that I was free at last of booze. If there's anybody who is curious what an obsession is, that's one. And that drink got me about three days later because I got to vodka and I got going And I drank again for about three days and got so deathly ill and was terrified. I was drinking in the nut ward and so on down. And I was absolutely terrified, and I called AA. And a big guy came by my house. He was my sponsor. He outweighed me by about 80 pounds. And when he told me not to drink, I decided I better not drink until I got rid of him. He was very big, and he was another Marine. He was mean. And I could just tell that he wasn't going to mess around and think too kindly of me if I showed up with booze on my breath. And he started taking me to those meetings where I sat out there and resented being there because I didn't have enough evidence to support the fact that alcohol was causing a problem in my life. And I'll tell you, something wrong with you when you've got the kind of trouble that I had and you can sit out there at an AA meeting going, oh, I don't think I really have a problem. I was about to die from it, and I couldn't admit it. I could not accept the factthat I needed help. It was an absolute blow to my ego. I had been taught that a real man never asks for help. A real man takes care of his own problems. It's a sign of weakness to ask for help." I don't know who taught me that, but if I find them, they're in for a lot of trouble. That kind of bad advice gets us alcoholics in trouble. Anyway, somewhere... I want to just tell you a little bit about the third step and then I'll sit down. But somewhere after two or three months of attending these meetings and not drinking, some of you people got through to me a sentence here and a sentence there. And you gave me this little hope that I was finally in the right place, that I didn't have to be frightened all the time, and that maybe my future was going to be a little better than I had envisioned it. And I wanted to be like the people who were happy in AA. I wanted to be like the people who had what the 12-step calls the joy of living. There were certain ones that I wanted it to be like, and they were the ones that exuded and radiated the AA program. You could see it in their joy of living, and every one of those said they got it from the 12 steps. Without exception, they said they got it from The Twelve Steps. And I wanted in a hurry. And I can remember when I decided to become a member of this program. I got to 12 and 12, and I went home and I took all the steps in 45 minutes. I was finished. Bam! And I sat there going, when do I get that feeling that those guys have? You know, I'm ready, I're ready, I'm already, when does it come? And of course it didn't come that night. But that was a big night. That was a night when I was willing to try. I was willingly to maybe take a look at your way. I was like a wild animal who was absolutely terrified by everything it didnít know. And you had to tame me by steps. You had to reach me with love, which is how you tame a wild animal. And you had to prove to me through consistency that every time I came back, I'd be welcome. And every time i saw the same face, it was smiling at me. And they were telling me, good to see you, Sandy. Keep coming back. It's going to be all right. Keep comingback. It's gonna be allright. That's how you tame a wild, frightened alcoholic. And that's what you people did to me. And I'm so grateful for it. And the program of love began to have its effect on me. I became less frightened of you. I was frightened of me, I was frightening of God, I was frighting of the rest of the world, but I became left frightened of Alcoholics Anonymous and I was willing to try some of the steps that you had. And I got through the first two steps all right, but when I got to the third step, the fear overpowered me again. It said something about turning my life over to the care of a higher power and there was no way I could relinquish control of my life and I approached this mean sponsor of mine with this problem. And he burst into hysterics. He said, you're worried about turning your life over? And I said, yeah, I'm just a very serious thing. He's just a bunch of howling over there. You're worried I'm going to turn your life over. He says, who the hell can do a worse job than you do? And then I looked at him and he said, Sandy, we could go out on the street there and stop that car and get the driver and say, hey buddy, run this guy's life for a year, will you? And he'd do a better job than you do. And I was still an outpatient from the nut warden. I did not have a good answer for him at that moment in time. I didn't have a wait a minute. He said, Sandy, the big thing we'll accomplish if you'll make a beginning on that step of turning your life over is one of the biggest things that can happen to you. And i said, what's that? He said your life will no longer be in the hands of an idiot. Those are very, very rough words, but you know he was right. And that is the beginning of the third step is to let him go. You don't have to have a full concept of what God is. You don' t have to know all those answers of what your future is going to be. All you have to do is let go. And when you let go of that old way of life with all those old ideas and all those inflexible attitudes towards things, that is when you drop that weight that is preventing you from getting afloat on this sea of life. AA is trying to pull us along, but when we got the weight of that old way of life, it's a rough pull. And the second I dropped it and was just willing to whatever, take it over, take It over, that's what I did. I turned my life over to whatever was there. I didn't have a concept. And that was the moment the great release came on And that's the feeling that things were going to be all right. I've since come to realize and come to know a God of my understanding, which I think gave us this AA program and was kind enough to let me in it. And I've come to Know What the Spiritual Side of This Program Is. But the beginning was the willingness to get rid of that old way of life. And if you're new and you haven't been able to do that yet, I hope you're able to doing soon. because when you do, you won't have to tell anybody that you've done this because the people around you will see it in your eyes. They'll see a whole personality change that'll come over you where you're suddenly talking about now I'm going to do this and I'm gonna do that and yes, I can do this and a positive attitude will take the place of all that negativeness. There'll be a sparkle in your eye that was never there before and a whole new outlook towards life that may not be supported by the facts. And the facts may be that you don't know where your family is, that you do not have a job yet, that you are $2,000 in debt and you are walking around with a smile on your face. Now how the heck is this possible? And you know I have watched this in AA and I have come to realize how this is possible. The reason that it is possible is that we finally realized in our own minds that we have hit the bottom and we are on the way back up. When that moment happens, it's awful hard not to smile. When you yourself are sitting there and go, hey, I'm through going down, I'll go in the other way. When that realization comes in, you see that it's a long way back up. But just the knowledge that you're going the other way is sufficient to produce that grin. And the second beautiful thing that I think is great is that you will not take this journey back up alone. You went down that horror story all by yourself, but now you're going to be going up with friends. And you're gonna be going with people who've been over these rough waters who are willing to stick their hand out and say to you, if you're having trouble with that, I had trouble with it, let me show you the way. And they'll stick their hands out and pull you along. And if you can realize the greatest gift that you can give yourself is to accept the help of AA. When I learned how to accept help on a basis of love here in AA is when my life changed. And again, it's been a pleasure to be down here. I'm very happy to be invited. And to the new person, I hope this moment of change comes about sometime during this convention. Thank you.