Why AA Spells Yes Instead of No – Joe K.

And our next speaker will be a good friend of ours from San Francisco, Joe Kay from San Francisco, Joe. Thank you, Charlie. I'm Joe Klass. I'm grateful for what my creator has made of me. thank God I'm an alcoholic good evening fellow drunks and friends of drunks you know III think it's so great to have somebody like Archie in that business and we have a lot in common I'm uh well he's a colonel and I'm a colonel and he's been a marine for 30 years and i've been an alcoholic for longer than that i think the reason i'm here tonight though is because i oh the reason he hasn't got a beard is young they're not long enough to grow one yet but uh i think the real reason i'm here tonight is because uh quite a few years ago i uh 12 steps stepped their next convict and this was in the middle of the night it was about 2 30 in the morning and this guy who'd heard me speaking at a meeting and incidentally i didn't even know what the hell i was talking about then this uh this uh this fellow called me up in the middle of the night drunken a skunk and uh i i decided to go down and see him i don't know what his problem was except he was really drunk you know but he said he'd heard me talk and decided he didn't need the meetings anymore and so I kind of felt responsible so I went down to see him I was living in Hayward that time and I went and I walked into this plush apartment in Fremont in the middle of the night about 2.30 in the morning and this apartment was beautiful he was just absolutely staggering drunk and he was on a wooden leg so he was really staggering kind of funny and this apartment had beautiful paintings on the wall and it looked like there'd been a hell of a party in there and there were all kinds of prestige matures sitting around and across one wall of the apartment he'd stretch some wrapping paper and on it it said, I love you in Norwegian and so I asked him what he was drinking for well he told me that he had felt so good after hearing me talk that he knew he had this problem licked. And so he had a girlfriend over in Norway, and he sent for her to come over for a trial marriage of one week. And if it worked out, you see, if she was convinced he was cured, they were going to get married, but she'd have to go back and tell her folks everything was okay now and so what happened of course was he was celebrating the success of going a whole week with her without getting drunk by having this little farewell party and she's going to leave on the plane the next morning about that and he started to tell me about the correspondence and he actually had the letters hidden inside the joint of his wooden leg he was pulling these wadded letters out and reading them to me and i'm thinking oh hell i don't think i ought to be here you know i don't think i'm really responsible and then finally i said well where is she because she's in the bedroom that was about an hour and a half after i got there and i poked you know i tiptoed over the bedroom and opened the door and she was sitting up straight in bed crying and absolutely at attention a gorgeous norwegian blonde girl you know absolutely gorgeous well to make a long story short i i decided to i said what what are you going to do and she says i'm through with him absolutely through he says i would marry him if he turned into jesus christ and so she said i don't know how i'm going to get the plane it leaves at one o'clock tomorrow from san francisco airport so i took the two of them now he's a big shot he had found a way to separate people from their money without getting arrested for it. He was a reformed convict. Now he was a financial investment counselor, and he operated the biggest mutual funds company in Alameda County. He was the boss. And he was going to impress me if he insisted that we take his Lincoln. So I'm driving his Lincoln, He's in the front seat with me. I got the blonde in the back seat. I went by my house, picked up my wife to console the blonde, you see. We get over to San Francisco Airport and he insists on using the valet service. And he puts the ticket in his pocket lest I might be tempted to pay for it and he wasn't going to allow that. We go in and he goes to the bar while we're waiting for the plane that comes out with a drink for him and one for me and I wouldn't drink it so he drank them both. And this went on, and the blonde is getting madder and madder and maddened. And she gets on that plane, and I'm trying to tell her, you know, if he should get into AA seriously and really start working this program, it still might be all right. She says, AA isn't going to help him. So she took off and left. Now, I drove this guy back to Fremont. My wife didn't want any more of him either, so I left her off. I drove him back to Freemont in his Lincoln, and by well in the first place i had a hell of a time finding the lincoln because i couldn't find this ticket he passed out on the bench by the valet parking and so i went with one of the valets out in a one of their airport cars and we went through the parking lot have you got any idea how many lincolns there are parked at san francisco international we never would have spotted it except this guy says hey there's one of those disabled stickers on that one is that it since he had a wooden leg that had to be his so i drove him back and it was about it was one of the hottest days of the year and it's about 110 degrees in fremont he's passed out cold in the back seat he's lying there and i drove into the parking lot next to his apartment house opened the door and i tried to wake him up i couldn't wake him i didn't want to tell his landlady what i was bringing home i didn' know quite what to do i tried t lift him up now he weighed about 185 pounds without his leg which fell off in the back seat i was so disgusted i pushed him and his wooden leg back into the backseat locked the car door in 110 degrees temperature and started to leave and then i got a i had the key in my hand you see i didn't want him to wake up and start driving this thing so i wrote a little note as a sort of an afterthought and i said your key is in your mailbox and i say by the way there's a meeting at such-and-such an address in niles at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning if you should be interested in alcoholics anonymous it was a meeting i'd never been to and i left him there baking in the car and his note in the key in the mailbox. The next morning I couldn't resist, I just had to go to that meeting. I didn't expect to see him but I had to. I was irresistibly drawn to it and by God there he was. That man never took another drink as long as he lived and he lived several years. He became my financial counselor. The biggest investment company in Alameda County became a headquarters for Alcoholics Anonymous. It had more people wandering in and out of it for a cup of coffee and arm's length than any Alano club in the country. It was really sensational and then he got active in the hospital and institution out of san quentin and he used to try and get me to go out to san quentine with him and i said hell they don't want me out there i've never been a convict they want to hear convicts out there you'd go out and talk to them i haven't had any business out there that they would resent me and he one night about seven oh about six o'clock in the evening we were down at the Alano Club in San Francisco. He says, Joe, he says, you're a writer. He said, don't you think you owe it to yourself as a writer to have a look at some time and see what's behind those walls? I said, well, I am curious, but I don't want to. He goes, listen, just come along and watch. So I said okay. He trapped me. Went out to San Quentin. Before I went in, I hid my money in my the meeting end was in the main dining hall and that was a place so bad that the screws wouldn't go down there and the convicts the prisoners were using it to make points for the most part it looked to me like I don't know they were sitting around mumbling to each other instead of paying attention to what how was telling them but there were two or three guys there that were getting into the conversation and for some damn reason or other I'm no time at all I found myself in the middle of this discussion and when it was over a couple of these guys came over they were being rushed back to their cell blocks a couple you guys came over and they said hey Joey we like what you had to say how about coming back next time and I said well I don't know you really want me and he said yeah we'd like to have you come back and i said well and he says you know joe there's one thing that we never talk about at these damn meetings he says no he says you were a prisoner of war you know what we need the most the minute we get out of here yeah i think i think I do yeah down. He says, we never talk about that and where are we going to get it? We go into a bar. He said, where else are you going to meet a gal? We're going to a bar and we're on the violation of our parole the first night. I said, okay. He goes, will you come back? Will you talk about this for us? I said okay. The next meeting the subject will be kale without ale. We discussed that for four years. Got to be a hell of a big meeting. Oh, once in a while we'd vary it. We'd talk about how to be an nonconformist without getting busted. I found that I had a great deal in common A great deal In common with these guys There wasn't any question about it We were alike What the hell is the matter With us alcoholics For one thing we're super sensitive people We'll recognize hypocrisy The minute we see it Except when We're doing it But it's all around us. We recognize hypocrisy, and we escape from it. The guy that ends up behind the walls declares war on it. That's why he's there. He declares War on Society. He figures if the head of Sears Roebuck can do it, why the hell shouldn't I steal something? So he gets a snootful, and just like the guy at Sears Robuck, He gets a snoop pull, you know. Or was it Montgomery Ward? Well, the long and short of it is that I find that I have a tremendous amount in common with the Marine Corps and the guys behind the walls in San Quentin. We're sensitive. And we're hurt easily. and we can react blindly and do stupid things and that's why they're there and that' s why I'm here my father was a marine I think the first thing I ever remember on this earth is waking up in the middle of the night and hearing explosions and grabbing the bars of my crib in an apartment house in San Francisco and my father's homebrew was blowing up in the closet. The next thing that I ever remember was tasting my father'S homebREW and a Marine Corps buddy of my fatherÕs named Jimmy was there. He was a sergeant and my dadÕd be a sergeer My father was out of the Marine Corps and Jimmy came by to see him. My father liberated Hawaii. he had the primo beer concession at Pearl Harbor but anyway they decided to see how I liked homebrew and I stood there eye level with with the Marine Corps shoe I can still see that shoe he was sitting there with legs crossed they were laughing over the way I was lapping up this homebrew because I really liked it I used to well I think the first thing I ever understood actually understood is probably the first everybody understands and that was my mother saying no no no baby mustn't do that that has to be the first words any of us ever understand. Not mama, but no-no. And we grow a little bit older and pretty soon brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and grandparents and the neighbors and the cop on the beat, the drill sergeant, employers, nurses, doctors, the legislature, school teachers, got everybody saying no to it. So what the hell do we want to do? Somebody says no, you mustn't do that or you shouldn't do that and we hit that magic age of puberty you know when we really want to start doing something and what are we here hey you're getting mature now it's time we didn't have to say no to you so much it's time you began to learn how to turn yourself down you're mature now and so we start to practice turning ourselves down. And we hit middle age sometime, we look in the mirror and we say, you poor slob, why aren't you a success? Well, the definition of success is to do what we want to do. So we've been practicing not doing it all our lives. The definition of success is that we're not doing what we're doing. Success is to be what we wanna do, and the definition of failure is to not do it I began to rebel against this like you're supposed to be 21 to drink well as a matter of fact when I was growing up you weren't even supposed to drink you weren's supposed to make it and my father was a respected member of the community because he knew how to make good home brew and later on he made good bathtub gin and I never made any but I used to help him and i remember the recipe that's a hell of an impression to remember for about 40 years and a guy got elected president on the slogan bring back light wine and beer and happy days we'll be here again the idea was that he was going to that's still the theme song of my political party the theme song was based on the idea that if we made alcohol legal if we made light wine and beer legal incidentally prior to that light wine and beer was forbidden on military bases even before prohibition because those old primitive soldiers used to think that that stuff made you drunk and Roosevelt convinced the world that you couldn't possibly get drunk on light wine and beer god bless him that's why we have it on military bases today it's okay now so what happens is uh we're going to eliminate the income tax because we're gonna put a tax on alcohol we're to eliminate al capone because what are you gonna do if we stop his liquor business uh we are going to bring back prosperity in an age of depression because it's going to stimulate the economy and most of all we're going to make everybody straight who's been a criminal by making or drinking booze this is all going to happen with the repeal of the 18th amendment which happened in 1933 and obviously when that happened the patriotic thing to do was to drink now my parents thought that they had taught me how to grow up and drink like a gentleman they believed that the way to do that was the european way they thought european ways were more genteel that's because they were both born in this country and so they taught me how to drink wine and beer right from the start you know from the time i was knee high to her eye height to a marine corps sergeant's boot and so what did I do I learned how to drink like a gentleman I became the world's champion now when when I started well when I was 13 years old I was buying homebrew for social occasions I was a social drinker when I wasn't late great you forget it on the houseboat down in Lake Union for 10 cents a quart, and that stuff was about 11%, I think. Also, I used to deliver papers, and I'd pass this place in Seattle where we moved to, and it was raining all the time, and I had this huge paper route, really a big heavy load, two loads as a matter of fact. I went past the hotel where we lived twice, delivering papers, and each time I would dash into the hotel, into the bathroom, and pour myself a tumbler full of Formula 4, Formula five or formula six that's how you ordered port tokay or sherry at the local drugstore and so i had two tumblers full of that just delivering papers every day it kept me warm kept me industrious i won a lot of awards for being a good newspaper boy my aim was deadly well i couldn't wait to grow up i started drinking in taverns about that time nobody ever asked for id there was no such thing as id i doubt if a person's age was even on a driver's license at that time you go into a tavern and if you were tall enough and held the glass right ordered it right why you got it right and so i started on a life of fantasy because you can't sit in a taverna long on a bar stool before the guy on the next stool or the bartender says what do you do and i couldn't say i go to broadway high school i said i'm a college man i go to the university of washington and i would tell him what it was like playing on the university of Washington Huskies football team and what it was like living in the fraternity i think i was using SAE at that time well i was saying this because that's what i thought i ought to be you see in the first place i was drinking in order to be 21 i want i couldn't wait to be a man and i i was influenced by the movies which was our main means of entertainment every saturday night or friday night and i'd seen these movies about flaming youth a guy in a raccoon coat sitting in the rumble seat of a model a ford with a flapper on his knee and a silver flask and god damn it that's the kind of a man i wanted to be well by the time i got to college i'd been a flaming youth for so long i became a freshman and that isn't exactly on the university of washington husky football team i was bored with it already so when i'd be in a tavern and somebody say what do you do i wouldn't tell him i was a freshman at the university of washington i'd say i'm a newspaper man i had seen the front page with pat o'brien and lee tracy and i i well there was this guy you see at the cook county courthouse and there's an escaped murderer about to be executed in the morning and Hildy Johnson's got him stuck in the roll-top desk and there is a bottle in every drawer and the reporters keep coming in and out to phone in their stories and have another slug and Hilde's calling Walter Burns at the Chicago Tribune and saying, God damn it, I'm no la-di-da I can blow better newspaper stories out of my nose than you can write and God damn if that's the kind of a man I wanted to be a good two-handed hard drinking newspaper man and i was enrolled in the school of journalism and naturally i got a job as a campus correspondent and then when the summer vacation came along i was filling in for staffers at the seattle post intelligence and before i knew it there i was on night police beat going to school in the daytime working nights at the uh king county jail and the seattle city jail down on uh on uh yesra and i was in this i i was the only morning paper but the other two guys got through work early because their papers came out in the evening mine i was there all alone you know no escape murders no roll top desk a damn lousy uh teletype machine and i've got to send something up to the paper seven times a day which i copy off of the police slaughter i got to be on a first name basis with all the cops and the attorneys and the everybody the judges the district attorneys the bail bondsmen the the guys who were arrested their wives the pimps everybody you know and I used to drink across the street from there you know in the business and professional men's club they still didn't have hard liquor across the bar in the state of Washington so the law had to have it speak easy across the streets from the police station was called a business and professional Men's Club and that's so all these people I just described would have a place to drink all night long and so i would go over there and i was making 22 a week after two raises you see and i began to realize that being a newspaper man wasn't much and i'd be sitting in this bar listening to the piano player or something and if a stranger walked in and sat on the next bar stool to me and said what do you do i say i'm a military pilot And I'd do a navigation problem on a bar napkin. And I learned navigation because I really wanted to be a military pilot. I wanted to being a military so bad I could taste it. I read all those books, Fighting the Flying Circus, The Red Knight of Germany, Falcons of France, High Adventure, Warbirds. I read them all and I saw all those movies. I wanted to be a military pilot. I wanted to be the guy that was in every motion picture ever made about military flying in no matter what war, only then it was World War I and I regretted so much I'd been born so late that I couldn't fly a SPAD or a Newport against a Red Baron with his red tri-play. That's what I really wanted to do. I wanted the be the guy in the movies played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. or David Niven or Richard Dix, the guy that wakes up so hungover in the morning in his red polka dot pajamas, hugging his pillow like a girl, you know, that he can't even get his clothes on, so he pulls on his fly-in coveralls over the polka-dot pajamas, goes out to the Newport, takes off on the Dawn patrol and never comes back saw the picture huh well in the next scene you see the next scene all of a squadron makes are somewhere in France in this officers mess which is just a shack with broken pieces of airplane wings with crosses on them and busted propellers on the wall and they're standing there at a makeshift bar drinking a toast to their comrades upside down glass on a shelf behind the bar and then smashing their glasses. And then we cut to a storm that's raging outside with lightning and thunder, and here comes a lamey with handlebar mustaches driving a motorcycle, and the camera pans over to the sidecar and here in the side car is our friend with a red polka dot pajamas and his arms full of champagne bottles And God damn it, I wanted to be that man. And I had all the qualifications. I had enough college. I could pass the physical. I wanted a job. I wanted me to be a military pilot so bad that my mother wouldn't let me. She would talk to me very seriously about how when I was born I was such a big baby I stretched her all out of shape and how she had sacrificed so much you see to get me where I was and I was her only son and it wasn't fair to her to risk my life in one of them flying machines so I well I was having trouble paying for those drinks in that bar across the street and i had to raise some extra money and i was going to school that was a mess you know and i i um i had some pretty good uh friends over there i was a friend of the prisoners and the law and everybody because i spelled everybody's name right i was going to learn how to do that they said joe they're going to get mad at you if you misspell their names but they're going to love you if you spell them right and so i had some guys behind the bars tell me an easy way to pick up a little loose change they needed money and they had certain kinds of merchandise that their wives or girlfriends would deliver to me and then i would bring in the money and help them after i sold the merchandise and helped them pay for their attorneys and maybe put up bail etc etc etc and so i became sort of a foolproof fence it was foolproof because i have access to the pawn shop details hot property list i get a camera look at the serial number look at the list if it's not on there walk down the nearest camera store and sell it and they were never never they would never ask where i got it they'd look at a list not on there give me the money well i got to thinking why should i let's see why should I be the middle man you know i was born in an age when i could no longer cross the plains as an indian scout i could not longer sail in a three-masted schooner around the horn I could no longer fly spads and new ports in World War I. I was born at the wrong time, and there was a hell of a lot of adventure out there after I got off work about 2 o'clock in the morning. And so I began to wander around the streets at night looking in windows and finding two different kinds of things. Property that was worth money, and I was getting ready to be a writer, so i was studying human behavior boy when they know when they don't know you're watching you really get a lesson too and naturally i was stoned every time i did this because i started getting drunk when i went on shift you know there wasn't any boss down there as long as i could punch those keys and get those stories up or i could pick up the phone and say that linotype is not working at the moment we have a problem i'll phone it in if i couldn't hit the keys you know this kind of stuff they got rewrite people so here i am walking down the street one night about four o'clock in the morning in a rain one of those heavy drizzles in seattle with a stolen blanket over my head and i'm walking along like the apparition of death and a patrol car comes along and they see this cold figure going down the street at four o'clock in the morning in the rain and they pull over hey it's joe you know well what the hell are you doing joe and then when they found the tennis racket and the rifles and the bottles and the cameras and all whatever crap i had under that blanket they began to figure it out and they were terribly embarrassed because it has to be very embarrassing to have to arrest some guy that spells your name properly. So they took me down and they weren't anywhere near as embarrassed as the death sergeant who booked me because I was running around with his daughter. I spent about a week or so in the tank listening to some guy singing Sierra Sue to the gals that were getting treated for syphilis in the next uh you know and then i was taken by a friendly district attorney who knew me on a first-name basis before a judge in his chamber the judge knew me on a name basis my my parents were there our family attorney was there everybody was there that knew me and the judge says you know joey says this is terribly embarrassing we just don't know what the hell to do with you nobody was there from the paper i ceased to exist as far as the paper was concerned i didn't even get fired i just ceased to exists and so they said uh the judge said joe we're going to give you your choice you can go for a year in the county jail or he says you can go into the military service and so i became a military pilot and my mama didn't object i went to santa maria california george allen hancock college of aeronautics a cadet school flying cadet had an upperclassman of texas as soon as i got rid of the commandant who was uh well the commander was a captain in the air force he um he said He recognized my unusual leadership ability. He saw it right off the bat. So he put me in charge of the cadet club at the Santa Maria Inn, and that was a bar. After I washed out with 21 hours and 8 minutes of flying time in Stearman biplanes, I was given sort of a standby appointment as a bombardier and discharged to await an opening in a class sometime in the future. I went to Southern California and learned how to fly from a lady. A woman named Lillian taught me how to fly, and she taught me very well. And the reason I wanted to keep on... Oh, the flying cadet board, the washout board said this cadet does not seem to possess a burning desire to be a military pilot. That was the reason given for throwing me out. Now by American regulations, I could never again handle the controls of an American military aircraft, navy army or marine corps i couldn't start over no way could i ever fly an american plane so as soon as i had enough flying time i joined the royal air force it was before pearl harbor and i went to the seventh floor of the hollywood roosevelt hotel contacted the british aviation corporation and i ran over to fly spitfires for england now as long as i live i will never do anything as glamorous as that I didn't have red polka dot pajamas but somebody sent me a pair of red shorts and told me it was my horoscope color every day I would well every day i flew and I flew almost every day sometimes more than once a day we would take off at Bigging Hill and fly across the English Channel and be met by three or four hundred yellow-nosed Messerschmitt 109s or Focke-Wulf 190s of the Goeringstaffel. We call them the Abbeville Circus because we were over a place called Abbeville. And there's absolutely nothing in the world that I could ever do that would be as exciting and as glamorous and as adventurous as flying in the American Eagle Squadron. And that was it. That was the epitome of it. And when somebody in a English pub would say, what do you do? I'd say, I'm an escaped Norwegian. Now the Eagle Squadron was made up of a bunch of washouts from the Army and Navy Air Forces. People who had washed out or weren't old enough to get into the Army or Navy Air Force of the United States couldn't pass a physical or didn't have the educational qualifications or perhaps we had a slight criminal record along there somewhere. But none of us were eligible to fly for the United States and there wasn't a man there who wasn't flying Spitfires because he wanted to and so we had one hell of an outfit. It was the top scoring squadron in the Royal Air Force for the last three months of its existence before the United States bought us back. Now, the United States got in a war in December 1941 and by October 1942 they hadn't been able to get together a fighter force in Europe. They put the 31st Fighter Group over which lost 18 planes on Dieppe Day while my outfit of three squadrons, three Eagle squadrons shot down 21 and that was the score 18 lost 21 victories so they bought us back they paid $33,000 apiece for each American in the RAF who had combat experience and that a great thing for our ego now we were eligible to fly American military aircraft only they sent me and 17 other guys to as replacements of the 31st fighter group and you know what kind of an outfit that was every guy on the every every flight commander and every squadron commander and the executive officer in a group commander 100 west point the whole bunch uh preserving themselves to be generals Since we were all second lieutenants, you see, we transferred in grade. Actually, I was a sergeant pilot in the Royal Air Force. We transferred as second lieutnants. There were up to anywhere from 50 to 100 missions apiece amongst the replacements. And one disastrous day amongst all the people that outranked us. And so we flew FN Charlie for the rest of our flying career. We invaded North Africa, and six months after the United States paid $33,000 apiece for us from Great Britain, I was shot down over Tunisia, and the Arabs captured me. And they sold me to the Germans for $20. And I found out what I was worth, which puts me at a hell of an advantage, because I still remember and I very seldom meet anyone else who knows what he's worth. I'm going to tell you about that a minute because it has a bearing as strange as it is. It's a hell of a story anyway. My last friend, my best friend was killed the night before. All the guys I went over with in the RAF, all the guys had gone across with were dead. I was the last one alive. I didn't meet the night before i didn't eat the next morning i took off on the bird turd patrol in the movies they call that the dawn patrol we call it the bird third patrol took off of a bird turds patrol in the dark i got a little anxious out there i didn t like the way the squad the group commander was leading our squadron that day we were the bouncing squadron which means we were supposed to go down after the four Faki wolves that were attacking the 820s that were bombing Lafoucanarie in Tunisia that morning. We were bombing that place every hour on the hour until it wouldn't exist anymore. That's what the idea was, and then we'd go on to another one. This was on April 6, 1943 a year and a day after I started flying combat and I went down ahead of the group commander he was leading and I was at the rear end and I got there first that's not hard to do it's not very smart thing to do because if the Germans don't shoot you the commander will no but anyway I took a shot at this This Focke-Wulf 190, it's the only time in my life I ever took off in a plane without examining the aircraft, inspecting the aircraft. I just didn't feel like it that morning. It wasn't even my own airplane. It was a borrowed bird. Mine was out for an engine change. I didn't check it. I found out after I was up in the air and started shooting that a couple of the guns were missing. Whoever owned this plane took a couple the guns out to make it more maneuverable. That's the kind of an outfit I was sent to. idiot you know so anyway i took a couple of squirts at this goon and he started throwing to the smoke and i decided that's good enough i'll leave and call that a probable and i started back up and found out the throttle had flipped all the way closed and i was going about 300 miles an hour slower than i thought i would be going i used to shoot with both hands to keep the thing steady And then when I put my hand back, the throttle had flipped closed. So I turned around and I started to creep back up at near stalling speed. And to show you the kind of characters we were up against, this German who was on fire turned around. Instead of bailing out, he turned around, took a shot at me. And so I started turning, and I was going too slow at a climbing angle, and I went into a spin and came out after about a turn and a half in a beautiful formation of German aircraft. Two Focke-Wulf 190s and six ME 109s, four planes in each flight led by Fockee Wolf. And I was the crossbar in the H. I looked at them, they looked at me. You know, I made the decision first. I said, I've got to pick that guy off to get out of here. And it wasn't hard. I had to pick him off or collide with him, you know. So I went into an aileron turn to take it down to the deck, and they can't follow a spit in an ailleron turn. So I got down on the deck in a tight turn, and I was fairly lucky until I ran out of ammunition, at which time I still had three ME-109s and a Focke-Wulf 190 left. They all weren't dead, but some of them got discouraged. Their planes weren't working quite right. You know, you leave then. And I was out of ammunition, and it was about 30 miles to Fyde Pass where our friends were. And I called upstairs, and I said, I got four of them down here. Come on down. We'll have a field day. And I heard the colonel up above say, Close up the formation, boys. We're going home. Last words I ever heard him say. I've avoided reunions. So I kept flying around in circles, Turning and turning and turning And creeping toward five paths Until finally I passed out From the blood running out of my head into my feet It's called a blackout I began to stretch Like I was waking up in bed Because that's usually where you wake up In bed And I yawned a little bit And then I heard the motor And remembered where I was And it was too late Because before I could even move A 20mm high explosive shell Went off in the oil tank right forward of the firewall in front of me and set the plane on fire another one blew up right in the cockpit about four inches from my butt and so i pulled up and decided to pull a little rubber i didn't decide what the hell i instinctively reached for the little rubber ball to pull the canopy loose let it eject and the ball came off in my hand and the canopy was stuck it wouldn't open and my boots were on fire the cockpit was full of smoke it was even smokier than an AA meeting. I couldn't see out of this plane. I couldn't the ground, the sky, the Germans or anything and they were still hitting me. And I didn't know what the hell I was doing except that I was absolutely positive there was no chance at all of survival. It was hopeless. I was going to blink a couple of times and be a cinder and find out what God was. And this was going to be the greatest adventure of all and i began to get a little exhilarated i was going to die and everybody wants to know what it's like after you're dead and i got very calm suddenly and all the things all those no-nos i'd been told about all my life all the films that i had been told that if i did them i would never meet god everything that I had done that was in violation of God's laws as they've been explained to me flashed through my head it probably took a tenth of a second it couldn't have taken much longer than that but one by one they all had time to go before me I killed about a hundred and eighty some odd people mostly on the ground in the last year I had been living with two remarkable women in the casbah at algiers and you're not supposed to go to heaven i had stolen what the hell hadn't i done but i knew and it wasn't an opinion there was no time for that it was the absolute certainty of a man who is dead that they were wrong i am acceptable and i waited for it and the plane hit the ground it was my fourth fighter crash in about six months it was a lot of fun flying with that outfit and so each time I got out faster now you got to get rid of the oxygen hose the radio the Sutton harness the seat belt and preferably this parachute unless you're up in the air you know parachutes sort of like deciding to take that the steps you know they're suggested steps if you bail out at 20,000 feet it suggested that you pull the ripcord but on the ground it's useless and i hit the ground and i started to run and the cockpit went up like a roman candle and i got about 50 feet and found i was shot in both legs and i fell down i couldn't even stand and i was lying in the ground, and these goons were still diving at me four of them and trying to kill me on the grounds and they were kicking up the ground around me the desert between my legs next to my ears every place all around me they were kicking up the ground with high explosive shells and missing me and i was shaking my fists at him and saying you stupid bastards can't you even kill a man lying on the desert and they ran out of ammunition and they left and i thought what the hell am i doing here i was already i had accepted death i had accepted god and what was i doing here and all my friends were dead so it wasn't i wasn't left here as a reward because they were better men than i was and people started coming up off of the desert you think that desert is empty but it's heavily populated those arabs lie around under burn nooses keeping cool until there's 20 bucks in the offing and you can draw quite a crowd well I spent the next 25 months in hospitals and German hospitals and in prison camps I was taken all the way up into Stalag Luft 3 in Germany I I knew one thing, though. You see, I was living on borrowed time. I had to pay it back. God had left me here because there's some stupendous mission I was supposed to perform here for him. That I was sure of. Obviously, what the hell was it I was opposed to do? I didn't know. In Stalag Luft 3, they found out i had some special talents they put me on the x committee i wasn't even man enough to admit to those guys i'd had enough you were supposed to want to escape it was your duty so i didn't tell him i didn t want to go you know i didn d want to g o i would like to sit there all my friends were dead and i didn really love them enough to join them and i wanted to find out what i was left here for you know why they put me on the x committee i took one course in college that my father almost disowned me for theatrical makeup and the big ex roger bushell at stala glyph tree needed a makeup man and here i am on the select committee deciding who goes out and who stays and what with and all that sort of stuff we were digging three tunnels there that made steve mcqueen famous in the movie called a great escape that's the place but i was also reading the old and new testament and i read it cover to cover i gave up drinking mostly we made a few brews we had a good one on the fourth of july uh two other eagle squadron guys and my guys have been shot down before the transfer Bill Geiger and Bill Hall, Greggie Hall. We made prune brandy once. We saved prune. Now there was never enough to eat in this place but we would save food to make booze. We save the dried prunes we decided we're going to make some prune Brandy. We had a great and noble idea. We made a still out of a trombone that had been sent in there for the camp band by the YMCA in switzerland we made the brew for about six weeks until it was real sturdy and we had to tame one of the goons because you could smell it out at the gate you know and he wandered around in there so this particular night we made the brew and i mean we took the brew and we distilled it over a pot-bellied stove and uh we had the goon in there with us his name was blue boy and uh he was in there and he had a drink his because he couldn't take it out through the gate he couldn'T get it out so he had to drink his on the spot and we had to help him because it was it was pretty good stuff i don't know about 180 proof i guess something like that it wasn't exactly elegant but it sure as hell was effective and along about three o'clock in the morning the goon passed out out like a mackerel as a matter of fact we weren't sure he was alive it was cold outside there was snow on the ground we decided to drag him away from the still so that the Germans wouldn't find it if they found him so we took him over to my block now this is a place where they turn dogs loose at night and those dogs are trained to kill. So we just blithely, reeking of pruned brandy, we must have smelled like the Germans. We moved across to the next block, which was mine, took him into our washroom. Now that's a shower room only because we put Nescafe cans with holes punched in the lids over the faucets. And in Poland, this is in Poland. It's in Upper Silesia. The water's cold in the wintertime. It gets even colder in the summertime. The only reason it isn't frozen is the water pressure won't let it freeze and so we took his clothes off laid him on the concrete turned the ice cold water on him and stood back and wondered if he was ever going to snap out of it you know we left them under there for about an hour if we hadn't called him blue boy before we sure as hell could have then he never moved a muscle never flickered an eyelash i don't think he was breathing fine we were making so goddamn much racket because we weren't exactly sober that Red Clark the Big X our Big X this is an American compound now he came in he says what the hell is going on in here and he saw this guy says who's that we told him this blue boy oh god you know by then somebody had stolen all his clothes his flashlight his ID everything blue boy we had a nude ferret in our camp right in the middle of our my prison block dead so uh he says well listen big x ordered to just send out an order right away to all prison blocks bring back everything that was stolen man that was a command that was obeyed no time at all was there we're pulling all these clothes back on blue boy on his wet body we dragged him outside and propped him against the side of the building and he was supposed to be off duty at four o'clock in the morning he was supposed to go off guard duty it was about 5 30 now and we were about a half an hour away from roll call appell and the germans found him and they thought he was dead and they came out instead of coming in to count us they came in to shoot us they come in with tripod machine guns and set them up on four corners of the parade ground everybody was called out there they had the dogs they had about 70 guys with with burp guns and they demanded to know who the hell had poisoned their guard. They wanted to know, who had poisoned their guard and the logger fuhrer issued an ultimatum if within one hour when they came back the culprits had not been turned over 25 prisoners would be shot you know brandy cost a hell of a lot of money in that place they came back we were told to cool it you know told the cool it but we knew that they were being big about this I mean our own people when the chips were down we were gonna have to go I still think we were going to have to go I don't think they would we were to stand by while 25 other guys got shot I I don't know whether I was going to volunteer or not. I really wasn't feeling too patriotic at the moment. But I thought I was a dead man, and I was sober. I got sober pretty fast when that order was issued. They came back in, and what do you know? Blue Boy had revived. They got him in a warm room, and he thawed out. So they weren't going to shoot us at all. They were going to shot him. they had him on uh they had him court-martialed under sentence of death and then they found out his father was a member of the nazi party gauleiter of leipzig or some damn thing like that and so instead of shooting them they sent him to the russian front that's my drinking career in a prison camp i used to lie awake at night i read the old new testament trying to find out what i was here for what was i left to do what was the great task then i read the Koran. Then I read the Book of Mormon. I read the Talmud and the Korah. I got into discussions with the Padres, all three of them, the rabbi, the priest, and the Church of England guy who was really a paratrooper but he was ordained before he volunteered to be a commando. And we had some funny people in that place. And then we got into theological discussions about what the hell I was left here to do. And I never could figure it out. I learned a whole bunch of different ways to pray by reading about different religions and reading different gospels. I think I got through about seven complete gospels, every one different, and every one the one and only word of God. And I was getting pretty damn confused. I started reading mythology, which are dead religions. Mythology is a religion that's no longer practiced. Then I began to read Jung and Freud and Adler, and then i got into philosophy and i started with aristotle and plato and began to work forward a guy named tracy strong with the ymca in in switzerland was so impressed by the kind of literature i was asking for he was getting to me post-ace it was remarkable and i would lie awake at night and i'd look around this place in the daytime but i would try and pray at night when nobody was looking i would my damnedest all the different ways i was reading how to pray to god and all i wanted to know was a sign i wanted a sign that he was there because in the daytime i would look around this place this place with a high double barbed wire fences all rusty with big coils of rusty wire in between a 20 foot in from the fence was a guard rail if you stepped across it they shot you there were goon towers made out of wood standing over the fence at intervals with machine guns in them and searchlights and dogs let loose at night and you couldn't viewers with rifles and machine guns outside the camp in a dirty wall of pine trees 21 consecutive months with these underfed undernourished guys who were beautiful really brave people wonderful men good humor they were talking about their women all the time but there was no women there only what they talked about for 21 consecutive month I never even saw a female cat a a bird or anything nothing no little children no old ladies no women and i used to look around this place and i think maybe i'm dead and don't know it maybe i wasn't eligible maybe this is hell because if there's such a place as hell it would be a place like this i could adjust to intense pain i could adjust to it for eternity hell would have to be a place in which you would think you always would have a chance of getting out only you never would that would be hell where you think you might get out or you maybe will get out but there's no date set for it and you never will that wouldbe hell and i would lay awake at night and when all else failed i would try to pierce the darkness with my willpower, willpower alone, straining every fiber and bone and muscle in my body, gritting my teeth, clenching my fists, and trying to penetrate the darkness and saying, God, God contact me. Give me a sign because if he gave me a sign, any kind of a sign, it would mean this wasn't hell and he never gave me a sign. I didn't get what I asked for. I tried every way of prayer that I'd read about. I thought I tried everywhere, but I didn' t get a sign." Eventually we got out of that place. I don't call that a sign, that was after a death march. We went on a death March. The Russians got within seven miles of Stalag Luft 3. By then there were 10,000 prisoners in there, British and American. It was 40 below zero outside, and the Germans decided to march us out of there so we wouldn't get liberated by the Russians. In two nights going 60 miles in 40 below 0, 2,700 guys froze to death. I knew I wouldn't make it. There wasn't any way that I was a foot soldier. I was a bird man, and I'd been on half rations for a year. Some of the guys were recently shot down they'd had more to eat lately but i couldn't make it god my feet hurt oh jesus it was awful my bones the wind was blowing it was 40 below zero that's awfully cold and i just kept going you know one more step one step more i can't make another then i'd make one more we got to a place we thought we were stopping and they told us we had five more kilometers to go to a town called muskow which is now in east germany on the polish border muskau m-u-s-k-a-u and one step at a time groaning and crying every foot of the way i made it 300 guys became instantly paralyzed the minute we hit moscow there they couldn't go any further that was it we had to leave them there when we marched on a couple of days later it was certain death again and i'd escaped it but what the hell for you know what is it i'm supposed to do there was one thing i was sure of when that war ended we were in mooseburg down near munich the 10th armored division took our camp in a three and a half hour tank battle the first shot fired blew open the gate incredible shot tanks came rolling over the hills just like the marines it was incredible it'd make a hell of a scene in the movie it really would flags began to unfurl on every prison block there were 210 000 prisoners in a prison camp about the size of four city blocks and there was only one two-story building in the camp and that was the guards barracks the ss shot them because they refused to fight the s.s shot our guards we had all their bullets they turned them over to us they were trying to surrender the night before 10th armored division wouldn't accept the surrender because they couldn't surrender for the ss there was one thing i was absolutely sure of and that is that all my friends have had died for something they had to have died for something I had served in prison I had been shot I had killed what for for freedom it had to be for freedom 50 million people were dead for freedom if it wasn't for freedom then the whole thing was obscene I believe with all my heart and still do that after that Holocaust you and I deserve to be free at last we deserve to be free the greatest moralist of all time was Hitler he wouldn't let women wear lipstick he wouldn't let artists paint decadent pictures it was time that we stopped letting people tell us what god wants us to do now my idea of freedom wasn't too profound when i got out of there i thought freedom meant all i could eat all i can drink and all the women i wanted not in that order I never am sure of that order you know it comes out different every time I say it I know one thing I had to eat first they told us we'd probably be sterile that's why I got six kids they're right though it just took a lot longer than they thought well I believe that and so the first thing I went for was the food and the booze and the women. And it was glorious, you know? I didn't really understand about booze. Booze to me meant freedom. I always took booze to do what I wanted to do. I'd been hearing these no's all my life, and I knew that the only time I could do what I wanted is if I escaped from the nose for a little while. If I took the booze... I used to think this was alcoholic thinking. I couldn't dance unless I drank as a matter of fact I took I drank to take dancing lessons up in Seattle it was at the odd fellows temple in Seattle I went to Broadway high school that odd fellows Temple was a half a block down the street a dance teacher named Bruce Crane taught people how to dance there in big classes mostly high school students to get ready for the dance classes I used to drink about a fifth of wine with another guy across the street and Broadway play field just to learn how to dance you know not long ago i went up to seattle i got in there late at night and late in the evening and i called up the central office and said where can i go to a meeting they gave me an address on pine street and i'll be god damned if i didn't learn how to dance in the place that's now the ilano club and they're still dancing in there they're still learning in there yeah well Well, it's a funny thing when you feel that you have to have booze in order to do what you want to do. And you don't have to be alcoholic to feel that. If you want a smile at a stranger, if you want sit down next to an attractive person on a bus, if you wanna dance, if want to get up and speak to an audience, you gotta have a few snorts first. that's what the stuff is made for and that's why what everybody it helps you relax helps you celebrate helps you sleep that's where the people buy it for but that's not what made me an alcoholic what made me alcoholic is that once I started drinking it I couldn't stop that's What made me and alcoholic it wasn't even working for me anymore it didn't help me dance it didn' t help me make love it didn''t help me enjoy a baseball game it didn't help me do these things anymore i drank trying to get well and it didn't make me well anymore i became a surreptitious puker i was throwing up 18 20 times a day toward the end my flight training came in handy because when i was a pilot i always had a place picked out to land the plane if the engine quit and now i knew where every garbage can and every park car and every bush and every toilet in town was i could be in the middle of a sentence say excuse me go puke my guts out come back and finish the sentence and finish the drink i went into a diagnostic clinic i weighed 229 pounds and that's 50 pounds that's fifty yeah that's 50 pounds more than i weigh now and it was all pain and they told me joe you've got cirrhosis and it's too late to do anything about it after few tests for several days and i begged them for something to do i finally got into this program in burbank california i went back to hospital i tried drinking down in mexico i had written a book and it became a bestseller and i was living down there in retirement until internal revenue retired me from retirement a doctor down there told me he could teach me he could cure my liver without my having to not drink anymore so i started drinking again and ended up on intravenous feeding in a Mexican hospital. They taught my wife how to hit me in the ass with a hypodermic syringe full of Dramamine so I wouldn't throw up so much. She refused after a while, so I used to go to the drugstore and pay the gal there a peso to do it. It's a hell of a way to live. Looking for what? Looking for freedom. Finally one day, after I came back to the United States I hit a periodic dry and I called Alcoholics Anonymous I didn't know what it was I thought two guys would force me to lay off booze and that two of us would always outnumber the third one and I heard that there was some kind of a deal about phoning so I figured you took a note to call them before you were about to take the drink and they would hurry over there and either stop you or drag you out of there that's what I thought it was I hated myself I was repulsed by myself I was disgusted with myself because I wasn't a man I had no willpower a man could drink I really believed that and the guy that walked in the door of the 12-step me had the Congressional Medal of Honor and I looked at him and he was a more famous fighter pilot than I was he was more famous drunk by far every time he got drunk he made Time Magazine I was trying to get him down here tonight but I couldn't find him lives in Fresno he's my sponsor he didn't take me to a meeting because he didn't have a stretcher with him the next day he took me to a meeting he carried me into the meeting by my elbow like you're leading an old lady you know who can't walk he carried being of the meeting on this sunny morning and everybody in there looked beautiful dressed up Sun in the place people passing around big platters full of sweet rolls and big white pitchers full of steaming coffee, then somebody comes over to a poor old quavering show and says, man you've come to the right place. The guy who stopped in front of the room said I have a disease it's like any other disease it is a disease I can't help having. It's a disease called alcoholism. The symptom of the disease is that one drink in the stomach sends a message to the brain that not all the willpower, not all the religion, not al the IQ, not all the strength of character, not all the education, not all the racial or national characteristics in the world will prevent me from obeying. The brain will not be turned down. It'll get more booze. That's the symptom of alcoholism. I hung around this program for a long time before I understood much more than that. All I knew then was that it wasn't my fault, that it was not from lack of courage. I didn't get this program right off. I didn' t drink for a long time because I learned a trick. If I don' t want to get drunk, I shouldn' t take the first drink. It's absolutely impossible to get drunken if I don't take the 1st drink. So I went 5 years and 8 months practicing what I heard in the program. there are no Saints in this program we just do the best we can and I fill in the rest because I'm an author no Saints for this program we just to the best weekend to be Saints I became so humble I was adorable I became so pure I should have landed at Plymouth Rock man I was swinging on a halo I couldn't help but look down on people because there wasn't anybody else up there with me not even God he didn't want anything to do with a self-righteous son of a bitch like me five years and eight months after I came in this program I got drunk one time for four months when I came back in I learned that something different about this program for one thing I learned I was powerless over alcohol three years after that I learned the second half nine years after I came in this program I learned a second half and I can't decide these things there's no way that I could decide I was powerless over alcohol either I am or I'm not I just have to know it that's all nor that my life is unmanageable you can't convince me of that as long as I think I can manage it and I cannot lie to you and be honest about this program I finally realized you didn't know how to manage your life either and then I decided I must not know how and I moved on up the way up the steps and one day I was driving along the freeway and I was kind of troubled and I thought maybe I ought to take that step about turning my will in my life over the care of God but then I'd have to jump up two steps like I have God remove my shortcomings and take away my defects of character you see and I thought he might take away my sexual fantasies not just what I was doing but what I'd like to do for God's sake you know I I've been taught some of these things were shortcomings well I thought I'll take a chance you know I'll ask Buster to remove my defects of character I'll humbly let him remove my shortcomings I taken a million inventories that I now realize were histories they weren't inventories and inventories what here now not what used to be here an inventory of a star stores now was here in 1912 it's what's there today the white house in san francisco one of the biggest department stores in the west coast i took an inventory out of it the other day it had 186 cars in it it's a garage now that's an inventory the history of it is it used to have notions and it used TO HAVE BOOKS AND IT USED TO HAVE HOSERY AND IT USAID TO HAVE DRY GOODS AND ALL THAT KIND OF STUFF BUT THAT'S A HISTORY NOT an inventory the first time I was able to take a fearless inventory is when I let God control what's in the store if I turn my will and my life over to the care of God and let him fill me with whatever I am that's an inventory and there's nothing to be fearless fear about it that's the way i can be fearless if it's not my responsibility so i did this and a few days later i woke up in the morning and a strange thing had happened for all those years ever since that spitfire crashed on the earth ever since i had let god fly that airplane instead of me and he showed me what a better pilot he was and i didn't have sense enough to recognize what caused that i always woke up in the morning thinking i'm living on borrowed time and i gotta pay it back sometimes i think well borrowed time is just gravy and i go out and have fun but not much usually i want to know what is it i'm supposed to do what is this stupendous feat i'm suppose to perform and this one morning i woke up and i looked out the window at a tree there was a branch waving in the sunshine i planted the tree several years before i looked at this beautiful branch and it just came to me this beautiful day is not borrowed time it's a gift this day is an outright gift with no strings attached and i should accept it because it's being given me by god whatever god is it's been given to me and i shouldn't be like the person that gets a box of candy from somebody and starts squeezing to see which chocolates i'm going to like and which ones are too chewy i should except the whole thing because it has been given me to me by God and for reasons that I don't understand yet, but that I will find out. And you know something? All of a sudden, I knew what I was left here to do. You know, this search for freedom had been going on all my life, intellectually, physically, in combat, in college everywhere, in church I had been seeking freedom and so many people throughout the world are seeking freedom and when I came into AA I thought AA spelled no I never thought it spelled freedom and then this morning it suddenly hit me what I'm supposed to do here, this stupendous mission on this earth for me, is to live. And I'm what God created me to be if I let myself be. And if I turn my will and my life over to the care of God, I can trust my life and I can entrust my will. Does that mean I become a vegetable? No, it means I can go ahead and do things instead of weighing them all the time and trying to plan whether it's good or bad or going to be good or Bad. If I turn my will over to God, I can trust it. And if I trust it, I can do what I want to do because God makes me want to do it." And I found out then, and that was nine years ago now, that AA doesn't spell no, it spells yes. Thank you very much.