We Are Not Saints

by David M

  Chapter seven:

  As usually happens in an Infantry line unit, the new platoon sergeant arrived without warning or fanfare. One day he was just there.

  I liked the old platoon sergeant. He was a fan of hard drinking himself, and would often admonish me for my bad behavior over a glass of whiskey after work. He tolerated more of my bullshit than most other noncommissioned officers in my unit ever would, and more than I suspected this new guy would.

  The new sergeant didn’t say much for the first few days. He just watched. This is also traditional in the Infantry. If you start making changes your first day on the job it appears you have no faith in your predecessor. If your predecessor had earned the trust and respect of his men during his tenure, you would not.

  Besides, if you make changes without observation you could wind up fixing something that wasn’t broken. I think this should be common practice in all transitions of authority.

  We really didn’t know anything about this new guy. He just appeared out of nowhere, but there were rumors about him.

  I had heard a rumor that our new platoon sergeant was a recovering alcoholic. I really didn’t like the sound of this. I had run across a few twelve-step Nazis in my time, and they all told me the same thing; seek help. My response was always the same; it’s my grave, so shut up and hand me the shovel.

  Finally, after about a week of near silence, our new platoon sergeant spoke up. He had us all in formation, standing at the position of parade-rest as he walked up and down the line. He said he felt he had been handed a well-trained and disciplined platoon. He also said he felt everyone was in a position which best suited their skills; there would be no personnel changes. So far, so good.

  Then he stopped right in front of me. Though his eyes were trained directly on me; he seemed to be looking through me to the rest of the platoon.

  “I know a lot of you like to drink in your off-duty hours,” he said. “I have no problem with that. You are all adults. But heed my words; if I feel your drinking is becoming a problem, or interfering with your job performance in any way I will put a stop to it. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  “Yes sergeant,” rang out the response of thirty voices in unison.

  As he moved to take his place at the front of the formation, his eyes locked onto mine. It was only for a fraction of a second, but I knew then this warning was meant for me. He had me in his cross hairs.

  I took every precaution I could think of not to fall into, what I felt at the time was, his trap. I tried to start drinking later at night so all of the stores would be closed by the time I ran out of booze. He kept a close eye on me at P.T., but I knew I could hold my own despite the hangovers.

  I even loaned my car out to anyone who asked. The philosophy was that if it wasn’t there, I couldn’t drive it. Despite this, my blackout excursions still continued with alarming regularity.

  During my time in Hawaii, I had been pulled over no less than a half dozen times by the police. In every case I was drunk. In several cases I was even pulled over because I appeared to be driving while intoxicated, yet I never received a DUI.

  Most times I was told to park the car and call for a ride. Once, I was even given a ride to a military resort in Honolulu. And still, no DUI. I don’t know if it was because I was in the military, or if this was just common practice at the time in Hawaii.

  In any case, it didn’t take long for my new platoon sergeant to do what the HPD had failed to do, and I couldn’t have made it any easier for him.

  I was a team leader at the time ready to make sergeant. I had been out drinking on a double date when I apparently decided to go on a midnight-blackout drive. I woke up behind the wheel in a part of Honolulu I didn’t recognize, and it was already after three in the morning.

  I had been at an apartment on the north shore, but had lost interest in my date. I knew I had left my friend behind, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember where the apartment was. Once I got my bearing back, I turned the car toward North Shore and drove there as fast as I could.

  After about an hour I finally found a road I recognized, but was still just guessing. Amazingly, I found the apartment just before five. I rushed in and woke up my friend. From the looks of things, he hadn’t lost interest in his date nearly as fast as I had, and he followed me to the car with not a little protest.

  We somehow made it back to the barracks right at the stroke of five-thirty; first call. I was in my PT uniform in under a minute and was pounding in my team’s barracks door to wake them up. Then I went to the squad leader’s room and reported that my team was present for duty. Once again I had pulled off a miracle.

  I will never be able to explain what I did next. There was no reason for it, and I certainly didn’t intend for it to happen. It just happened. I went back to my room to kill a few minutes before our six o’clock PT formation. I pulled a beer out of the refrigerator, drank about half of it and then passed out cold.

  When I woke up, my platoon sergeant was standing over me. He didn’t yell; he didn’t even look angry. The best description I could give would be to say he looked concerned, or even possibly a little sad. He told me to put the beer down and grab my ID card. We were going to the MP station.

  I was given an Article-15, which is the military version of a plea bargain. Rather than face a court martial for drunk on duty I pled guilty to overindulgence the evening prior to a duty day. I was restricted to the barracks for fifteen days and given extra duty, pending further action. It was the “pending further action” part that worried me.

  I was later told I would have to report to a review board to determine if my promotable status should be revoked. This didn’t worry me much. I had sat in front of boards before and knew how to handle them. If there was one thing I inherited from my father, it was the gift of bullshit.

  I was told by someone once that my father had been arrested for breaking into a drugstore. The judge gave him little more than a slap on the wrist, and even wrote him a letter of recommendation for a job as an airport security guard. Like him, I could bullshit my way out of just about anything.

  It was the second part of the further action I had a problem with. I was ordered to enroll in the Army’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Program, ADAPCP for short.

  I had to report to a counselor to decide if I needed the full four-week inpatient treatment, or if outpatient care was sufficient. I convinced her that the inpatient rehab was not necessary. Instead, I would attend classes over a two-week period.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t talk her out of the required two AA meetings a week. This was a requirement of the ADAPCP program, and there was no getting out of it. But the worst part, the part I truly did not think I would survive, was that ADAPCP required total abstinence from alcohol.

  I was told by my counselor that if I was ever found to have alcohol in my system, or even a beer in my hand, I could be discharged from active duty as a chronic alcoholic. I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that this was the end of my military career.

  Chapter eight:

  My first few days without a drink were among the worst days of my life. It felt like everything that could go wrong with my body, had. I was violently sick, freezing, sweating and couldn’t keep food down. I barely got out of bed for three days.

  I finally gathered the strength to call a friend who I knew was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I suspected early on that this girl had a crush on me, but assumed by this time I was either wrong, or she was over it. In any case, I had no interest in her romantically but we had a lot in common, and she was fun to hang out with.

  Now it would be up to this friend to introduce me to the world of AA. The first meeting she took me to was a speaker meeting in Honolulu. The guy at the podium looked as though he had just drug himself in off of the street. He was old and dirty, and though I wasn’t close enough to smell him I could only assume the worst.

  He talked a lot about life on the street, eating from dumpsters, tradi
ng sex for drugs, life in prison, and if I remember correctly there was something about an alien abduction. I couldn’t help thinking to myself that if I was snatched by aliens and had my ass probed I’d probably drink the first bar I came across out of whiskey. Where did they find this guy?

  As we left the meeting, my friend asked me what I thought. I asked her if she was fucking serious. She said it was usually a pretty good meeting, but that maybe we should go over the list of meetings in the area until I found one I was more comfortable with.

  The next day she brought me a list of all the meetings in the area. I scanned the list and immediately found two meetings that sounded fun-Sick and Twisted on Wednesday night and Bad Brains on Friday.

  She said these two meetings were young-people’s meetings, and suggested we find at least one meeting with “a little more sobriety.” That didn’t make any sense to me. After all, wasn’t everyone in AA sober? That was the point of AA, right? Hell, I hadn’t had a drink in almost a week; I was sober, wasn’t I.

  My friend conceded without much argument. The important part was that I went to meetings, which meetings I went to was up to me. My counselor seemed happy but also said I should find a meeting with a little more sobriety. I remember wishing someone would explain what in the hell these people were talking about. Was there really a difference between sobriety and not drinking?

  I began going to these two meetings almost religiously. They seemed to be doing the trick. Though I thought about drinking all the time, I hadn’t touched a drink since my first meeting. I never spoke up when the chairperson asked if anyone felt like drinking, but I just assumed it was a formality. My philosophy was that if we were all truly alcoholics, then we had naturally thought about drinking.

  My counselor kept asking me questions about, what she liked to call ‘the program.’ I figured she called it that because we were supposed to be anonymous. I played along. She wanted to know if I had chosen a home group yet. I said my Friday night meeting was my home group, not that I really knew what “home group” meant.

  She started babbling again about finding a home group with a little more sobriety, so I just nodded my head and assured her I would keep looking. She also wanted to know if I had found a sponsor yet. I said I had, and I assured her I talked to him every day.

  The truth of the matter was that I had a name and number of a guy I had gotten at the alien-abduction meeting. I never saw him and we never talked, but technically he had never quit. So I was only half lying.

  She also wanted to know if I had been working the steps, and if so; what step was I on. This was getting to be a pain in the ass. I had agreed to go to two meetings a week, and suddenly this chick was testing me every time I walked into her office.

  I remembered something about AA groups being self-supporting through their own contributions. I couldn’t remember if this was a step or an AA Tradition. I didn’t care. I just wanted my counselor off my back so I said I was on step seven. Anyway, I had thrown a dollar in the basket at almost every meeting. That had to count for something.

  I had been going to my two meetings a week for several months at this point. I could feel a change occurring in me, but it was not what I expected. Rather than feeling better, I was feeling worse. I was in a bad mood almost all the time, and people around me were starting to notice.

  I started thinking about drinking more frequently, and when I did it became an obsession rather than a passing thought. I was angry that I couldn’t drink like other people. For years I had watched my mother or sister have a single glass of wine or a single mixed drink. Why could they do it, but I couldn’t.

  I wanted to know why only the men on my side of the family seemed to be alcoholics. My mother’s side of the family was fine; my sister was fine, so why me? Why didn’t they wreck cars, lose motorcycles, and get arrested. It wasn’t fair, and I began to hate them for being normal.

  There is a line from the book Alcoholics Anonymous that is read at the start of every meeting. It says; “If you want what we have and are willing to go to any lengths to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps.” I didn’t want what the guy whose ass had been probed by aliens had, and I certainly didn’t want what the sniveling little babies at Sick and Twisted or Bad Brains had.

  I wanted what my mother, my sister and the rest of the normal people in the world had. I wanted to be able to drink without consequences. The problem was that even if I could figure out how to do this, the Army had already decided my drinking days were over. Now I hated the Army too.

  I started sharing about this at my meetings, but they had changed as well. When I first started coming around I would talk about how happy I was to be there, and everybody would smile and nod their heads. But as soon as I started throwing my true feelings around, everyone just got quiet.

  By the time I had been in AA for about seven months, I was pissed off all the time. I talked to my counselor about this and she sent me to see a shrink. We talked for an hour before he pulled out the prescription pad and sent me on my way, but before he did, he excused himself for a few minutes and I got a look at his notes.

  This guy had the worst handwriting I had ever seen. I could barely make out two words. I followed the paragraph down and finally saw three words I recognized…”patient suffers from.” the next few words were indecipherable. I read it and reread it. I wrote it down and played with it like a crossword puzzle. Though I didn’t know what it meant, the doctor seemed to think I was suffering from something called ‘Dye Chunk.’

  I should have asked the doctor what Dye Chunk was before I left, but I didn’t want to admit I had looked at his notes. Besides, the pills he gave me didn’t work, and now I was pissed off at him too.

  Everything eventually boiled over. I was walking into a convenience store one night for a pack of cigarettes when a drug dealer approached me peddling his goods. I shoved him out of my way and went inside. He was waiting for me when I came back out. He began yelling at me and gave me a shove. I lost all control.

  I heard somewhere that most serious injuries and deaths in a street fight don’t occur as a result of the beating itself, but because one person falls awkwardly. This is why fight-instructors spend so much time on falling properly. Apparently, this drug dealer had not been well trained.

  He stayed on his feet for what must have been the most brutal beating I had ever dished out, but when he fell; he fell very poorly. He had shoved a hand in his pocket just as he was going down, and the other hand wasn’t enough to break his fall. He landed face first on the curb of the convenience store.

  About this time, a passing police cruiser turned on his lights and began looking for a good place to make a U-turn. I had the top down on my convertible, so I ran up over the trunk and into the driver seat. I started for the exit, but not before the cruiser blocked my escape.

  I knew that if I made a break for another exit I would be guilty of running from the police, as well as assault. So I put the car in reverse, backed into a parking spot, shut the car off and waited. Within seconds I was pulled from my car, frisked, cuffed and thrown in the back of the cruiser. There was something strangely familiar about this situation.

  In no time at all the parking lot looked like the site of a street fair. There were flashing lights form police cars, ambulances and even a fire truck. Both entrances were blocked and everyone was being questioned. There were even volunteer firemen directing traffic around the scene. The whole situation had “long prison sentence” written all over it.

  After about an hour the officer in charge came over to where I was being interrogated. He said I had no idea how lucky I was, and on more than one level. I said the handcuffs weren’t making me feel very lucky. He reached over and removed the cuffs, but gave me a stern look.

  He said the guy I beat up was going to live, but that his condition went far beyond simple battery. The other man was mutilated. He lost most of the teeth on the right side of his face and would need reconstructive surgery. He may also lose the use
of his right eye.

  The officer said if this man had not been a known drug dealer guilty of assaulting other people at this same location, or if he had found a single witness who saw me hit the man while he was down, I would be going to jail for a long time. Fortunately, all of the witnesses in this case were on my side.

  The officer also said the reason the dealer had his hand in his pocket when he fell, was that he was reaching for a knife. I had come very close to killing a man, or losing my own life. As I was getting into my car to leave, the officer yelled over to me.

  “Maybe you should think about taking some anger management classes.”

  I’ve already tried that, I thought. Maybe I just needed a fucking beer.

  Chapter nine:

  It wasn’t long after the beating at the convenience store that I was released from the ADAPCP program. The counselor sat across the desk and played with her papers. This was clearly not a conversation she wanted to have.

  “I wasn’t expecting to be released from ADAPCP for another four months,” I said.

  “Do you think another four months would help,” she asked.

  “I really don’t think it’s necessary,” I said. “I’ve been sober for eight months.”

  “What does the word ‘sober’ mean to you,” she asked.

  “It means that I haven’t had a drink in a long time. What’s with all of the questions? Every time I come in here I feel like I’m on a quiz show,” I said. “Am I being released or what; I have shit to do.”

  “Let me tell you what I think,” she said. “When you came in here eight months ago I had high hopes. You were a genuinely nice person, and had a great attitude. Over the last eight months I’ve watched you become a spiteful, angry, downright hateful person. I’m afraid if you continue on this path you’re going to explode. I’m afraid someone is going to get hurt.”

  It was too late for that, I thought. But she did have a point.