HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH
This week’s HTYH is a continuation of Dennis’ story: After my tour of duty in Vietnam, I married Libra, my childhood sweetheart; we had a son and moved to Oklahoma to finish out my military obligation. I immediately started drinking alcohol again and we began doing what other alcoholic families do; we drank liquor, argued, fussed, fought about money, and chased each other around with a butcher knife. We lived in constant chaos, disharmony, and the misery progressed until after I was discharged from the Army and I finally got in A.A.
We all got real sick doing that, but after I came into A.A., I began to understand and learn how people who really love each other treated and acted towards one another. The A.A. people hugged me, shook my hand, and unconditionally loved me long before I learned to do that at home and for that I’m eternally grateful.
After 8 years in the Army, we purchased an old barn and house in Oklahoma and owned property in Shelby and Greensborough, North Carolina. But the Army was beginning to zero in on my alcoholism. My primary job involved nuclear weapons; I was a nuclear artillery gun chief except for the last two years, when I was a drill sergeant. When I look back at those last two years in the Army, I probably wouldn’t have had to be a drill sergeant, but my drinking caused me trouble with the military police. The Army frowns on alcoholics being involved with nuclear weapons so they transferred me and covered it up. It cost me a fifty dollar fine to stay out of jail in Germany and that was just the beginning.
When I came to A.A. they asked me, “Dennis, have you ever been trouble with the law because of your drinking? I said, “No,” because when I drank alcohol my level of honesty deteriorated. And my relationship with God deteriorated right along with it. In my alcoholic mind if I hadn’t been convicted of something, I was innocent. It took me more than three years in A.A. to get honest enough to admit all the wrong things I’d done. The A.A.’s pinned me down and my sponsor said, “It isn’t what you got convicted of, but what you did; did you do it or not?
My alcoholism destroyed my military career, my relationship with my wife, children, friends, and put me at odds with my parents over religion.
Coming out of the service and making that transition wasn’t smooth. When my enlistment was up, the Army wanted me in Korea and so did Libra because she wanted to get rid of me, but I didn’t want to go. I had forty-five days left in the Army before I began to get some idea of where the problem was. I was just as drunk and miserable in Oklahoma with Libra and the kids gone as I was when they were there.
I got out of the Army and moved back to North Carolina, drinking wine and writing bad checks. The house in Oklahoma was almost in foreclosure and the money to stop the foreclosure was missing. I had sent some of it to Libra, but then I got drunk and when I came out of that blackout the money was gone? I came home to North Carolina and mistakenly believed my family would be glad to see me, but Libra instead said, “Where’s the money?” I felt a lot of guilt about that missing money, but it didn’t stop me from drinking. Libra loaded up the car and the kids; she left me and moved to Greensborough, North Carolina. I got in our other car and followed her because if she and the kids were leaving me, I was going to watch them do it all the way to Greensborough. We fought about that missing money for a long time before I finally started going to A.A. meetings and she started going to Alanon.
To be continued…
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