Sunlight of the Spirit in York, PA

Thank you, Bill. Well, with my name, I could be from California or Florida. Hi, everybody. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. I wanna thank the committee for inviting me and my dear friend, Pat, for picking me up at the airport and being my hostess here.

And, I want you know, tonight was I didn't realize my daughter was asked to read the 12 steps and it just choked me up that we're together at a conference. That's the first time that's happened. And man that was just wonderful. So I'm grateful for that too. I was thinking about what is it that I've gotten from AA and I've had a long time to think about it that I enjoy the most.

No, I don't mean tonight, I mean, since I've been in AA. And I think it comes from the last chapter in our big book, A Vision For You, Chapter 11. Bill was very like symmetry a lot. I'm surprised he didn't make 12 chapters in there, subdivide one of the family chapters and have to the adult children or something. So, that it would have come out 12 you know what I mean like he was so happy when the steps came out that way.

So, the traditions had to come out that way and but we didn't get 12 chapters. Anyway, the chapter's title is Vision for You. And I think that's what I'm most grateful for is the vision that I have now compared to the vision I had before I got here. Because before I got here, I couldn't see God anywhere. And now, I see God everywhere and the difference is miraculous.

It makes my days just wonderful. And by a vision, I mean, you know, what goes on in my head when I envision today or the future and what happens when I look around and what I see and in the years before I got here, what was going on my head was terrifying. I hated to tune it in. And what I saw was people out to get me. And I just looked around at the world and it was very threatening.

I didn't see anything joyful about this planet. And what I learned about God and Church was scary. That was the last thing I wanna do is to meet him. I mean, it was like, how long could I postpone the inevitable? I enjoy crowds.

I mean, I like being around people. I like being in AA, but I think equally I like being alone. I mean, I enjoy what I think about and I enjoy what I see just with my own eyes now just looking around wherever I go and I'm seeing God in action and I'm so in each person that I meet, I just see that's who I see. And as a result, people aren't as threatening as they used to be because we're all as Chuck and we've been talking a lot about Chuck this weekend. We're all just God's kids.

And that makes us all great gifts that I've been given here in Alcoholics Anonymous. I was thinking about the steps that sometimes and this is I'm talking to anybody who may be new here tonight. Sometimes you hear a different word associated with each step, like this step has to do with surrender, this step has to do with inventory, this step has to do with humility and this step has to do and you try to remember all those things when you're new and it's really hard, so I'll give you a shortcut to all of that. You can just start with 1 and go all the way to 12 and if they ask you what it has to do with, just tell them it has to do with God. That's what they all have to do with.

That's what the plan is. And so the whole jackpot of Alcoholics Anonymous is conscious contact with the God of our understanding. And there's a great deal of difference to me that is so different from faith in God or believing in God. That's so abstract. I mean, sure I believe in it.

I mean, everybody told me to believe in it, but I didn't have any contact. I didn't have any inside proof. I didn't know it for sure. I just never knew it. I knew people that knew it, so I could say that well I know a guy that knows it, but I don't myself know that.

And that to me is what is is the point of Alcoholics Anonymous is to achieve that to have this experience in steps 11 and 12, the spiritual awakening, the conscious contact. And then that becomes the solution in itself. And I look at problems now and they can come in many many forms, but the only way I think of them is I'm too far away from God. I have allowed something to come in between me and my higher power and as soon as I do that, I'm on my own and soon as I'm on my own, it's scary out there again and you don't look like you used to, you look threatening again. And I go back to that old world and that's what happens in sobriety.

We can misdiagnose our problems. We think we have a financial problem, we think we have a relationship problem, we think we have a job problem, we think we have a health problem, but we really don't, we just those are what caused the separation between me and my higher power. I started worrying about money and forgetting about God. And pretty soon I'm alone again. And now it's frightening to get up in the morning and it's I'm intimidated by other people.

And what AA does, it keeps reminding us of the solution and that's why I go to Sykes with Francie and John and I were talking. I still go to 7 meetings a day. I mean, 7 meetings a week. No. 7 meetings a day.

Wow. No, not 7 a day. I have 7 a week that I am comfortable in that are part of my repertoire. If I decide I want to go to a movie on Thursday night, I just go to the movie. I just don't go to the Thursday night meeting.

But if there's nothing going on, I'm there because that's where the transformation takes place. I know that that's that I have a problem other than a spiritual problem. And as soon as I buy into that then I'm off on that road that we all played before we got here. I mean the answer to financial problems is money. The answer to sexual problems is more sex.

The answers to not feeling secure is drugs. The answer to not having enough power is getting to be the president of the company. And those were the what I was taught. And I just beat my head out there and came in here and found out that I had one problem and that was I was too far away from my higher power. And didn't feel like that.

It sure didn't feel like that at all. But us, alcoholics ought to really think about how easy that is to believe because for me alcohol became a higher power in the very literal sense. I'm talking about in the good sense. I mean, jeez, it it saved me from committing suicide and I think a lot of us feel that way that if it hadn't been for alcohol, I don't know how long I would have lasted out there. We think of it as such a villain, but it was saving me from alcoholism, which was going to kill me.

That's what sets in as soon as you sober up. You're left with alcoholism and it's very uncomfortable and you sit around and you don't like life and what you want is a drink in order to fix that problem. And sometimes we get it backwards, we think that alcohol caused all these things that happened. Not in my case, they were that stuff was there before I ever had my first drink. Alcohol finally set me free for the first time.

It gave me the power to rise above all these problems that I had. That's why I was willing to pay a big price to keep on drinking because it was doing something for me that it wasn't doing for the nonalcoholics, it wasn't setting them free. It was you don't talk to nonalcoholics and say, say, what does alcohol mean in your life? And they go, oh, it's a secret of living. You know, they say something like my colleague roommate who I always talk about and we're both about 50 and I asked him that question because we both started drinking together at the University in New Haven.

And I thought he was sort of similar to me and he said, well, let me think about it, you know. And he said, well, I suppose the top thing that I would say about alcohol is it makes food taste better. I'm going, what? That's the top thing you would say about alcohol. I didn't say it but I was thinking to myself is that going down or coming up?

It makes it taste better. So we have a whole different relationship with alcohol than the non alcoholics do and as you've heard from almost every speaker, what makes us different is alcohol fixes this terrible situation that we have that Johnny was talking so powerfully about him. He knew when he was this big, there's something wrong with me. I don't fit in. There's something wrong.

There's something fundamentally wrong with me. What is it? And we didn't have a clue. And I didn't have a clue, didn't have a clue at all. And yet, when we look at the AA history, I really like to look at history of AA because I see God there.

This thing was just a gift, but it was given to us in such a magnificent way much against the plan that Bill Wilson had or anybody else had and it came out just the way God wanted it so that, alcoholics would finally have a new vision. And I'm going to take about 6 minutes and just review a couple of highlights to make my point. And I heard Ray O'Keefe do this and I've always enjoyed the way he saw this and he starts out by saying that the story began in around 1910 in Manchester, Vermont when a cast of characters was being assembled in their teenage years and down from Dorset, East Dorset, Vermont was Bill Wilson who was attending the Manchester Academy And up from Rhode Island where the his family, a millionaire's family, had a summer home was Roland Hazard and down from Albany, New York where his father was the mayor and was a vice presidential candidate and very famous name, was Eby Thatcher. And the Thatchers, there's a Thatcher Park up in Albany and it's just that was a big family name and they had a summer home there. And then up from Brooklyn, New York was a doctor, Burnham, who brought his very charming beautiful daughter named Lois and these people met or heard of each other in that town of Manchester and they were to play vital roles in this story that God was unfolding to lead to Alcoholics Anonymous.

And the first one to be tapped on the shoulder to get this thing going was Roland Hazard, and his father had him taking over the business. He was doing fairly well, but he kept getting drunk and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And he had tried everything that this country had to offer. And they finally said there's one last hope or you're probably going to end up in an institution instead of running this multimillion dollar business and that is to go over to see the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung in Switzerland because he is reputed to be able to work almost miracles with people. And so, he went and spent a year cause this personality change that we talk about in our 12 steps.

And at the end of the year he said, do you understand your situation, you'd never to drink again. I hope I've given you enough new perspective so that you can be comfortable in your sobriety and go on about your bill. Thank you, Doctor. Young, I'm so happy. And he goes far as Paris and somebody asked him the wrong question.

He said, would you like a drink? Yeah, that'd be great. And so now he's drunk and everything is awful again and he goes back to Doctor. Young. And this is where symbolically we come across the sentence in our Chapter 5 where it said no human power could have relieved our alcoholism.

Because at that time, Doctor. Young was recognized as probably the last possible place you could go as an alcoholic. And when Roland Hazard went back and he said, doctor, what are we going to do? And Doctor. Young said, there's nothing I can do for you.

Now, guess how that made somebody feel when the ultimate human power said, there's nothing I can do for you. You're gonna probably surrender. I mean, you are gonna feel pretty hopeless. You mean I'm going to be locked up? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're probably going to be locked up.

I have heard, however, of cases like yours where people have had profound spiritual experiences and made it. And if I was you, I would go out and try and find something like that. And so he did because he was motivated because he had just been told there was nothing of a human nature that could possibly help you. And you see what a wonderful thing it was that Doctor. Young did.

Instead of taking more and treating them for 3 more years, he just said there's nothing I, the world's leading expert can do. That's very humble statement that was made and it established this urgency that is so required to get into the spiritual realm. And so, Roland went and the first thing he came across, which is very popular then was the Oxford Movement. He got in that, got sober by following the spiritual principles that they had, was very excited about it and ended up in Manchester when the number 2 character in the play was tapped on the shoulder and that was Ebbie. And Eby's family had finally said to him, here's the deal, Eby.

We love you and this is what we're gonna do for you. You stay in the summer home in Manchester and never come to Albany and we'll pay your expenses. Very loving family and that was the situation that he was in. So he was just living it up and was getting in trouble and drove the car into the farmhouse. You all probably read that story in the AA history and crashed through the dining room into the kitchen and the farmer's wife said, he asked for a cup of coffee.

If nothing had happened and they were in a plane that made unscheduled landing at the opening of the Manchester Airport a week before it was open and he and Bill rolled out drunk along with the drunk pilot. So he was very well known. In the last episode, he had had this moment when he said to himself, you know, I'm not doing anything. My house is falling out. I gotta get my act together.

I gotta get my act together. I'm gonna paint the house. You ever do that and suddenly, I'm going to do something for real and so he runs down and buy some paint, some brushes and a ladder and then comes out and actually paints maybe 20 square feet and then sits down to look at it. Have a few drinks and man, this house is going to look wonderful when it's all painted like and drinking and some birds came by and crapped on the new paint and that got him upset. So he got some shotguns and a couple of chairs and bottle, sat out to guard the paint from the bird.

And the neighbors are don't know if a war is starting or what's going on. Police are back and he's in front of the judge and they're gonna have to send him off because this town is on the judge's back and he has one phone call and he calls Roland Hazard and Roland comes over and said, well, would you release him in my personal custody? And the judge felt very comfortable while the Hassard family, it would be safe to release him there. So he did. And we all know that Roland ended up down in New York City and got sober himself and thought about his old drinking buddy, Bill and made the call, went over, saw Bill on that Saturday morning and started Bill into the Oxford Movement after his next hospitalization and Bill was off and running to go out and see Doctor.

Bob and off we go with AA and this wonderful fellowship that we have. And many years later, Bill realized that he had never closed the loop with Doctor. Young. And you see this series of letters in the grapevine every so often when Bill finally says, oh, I better write to Doctor. Young and let him know what happened as a result of what he said to Roland Hazard and so he wrote the letter.

Dear doctor Young, you may not remember Roland Hazard, but he saw you and as a result of what you did for him and told him to do, we have this worldwide fellowship. They went on and on about how important his role was in getting AA started. And then here comes the spiritual part that I was trying to the reason I'm telling the story is that, in the response, Doctor. Young said, well, I'm so glad to hear about that. I was totally unaware.

I wasn't aware of what happened to Mr. Hassett. Hazard. I'm so glad and I'm so happy that this and after that. And he said back then, in the 19 thirties when he was seeing Roland, he said it wasn't safe for a psychiatrist like me to talk about spiritual things.

I would been laughed out of my profession, but things have loosened up a little bit and now we as psychiatrists are able to talk and we all know that he went on to really talk a lot about spirituality and symbols and just very powerful stuff. But when he was seeing Roland, he wasn't he didn't feel comfortable doing that. Now that he could and he said, what I was trying to do back then was to cause this equivalent of a spiritual transformation because I believe that that is what is necessary in order to recover from alcoholism. If one way of looking at the disease of alcoholism, if one way of looking at the disease of alcoholism is that each of us had a deep longing for God. And that was what was wrong with us.

And we were never comfortable, but we could never identify it as that. You could never identify that that was my problem because it doesn't feel like that. It feels like it must be money, it must be this. And besides the world we were living in was telling us that it wasn't that. It was saying, oh, you got that problem?

You ought to drive a Ford. That's what you ought to do. You got that problem, you ought to wear Nikes. You know, you got that, you don't feel, you have low self esteem, you have this, you have that, and there was men. So it just hurt all these different.

But think about what fixed it, alcohol. It was a power greater than myself that solve this problem from the inside out by causing a change in my perception of reality, which is entirely different. I see, oh my God. I contact. That was what was missing.

I was hearing stories about a higher power. I was hearing stories about this God. And then when I talked to other people that that was what but when I drank, I experienced it. I had conscious contact with a power greater than myself, vodka. And I developed great faith in this power just as I do in the program of AA.

I knew that this was one thing that I could trust. This was the one chemical that understood me. You know what I'm saying? It knew exactly where to go when I poured it in. And it was all powerful.

So, I was willing to sacrifice anything to make sure that I had access to alcohol. Even after I got sober in AA and thought I was working the program, I think for the 1st year at least, I had a secret $50 bill in my wallet just in case I needed a drink. I didn't tell my wife about it, didn't tell anybody. You know, $50 in 64 was a lot of dough. I mean that was I had this and so I had security in that $50 bill.

I really hadn't turned my life over to AA yet. I was going, meetings are great and so is this feeling of having that money right here just in case this is all crap. You know, a guy has to look out for himself. So I got this protection back here and that was my secret connection to alcohol. I had not cut it yet, really hadn't surrendered.

That's how powerful it was in my life. Now when I started drinking, I didn't know I was gonna be an alcoholic. I didn't know I was gonna be different than the other 9 guys that started that night. I just thought I would have a drink. I just thought I would have a drink.

I was 19. I had not I wanted to be a good athlete, good student, got very high grades in prep school as a captain of the track team. I was like, oh, good boy, good boy, good boy, that kind of thing. They didn't get in fights, didn't do all that. Now I envy guys that got in fights because they had courage.

I wasn't staying out of them because I was good, I just didn't wanna get hurt. And so I got I got to the down to university and felt totally overpowered. The guys are coming from all over the United States and it was my hometown. I didn't think much of it, but they all thought this was a wonderful place to come. And I felt absolutely overpowered by all these wealthy, smart, handsome people.

And I just had that feeling I didn't belong and I just spent all those hours uncomfortable, but I didn't drink, got almost through the halfway through the 1st year and my roommates are going, look we drink in college, come on, come on, come on, come on, this is abnormal. No, I don't think I don't think so. But anyway, I was at this event and think I've told it on every story, every time I told my story. A little social event and all you have to do is meet these other 30 guys. Just go up and go, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi and just sort of talk.

And to me that's like I'd rather go in with a gorilla, you know what I mean, and then this because there's 30 chances to be rejected. And I went in, I tried to get my courage up to do the best I could and each group I went over as I started to walk up, they all glared at me and I could see in their eyes. They said we have enough friends. This group is closed. Try that group over there.

And I said, well, actually, I wasn't gonna go there. I was going over here and then I just pop pop pop pop pop then never shook my hand, never shook anybody's hand. I almost walked up to each one of those groups in the room. So I decided to do what I always do which is leave. That's the secret way of taking care of anxiety, you just leave and then the anxiety goes way down.

Very simple solution, but they had a bar there. And I saw it saying to myself, well, God, the roommate say you feel good if you drink, why don't I have a drink? I don't feel good. I ought to drink and what the heck. So I went up in order to drink and drank it and I'm waiting to feel good and of course nothing happens and I'm going well it's probably overrated, those guys they brag a lot, give me another one, I drank it and I'm waiting, I don't feel good, Didn't taste very good.

I wasn't particularly excited about it and I saw I ordered a third and I got halfway through, put it down and said I'm out of here. And I turned around to leave and that's when it happened. Those other guys were gone and they were replaced by 30 of the friendliest guys I've ever seen in my life. They all wanted to know me, I could see them. Please join our group.

Please join our group. We'll give anything to know you. That was what I saw in their eyes and then I felt stronger. I was like this and I I had the sense they were lucky to know me. I mean, I was about I was so excited that they were gonna meet me.

You know what I mean? That's that's how I now felt. I said, boy I got a great surprise for these guys. Me. So I wasn't afraid and I intuitively knew how to handle this situation.

Hello, hello, oh you're from Wisconsin, hey badgers, you know. Take alcohol away and I'd go, hi. That was it. I didn't have anything else to save. Now and so I saw alcohol was the missing ingredient in me.

I was now operating at my potential. See, fear shut my creativity down. I couldn't be the real me. Now I'm there. Now I'm a 100%.

So I just saw it as the greatest blessing. I remember going, I should have started in grammar school. This stuff is this is a miracle. I can really be me all the time. You know, and it was just I was so thrilled to just finally almost get to know me for the first time.

You really are a guy who's comfortable with people. This is who you really are and you and I had all kinds of spiritual feelings and I'm getting in touch with the universe and I started puking and that ends again. There was the beginning of that. Wow, this stuff is mind expanding and all that. It was quite a, you know, for just 35 minutes of drinking, that was pretty powerful stuff, transformed my whole life.

So just in 35 minutes, I made a decision to turn my life over to the care of alcohol without knowing that I made that decision. I made a decision to make this more important than anything else. I made a decision that I would sacrifice everything else in my life in order to keep this and that was in order to keep alcohol the main ingredient for me. And so my grades fell, I started getting into fights, I got arrested, I almost didn't graduate. It was just a mess.

And the more trouble I got in and the more bad things happening, I would just still say to myself, so you got arrested. You think that's a big price to pay for what you're getting out of alcohol? And I would go, no way, not even close. I'd get arrested every day in order to keep on drinking. I mean, this is my new secret weapon.

And I didn't know I was making that decision. I thought all drinkers felt that way. The way that I drink with guys isn't drinking fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought everybody would have died to keep on drinking.

I didn't know they just had a casual relationship with this stuff. But for me it was the central force in my life and I didn't even know it. So I went on and joined the Marine Corps. The Korean War was going on. I eventually became a fighter pilot.

I got married. 1 kid and another and another and another and another and another. Was it 6 8 years, right, Connie? Yeah. So I just go all these kids and they're all around and it's crowded in the kitchen and I'm just, wow.

And I'm getting promoted and I'm hanging around with drinking guys and there's partying. And if you were to just sort of take a quick look, you would say, this is quite a guy, he's got this family, he's flying fighter planes, he got promoted to 1st lieutenant, he got promoted to captain, he's been over here, he's been over there. Looks pretty good, right? No. This is just about to crash.

This is an illusion. And then I knew it. I could feel it coming apart inside. I could feel that I was starting to collapse that I couldn't keep this up, this illusion that everything was fine. That was the hardest thing.

We ought to be given medals for the days that we got up off of that puke and blood and cleaned ourselves up and went down to work and somebody said, how you doing? Great. And remember what it took to say that? Great, I mean, you and your body's going emergency room, go to the emergency room, go to the office. I can't go the emergency room.

Somebody might ask me about my drinking and we can never have that happen. I have to defend my drinking at all costs. I would die before I'd let anybody get in and get my drinking. What if they told me to not drink? Then I'd really be dead.

So we stood there, all of us, wherever we were in an office or at home or wherever. And how you doing? Great. I mean, god, what a lie that was. Great.

And so that was what I was doing. I was showing up down there. There. Hi, guys. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And getting in that plane and put on oxygen mask and, man, I just was was getting sick and I didn't wanna go up with me because I was not a good pilot. I mean, I'm in there just looking around trying to get focused to where am I? You know what I'm saying?

You're supposed to take off. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Go. So fear is coming in anxiety and most of all withdrawal.

That was the mistake I was making. I talked to some of these Air Force guys, they were taking booze in the plane. I was going with this don't drink for 12 hours. You know what a setup that is? 12 hours, you're way into withdrawal.

Now I'm in there, you know, I really need a drink and I'm trying to fly. So it it was very scary and after 6 months in that shape with a lot of close calls and everything, I went to the doctor. They agreed I had a terrible problem, but nobody knew anything about alcoholism. And so that was not brought up. What do you have?

Well, I'm having these sweating, my heart speeding up, vision, I'm losing my vision. Okay, so we're going to send you down, let the doctors study you, study this guy's loss of vision and heart palpitations and so that was all approach from this superficial basis. You know, they're looking at symptoms and I was studied for 2 weeks, every day going into the doctors, every night getting drunk in Pensacola, coming in and several of them would go, do I smell alcohol in your breath? And I'd go, yes, sir. I got real drunk last night.

Oh, well, that explains why there's alcohol. If I had to smell and I hadn't been drinking, we would have had a problem. Oh, okay. Yeah. You got drunk.

Yeah. You probably do smell like that. So I went through all the testing and the it was the craziest 2 weeks I've ever spent. And they're trying, what is wrong with this man? And at the end of the time, they left it up with a psychiatrist.

Psychiatrist wrote me up as having childhood fear of flying that just showed up. In other words, I've been suppressing it for 12 years. So, I went back very quickly, I went back to Cherry Point, waited for 3 months to down they took away my MOS military occupational specialty as a fighter pilot. Now I got to get a new one because I'm a regular officer, I might have a career. So I wait and wait and wait and they said what would you like to get into?

I said intelligence. I remember saying I want to be an intelligence, I'll be an intelligent analyst. I get my orders, I'm now going to become an air traffic controller. I go to school in Glencoe, Georgia and I make it through the school. I mean, that's the most amazing thing some of us, you know, here's I'm going by already to go into a nut word with alcoholism and I make it through air traffic control school.

And that's what I did the last year of drinking. I was over in Japan, air traffic control. I was in charge of this unit and the top enlisted man saw me when I checked in, Captain, good to have you here. He just knew what I was the second I checked in. Good to have you here, here's your tent, here's the tent, don't go near the radar.

That was his order because he knew if I was controlling the planes personally, they were in danger. My job was to try and show up at work every day on my bicycle and now I had no constraints about not drinking for 12 hours. I became a daily drinker, drank around the clock, malnutrition, I lost £50. I was like weighing around 125, 130, couldn't eat, stopped hanging out. I don't even go to happy hour with my buddies.

I just stayed in the Quonset hut and drank, you know, I tried to eat soup and vodka. You know what I mean? Or juice and vodka, couldn't eat solid food. I just was like dying in in there and trying to show up every day. I yeah.

Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. You know?

And people would go, you are right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was just it's crazy.

And made it out through the year somehow and came back to Quantico, Virginia which is how I ended up in Washington DC to go to a career school to become a field officer. This is high levels training or in these heavy duty classrooms, little seminars, little breakout groups. I'm having a problem finding the school. I mean, I'm starting to hallucinate, I'm getting into that which all came out later. I remember coming up to the gate one day and then I went to drive up to the school and it wasn't there.

I went back to the gate. So where's junior school? It was up there yesterday and the, you know, the guards are going. Woah. Captain, it's up there.

No, it's not. I was just up there. So they one of them came in their little car and drove me up and pointed and I said, oh, yeah, there it is, you know, that's it. So in that school, I finally God took pity on me and I had a grand mile seizure, just about bit my tongue in half in an ambulance. I'm off to the naval put up in the top of the tower there where all the good guys go combustion?

You know, like, here we go again. What clues do we have? Well, he reeks of alcohol and this and that. I'm just studying me. I don't know.

I don't know. Well, after 5 days without alcohol, then I went to DTs and they were very violent frightening DTs. I saw all those rooms moving. I was psyched out and I thought I was going to lose my mind. The CIA was trying to question me and they kept coming in and asking me tricky questions and then they've moved walls.

They said, okay, what's out in the hallway? And then I'd name all the things and then they come back and they say, name what's out there and I would name it. You know, there's 3 telephone booths, the corpsman, the elevator. They said, no. Come out here.

And I opened the door. It's a photo lab. They changed the hospital hallway into a photo lab, you know. I went back and wrote it all down. They're trying to drive me crazy.

I don't know why they're after me and then I memorized the photo lab and the next time I went out, it was a flight line. There were planes passing by a tower and so I screamed and, they came and got me in a straight jacket and put me back in the network and I was there for 6 months. And that was what they did with alcoholics because they didn't have any. It was just crazy people. You're either crazy or not crazy, but there was no such thing as alcoholism.

So I'm in there with there was 2 other alcoholics and then the rest of the people had what the rest of the people called legitimate mental illnesses. Legitimate mental illnesses which meant that the 3 drunks were like, you guys sit over there because we're the real occupants of this network. You guys are imposters who we would be a lot happier if you weren't here bringing down the reputation of the nut war. That was the sense that you had as an alcoholic. So the beautiful thing is that, oh, I guess after about 4 months, A8 came to the hospital.

My sponsor went through the same network. Funny thing is, had the same sponsor for almost 37 years while we're talking about sponsors. And AA was there when he was there a year and a half before me, and then they they stopped allowing them to come in. And they got a new head psychiatrist and he determined there wasn't any alcoholics left in the Navy, so we didn't need AA anymore. And AA kept coming back and they finally talked to this new psychiatrist, well all right, you could bring one meeting a week and so that's how I got to AA.

I was sitting up in the North Ward and the corpsman came in, all drunks fall in, right face. No. Down to the meeting. It was a great meeting. I was very excited about it.

Got this guy's phone number and I told him, you know, if I ever run into a guy with a drinking problem, I'm gonna I didn't connect for myself. I got eventually allowed to go home as an outpatient, so I drank again to watch football. I had a rule you can't watch the Redskins unless you're drinking a beer and I didn't wanna sit there with the set off. So I had a beer even though they said if you ever have another beer, your career is over. What the heck, one beer.

They meant to say if you ever get drunk. They didn't mean if you have a beer and kept that up for a couple of weeks and I could see him and I was bringing back into the war now because I needed it and I saw that they were looking at me. They were looking at me but I saw that they were looking at me. I knew they were gonna catch me and so I decided to join AA on the outside and that's so on Pearl Harbor Day 1964. I called Intergroup and they had one guide on the Quantico Marine Base and said, yeah, we got one guy and we'll get a hold of him and he'll come over and see you.

And he didn't come for a couple hours and I changed my mind. I got some more booze to stay down. I called him back and said, I don't need the 12 step call. I'm okay. There's 2 ladies on his way.

So I said, well, I'll just get rid of him when he gets here. And I mean, you know, this is my recollection. The door frame started coming off from his knocking. Around. So I opened the door and no light came in because he filled the whole door frame.

And he wasn't a wimpy little pilot, he was an infantry major captain, like, you know, like, my name's Bill. This is a 12 step call. I talk. You listen, sit over there. I'm gonna talk I'm gonna talk to your family.

And he went in and they told him all these lies, you know. He's a terrible father. I hate him. We all hate him. He's awful.

He's rotten. And so he came back and said, well, I can see you're an alcoholic. You need AA. We're going to a meeting tonight. And I said, what about leaving some liturgy?

He said, get in the car. Get in the car. For a long time, I thought that was AA's first step, you know, let's get in the car. And then we get to the meeting and God Almighty with the Manassas meeting, it was in the Odd Fellows Hall, it's an old stinky building with non flushing toilets like outhouses and it just when you went, you had to go like this to go in the bathroom. You couldn't breathe in there.

It was just, you know, and it was a dreadful cold December from the distance out there and it's a group anniversary then they're having anniversaries and speakers and this big table with all this food and it went on. The whole thing lasted, like, 4 and a half hours. So now at the end of that, I'm sober, like, 12 hours or 10 hours. So right near the end, the last they started dancing. They had square dancing.

And guys are playing fiddles and the country dancing and all this food. And I didn't wanna look at the food. No. I don't want coffee. I couldn't hold it.

I just I just wanna go home. I got some vodka stashed back there. I wanna get home, so I decided to run away. No. I'm just that was what I decided.

I'm gonna run away only so isolated, such a deserted area, Manassas, and I'm went out in the front stoop or whatever, and I'm looking at the rain and I'm going, I better just go. Who cares where the hell I go? Let's just go. And a lady came out, an Al Anon lady. She'd been watching me and, must have seen the look on my face.

And I felt this hand on my shoulder, and I turned around. It was just like an angelic lady who I later knew and knew her husband and everything. Her name was Betsy Lynch. And she just put her hand on my shoulder and said, it's gonna be alright. Come on back in.

And I believed her. I don't know why I believed her, but I did. I just came back in. It's been alright ever since. That's a long time ago.

And, lots of things happened, But the biggest thing that happened was getting this new vision, and it is the most exciting thing in the world. If you're new, you think you're just gonna get sober. You think your life is gonna straighten out a little. You think that you got 3 or 4 problems and maybe they'll get straightened out. That's like nothing compared to what's gonna happen to you.

I mean, this is not some little, we're gonna change a couple of things. This is major. This is this is huge. This is epic. When they talk Bill writes in that 6th letter.

That's an epic step that we're gonna change everything there is about us. We're entirely ready to have everything there is about us, every single defect removed. So why do I want all this to happen? I'm not gonna go through the steps. I'm gonna just tell you what I think the purpose of these steps are.