Far Afield

I've seen you

Fire up the gas in the engine valves

I've seen your hand turn saintly on the radio dial

I've seen the airwaves

Pull your eyes towards heaven

Outside Topeka in the phone lines

Her good teeth smile was winding down

- Mike Doughty, True Dreams of Wichita

It's Tuesday morning, and I don't have anywhere to be until later this afternoon. I got up, did PT, and now have some down time until this afternoon/evening's mission. We're running food, water and fuel out to a unit in the field. This is a lot of work, but the hours go by fairly quickly because we're always busy running around and getting stuff done. Life is good like that sometimes.

While not exactly a formal protest, this does get me out of what's called a safety standdown. They are pretty much useless, but we have to do them anyway. Here's the basic concept- let's say a soldier in the maintenance division goes out one Saturday night, has a few too many drinks, and gets a DUI. Now, this is bad judgement on an epic scale, and depending on the severity of the situation, this soldier may wind up in varying depths of deep shit. More than likely if you wind up in jail and need your commander to come get you out, well, you'll be there for a while. Of course, drinking and driving is not such a good idea anyway. The simple solution to this is- have a plan when you go out. There are always ways around trying to drive home drunk, like don't get drunk in the first place. Or have a designated driver, or someone you can call. Of course, if you puke in my car, I'm going to tie your throat in a knot, but hey, at least you get a ride home.

But at any rate, the point is this- if one soldier does something stupid and gets in trouble for it, we have one of these safety standdowns. It means either we give up our down time, get dragged into work and sit through classes telling us to not do what we didn't do in the first place. Don't drink and drive, don't do drugs, etc. So pretty much someone else screwed us by doing the wrong thing. Now I think I speak for everyone when I say if I had known this person was thinking of doing something that stupid, I would be ringing the phone off the hook (or whatever the equivalent is for a cell phone) asking where they were, and hauling ass out there to pick them up, perhaps bringing someone else along to drive this inebriated friend's car back to where it needs to go. And in this way, we all live happily ever after, and our inebriated friend wakes up inexplicably duct-taped to the wall in the morning. Of course, we do try to watch out for each other, and let our platoon mates know what's on tap for the weekend- around here, generally not a darn thing. But at least they know where we are, and we have some plan in place to keep ourselves out of trouble. I'm proud to say I'm a designated driver, because people know whatever other weird stuff I'm doing, drinking isn't a part of it.

So despite this person probably losing rank and spending a night or so in the county's exclusive resort, we all get screwed for something we can say we had no idea about. Last time I checked, you have to be a legal adult to enlist in the Army, and generally should not need someone to babysit you. You make a bad decision, you have no choice but to accept the consequences of that decision. This whole safety standdown has a great deal less to do with any benefit to the unit than making the chain of command look good. That may sound cynical, but if it does, spend some time in the Army, and you'll find that this is the case. Not that this matters today- obviously, getting supplies to those that need them will take priority. And even if the chain of command says differently, I'll disagree.

This whole thing put me in mind of my own drinking problem, and where that stands today. I don't drink, not because I'm afraid of alcohol or think I can't control it, but simply because it doesn't interest me very much. I don't go hang out at the local watering hole for largely the same reason- I'm not interested in taking anyone home unless I'm the designated driver- you get what I mean. There are more important things in life. I once heard from a rehab counselor (yep, been there done that) that alcohol can produce a reaction in some people very similar to an allergy. Whereas most people drink, get a buzz on, and call it a night, or get completely falling down drunk, then call it a night, the main reason they keep drinking is because judgement is the first thing to go. Other people drink, and feel the compulsion to keep drinking due to the neurochemical reaction it produces, not unlike heroin, which produces such a strong reaction it becomes addictive after the first usage. It's an interesting idea, to be sure. It would seem that then in this case, the Alcoholics Anonymous model is true- alcoholism is in fact a disease, with symptoms. But if it's an allergy, well, the simple solution is avoid the allergen. I never was really comfortable with the AA model, as I always felt it defined us by our shortcomings. And how, if it's something we have no control over, are we even remotely responsible for our own actions? We need to rely on some higher power (I say some because that's a personal decision made by people in AA, exactly who their higher power is). From my own limited knowledge of the gods, they will provide guidance and insight, not do it for you. It's rather like having a snowplow on your truck but paying someone to come shovel your driveway. The gods will generally say, you have the resources, why don't you do it yourself? Here's how it works, so go try it yourself! I always found things a bit simpler- if your drinking is a problem, don't drink as much, or don't drink at all if you have trouble controlling it. Don't judge yourself and beat yourself up over not being able to have 'just a couple', I don't know how to fly an airplane or build a steam engine- nobody's perfect. It's our strengths and abilities that make us who we are, not what we can't do. And sometimes a recognition of those things we can't do can bring us to a point of new abilities and learning. Maybe not so much with alcohol abuse, but say I wanted to build a steam engine. I know the basic mechanism of such a thing, but actually building one is beyond me- there are all manner of moving parts, pressures and mechanisms I would need to find out about before I'm able to actually build an engine. Perhaps in the case of alcohol abuse it was a question of finding out the mechanism of addiction- because alcohol for someone like me is indeed addictive. Not that I can never drink again, I just need to be really careful that one drink doesn't turn into twenty. Given my limited time and mental energy, this seems to me like a whole lot more effort than it's worth, so I just say screw it, I'll drink a Pepsi and call it good. Mainly because despite the fact that it has a truckload of sugar in it, I like Pepsi. People say, well, Coke has less sugar in it, you should drink that. Look, if I was concerned about how much sugar I was taking in from a drink, I'd go drink water or tea, or something without any sugar in it. Needless to say, I don't drink Pepsi very often. It's good once in a while though.
But anyway, that's a little off topic, as usual. The point being, it's not so much "I need to define my life in terms of alcohol" as it is "This is a pain in the ass that I can avoid, so I'm pretty sure I can find some more enjoyable way to spend an evening". I know AA has helped a lot of people, but there are those of us out there who just put the bottle down and walked away. It's not for everyone, but then, life is to a large extent about finding what works for you.