From Vietnam Combat to Sobriety: Fred's Journey

- Hey, thank you, Bill.

Hi everybody, I'm Fred and I'm an alcoholic

and I'm glad to be here and I'm glad to be sober.

I have to apologize, I'm sick.

And so, you know, I might cough in the middle of this,

but you know, any day that I'm sober is a good day.

You know, in the big book, "Fred's Story,"

when it talks about Fred,

it talks about how Fred said that his,

he wouldn't trade his worst day sober

for his best day drunk.

And that's how I feel, you know?

And I'm extremely grateful for you, Ben,

to bring me over and to speak.

And Bill, thank you so much for your 10 minute pitch.

It's very difficult to get everything in at 10 minutes.

And so I appreciate what you did.

I too did not drink as a child.

And that's, you know, you find that kind of weird

and a lot of people like to brag.

Some people have you believe they were drinking

in their mother's womb because they want to say

they drank at an early age.

I didn't drink until my senior year of high school.

And I was with some friends on my front lawn

and it was homecoming game,

homecoming football game in high school.

And they passed me a bottle.

I don't even know what it was.

They passed me a bottle and I drank it.

I drank it all.

And I didn't pass it around to everybody.

And that was my first drink.

My first drink was a big, long drink.

And I went to the high school football game

and I promptly threw up on a cheerleader,

the head cheerleader.

And that's how I started my drinking career.

And it got worse after that.

When I was growing up, I always felt different.

I always felt isolated.

I felt that I didn't fit in.

And I'm a musician in high school.

I was in the band, you know, playing at the dances,

playing and talking about fraternity and sorority parties,

playing at those.

And I got into playing music too.

And it made me feel like I was a part of.

Wasn't really full blown drinking.

I was fortunate enough to get the call

when the Coasters or the Drifters

and the Isley Brothers would hit Los Angeles.

And I would get the gig to perform with them

because they didn't carry any musicians with them.

And so I was really having a good time.

I played at Gazari's in Hollywood

for a year after high school.

Got signed to a record deal with Mercury Records

when I was 18 years old.

During the height of the Vietnam War.

During the height of,

and I'm glad that Bill dropped that in his story

because that's a big part of my story.

I've got this combat infantry man badge.

That means that I was actually in combat.

And so I was in this marvelous band

playing in San Francisco during the summer of love,

a real hippie, really enjoying life.

And our record, the day that our album was released,

I got drafted.

I got drafted the day the album was released.

Well, you know, tried to get out of it,

but it didn't work.

You know, they took me anyway.

And before I knew,

and I knew what I was gonna do.

I knew that I was cannon fodder for the Vietnam War.

And you might be young, don't know about that war,

but it was a horrific war.

Really, really bad.

And some very traumatic things happened to me

while I was there.

Really horrific things.

I won't even share with you,

but let's say they were very, very, very ugly.

And so I came home from Vietnam

and I wanna talk about my sobriety.

My sobriety date is May 13th, 1988.

1988, I got sober.

I was 40 years old, 40 years old.

And when I came home from Vietnam,

that's when I discovered alcohol.

That's where I discovered drugs.

That's where I became mean.

I became mean, egotistical, selfish, dishonest.

I was an egocentric, a self-pitying, egocentric,

master of confusion.

A self-seeking, self-pleasuring producer of confusion.

And I came in to AA because around 1985,

the Vietnam veterans started to come out.

They started to come out of the woodwork.

Thank you, David, class of '88.

And I started attending a meeting

that was called the FNGs, the F and New Guys.

Not supposed to touch here,

but you know what the F stands for, the F and New Guys.

And we broke every single tradition there is in AA.

It wasn't open to anybody.

You had to be a combat veteran.

Well, you had to be a veteran, a combat veteran,

and you had to be Hispanic.

And we were like a gang.

We're meeting at the Vet Center in East Los Angeles.

And it was just a bunch of guys trying to get sober,

trying to help each other stay sober.

And that's what I really learned about the fabric

of alcohol synonymous, the love, the togetherness.

When we're together, it's a we program.

When we're together, we do things.

It's a we program, but I have to take the action.

Faith without works is dead.

So early '80s, I took a hostage in 1974, my wife.

We just celebrated 50 years of marriage, 50 years.

And that's like, she deserves every award there is

for bravery, for putting up with me.

Because as I said, I was very mean, very mean.

And I treated her accordingly.

It was ugly.

It's something that I'm not proud of.

But I was drinking, carrying on,

trying to make a living in music during the disco crisis

when all the bands lost their jobs.

And in 1977, we had our first child and I was drunk.

I was drunk when my wife went into labor.

I couldn't drive her to the hospital

because I was too drunk.

And my friend who eventually died of this disease

had to drive her to the hospital.

I get to the hospital and everybody's crying.

My mother, my father, my wife's parents, my sister,

everybody is crying.

And I walk in, I go, what's going on?

And the doctor comes up to me, he says,

your baby has a 50/50 chance of surviving the night.

She had a bacteriological infection in her blood.

And he says, we're gonna have to wait

and see how she does during the night.

I went out to the parking lot and I did that prayer

that Bill was talking about.

I did that prayer and I got on my knees in the parking lot.

And my prayer was, God, please let her live.

If she lives, I'll quit being a musician.

It wasn't anything about just quitting drinking

or quitting drugs.

My problem was that I was a musician.

That was the problem.

And so, you know, she lived, thank God she lived.

She's healthy now.

And I didn't get sober.

I would come home after work and see my baby in that crib.

And I would cry and I'd say, I want to be a sober husband.

I want to be a sober father.

But I couldn't get sober for my children.

I couldn't get sober for my life.

I couldn't get sober for anyone but me.

You know, they say that this is a program

for people that want it, not for people that need it.

I certainly needed it all those days.

But when I finally wanted it, I got sober.

So it's the early '80s, about 1985,

and I'm driving down the street

and I see a sign, Vet Center.

And when I got home from Vietnam,

I threw away all my medals.

I threw away all my awards, threw it into a coffin

at River Park at a protest, an anti-war protest.

I threw everything into a coffin with the other guys.

And I'm driving down the street.

Now I've got children.

I've got three children.

I'm driving down the street and go, oh, Vet Center.

I wonder if they can help me get my medals back.

I'm not a hero, just the regular medals you get.

And so I went in there and this woman is ultimately,

this woman that saved my life, her name was Natalie.

And I walked into her office and I asked her,

can you help me get my medals back, my awards, my ribbons?

And she said, yeah, we could do that.

We can do that.

As long as you're here,

we're not part of the Veterans Administration

and we're funded by the amount of traffic that we generate.

And so would you mind filling out this little questionnaire?

Oh sure, no problem.

I get that questionnaire and the page one just says,

rank, serial number, where did you serve?

Where did you take your training?

All this easy stuff.

I go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Then I turned the page.

Did anybody ever die in your arms?

Did you ever start asking all of these really ugly questions

that I wanted to cry because somebody did die in my arms

to get on my best friend, Herman Johnson.

And I broke down and I started crying.

And for the very first time in my life, I said the words,

I'm an alcoholic and I need help.

And she said, well, we can certainly help you

with that alcohol.

We have a meeting every Monday night.

This was the FNGs and she says, why don't you attend it?

So I started attending that meeting, I didn't get sober.

This was 1985.

I used to say that I bounced in and out of AA

for three years.

I don't say that anymore.

What I say now is that I wasn't in AA until I was in AA,

until I picked up the book, got a sponsor,

started reading, started following directions

and started really being a part of the FNG group.

That's when I got my sobriety.

So it wasn't easy.

If there's any newcomers here, I wanna welcome you.

Maybe you didn't wanna identify, but there's no shame.

There's no shame in identifying as a newcomer.

We all were newcomers at one point.

So it's as you know, if you've been sober for a while,

you know the early sobriety, how difficult

it might have been for you.

It was certainly difficult for me.

And I was at work one day and my wife called me

and it's our son.

We had the daughter, then we had a son.

And my son was about two years old.

My wife called me, she said, we have to give Andrew

an injection every night or he's gonna be four feet 10

because he's got a growth hormone deficiency.

So that meant at 90 days of sobriety,

I found myself sitting at my kitchen table,

fixing a needle, fixing a needle.

And when I went to go give my son his injection

the very first night, of course he was crying

because he could see that his dad was coming at him

with a needle and he started crying.

And all of a sudden he became that kid that we killed

in Vietnam and I started crying.

And I started, I just, I stormed,

I threw the needle on the ground

and I stormed out of my house.

And I was heading to Bailey's Liquor Store

in Whittier, California, because I had credit there.

And I knew that if I could make it to Bailey's Liquor Store

and get a bottle of Jack Daniels,

that Jack would push all that guilt down,

would push all the shame down

and let me continue living the way I had been living.

But something miraculous happened to me

on the way to the liquor store.

And that was, I realized that I wanted to stay sober

more than anything.

And if it meant that I had to feel the guilt,

I would feel it.

If I had to feel the shame, the remorse,

all of the feelings that were bubbling up in my life,

being sober, I would do it.

I would do it.

And I did it.

And I called my sponsor.

And I said, "Daddy, there's a beer in my refrigerator

and it's calling my name."

You know how we are as newcomers.

And he says, "Fred, Fred, Fred, let me ask you,

do you have a bottle of ketchup in there?"

I go, "Yeah, is it calling your name?"

And he made me realize how ridiculous it was.

I stayed sober because I wanted sobriety more than anything.

And that was the first of my outer body experiences,

so to say, my PTSD experiences,

because man, I was in the jungle.

I was there and it was real.

So I stayed sober.

Well, let me tell you about my sobriety.

My sponsor, of course, man,

my sponsor had to be a combat Vietnam veteran.

And I found a guy that did three tours

and he became my sponsor.

And he came home from his third tour of Vietnam

and he killed a guy.

And he went to prison.

He got sober in prison.

So as one of his sponsors, I was taught about HMI.

Take meetings to Terminal Island in Long Beach

to the prison there.

Take meetings to Chino Prison in Corona.

Take meetings to the local jail in Temecula.

H and I, H and I.

And that kept me sober.

That really kept me sober.

I built a foundation of sobriety

that I could call upon and rely upon.

So in 1995, I had seven years of sobriety.

My first major experience,

I went to the World Convention in San Diego

and it was amazing.

I found out how big Alcoholics Anonymous is,

how big it is, international.

I found out how big it was.

And that same year, I had a chance to go back to Vietnam.

I had a chance to go back to Vietnam and I jumped at it.

I wanted to do it because I wanted some kind of healing.

Call it a nine-step, call it whatever you want.

But I had to go and I went.

But before I went to Vietnam,

I got five big books from New York in Vietnamese.

Five big books in Vietnamese.

I got the Southbound Literature in Vietnamese

and I had it in a bag and I took it to Vietnam.

And I was in Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon.

And the very first night we were there,

I went back with a group of veterans,

about 18 veterans from my unit, the 11th Armored Calvary.

And we went back to meet the enemy

and for them to show us where they ambushed us,

how they ambushed us and all this stuff.

So we had a big banquet that first night of introductions

and people spoke.

When it was my turn this week,

I went up there and I said,

"Look, you guys, a lot of us American veterans

"came home with drug and alcohol problems.

"And I'm wondering if you fellas experienced the same thing."

Now, you can't ask that in a dictatorship, okay?

Because nobody said they had a problem with alcohol.

Everybody's, "Oh, no, no, we're fine, we're fine.

"No problem, no problem."

That denial, right, it's ingrained in them

because there were government minders watching them.

So that first night I meet this colonel,

Colonel Conn from the Viet Cong.

And he was a rascal, a real rascal.

And I really liked this guy.

And we hung out and his son was killed in a B-52 raid.

I had Herman that died.

I had other events in Vietnam

that I wanted to be on the spot.

And he took me to the places that I wanted to go to.

And we wound up going to a cemetery and burning incense

and being there together and hugging each other

and crying about the damage that both of us had done

to the other side during the war.

So I hung her out with him.

And like I say, he was a real rascal.

And so I was there for 14 days.

And on the last night we get together

and I've got the big books in Vietnamese and stuff.

And so we're sitting at a banquet for us to come home.

And the, well, no, I'm sorry.

We're in the courtyard before the banquet

and the interpreter came up to me and he says,

"The colonel wants you to know

that since he heard you speak the first night,

he's been trying to quit drinking

and he's been successful two times."

This isn't two weeks.

He was successful in not drinking two nights.

And I said, "Oh, tell the colonel to wait right here."

And I ran up to my room and I got the big book

in Vietnamese and I brought it back to him.

And I told the interpreter,

"Tell the colonel that if he wants to quit drinking

and to be happy and to be at peace to read this book."

Oh man, it was so grateful.

Thank you, thank you so much.

Really full of gratitude.

And we go to that banquet at the end of the visit.

And I'm sitting next to Colonel Khan.

And I'm talking, this is a banquet room full of guys.

And they come to pour me a drink and I say, "No, thank you."

And the colonel says, "No, thank you."

And the fellow with the alcohol goes

all the way around the room, pours everybody a drink,

and they go, "Cheers!"

And they take that drink.

They come back to me, "No, thank you."

The colonel, "No, thank you."

For everybody around the drinks, they take another toast.

"Yeah, third time."

I say, "No, thank you."

The colonel says, "Thank you."

And he takes that drink.

And the next thing I know,

the interpreter's leaning into me and saying,

"The colonel wants you to know

he has not read your book yet."

And so, this is a great, great story

about the power of the book Alcoholics Anonymous.

Yeah, I love this book.

I study it.

I'm not an expert,

but I've been studying it for some 30 years.

And it's incredible.

Page 133, it says, "We're not subscribed to this life

as being a veil of tears,

though it once was for many of us."

And it goes on to say that after all,

we made our own misery.

We made our troubles, we think, basically of our own making.

And on page 133, it says,

"Avoid, then, the deliberate manufacture of misery."

And that's been a good point for me,

is trying to avoid the deliberate manufacture of misery.

I'll give you an example.

During, as I said, we've been married 50 years.

It's really difficult.

It's really difficult.

And my wife, during the pandemic,

we're all shut in together, the two of us.

And her battery on her phone's always going dead.

And I'm, "Ah!"

Like that.

"Change your phone, change your phone."

Until I realized that all I had to do

was, when she was in bed,

plug your phone in and start charging it.

It's a huge difference.

That is what Alcoholics Anonymous has been to me.

It's been something that's been able,

I've been able to have some deep,

effective spiritual experience

that's realigned my thinking, you know?

That's taken me to, "Ah, ah, ah,"

to plug the phone in for you, you know?

And where do you get that?

You get that from working the steps.

Working with others, the big thing.

Working with others, you know?

Sponsoring people.

I'm being sponsored by the people he's sponsoring.

Not feeling like I'm at,

like I've got it all, but the end,

that I'm your sponsor.

No, man.

When I sponsor people, I work the steps with them.

And I'm working the step.

You know, I don't tell you how many point steps I've done.

It's been a lot.

And you know, this whole thing about

uncover, discover, discard,

I had a real problem with my friend Herman

dying in my arms.

It was a vision that I carried around for a long time,

that memory of him dying.

September 6, 1969, a Saturday afternoon, 11 a.m.,

that's when it happened.

I was sure of this.

I was positive that this happened.

My whole life revolved around it.

I still wear his boot lace, you can't see it,

but the guys, they stripped his boot laces

and made a little thing that I wear.

So what happened was I was carrying around

all of this emotional baggage, a lot of it.

And I was having these,

4th of July's were horrible for me.

I couldn't be around fireworks.

I couldn't be around explosions.

I couldn't be around helicopters.

And it was all stuff that I was doing to myself.

Well, when I went to Vietnam in 1995,

there was a film crew

that was following a doctor that went with us.

And what happened is they started to follow me

and they started to film me.

And 10 years ago, nine and a half years ago,

I wrote a book.

I wrote a book about my experiences in Vietnam

and it was published.

And it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

And I won best new author at the age of 65.

That's the power of sobriety.

That's the power of sobriety.

And I wrote this book and when it was published

and it was available, a guy on active duty read it

and he wanted to get Herman's etching,

his name off of the wall.

And he went to Washington DC to do it.

He found out Herman's name was not on the wall.

Didn't find it anywhere.

He found Herman.

He found Herman.

And when I talked to Herman after all the tears,

he told me that he never received his purple heart.

Never because we were in an eight hour battle,

an eight hour fight.

He came to without a shoe,

looked and had a toe tag on his toe

and it was put back on a machine gun.

So he never got his purple heart.

So I arranged for him to get his purple heart

and we had a reunion at the wall in Washington DC.

And the film crew that was filming in 1995

came out to film it.

And it was really amazing thing.

I went to meetings in Washington DC

because I'm a meeting maker.

I don't rest on my laurels

because I know I'm headed for trouble if I do.

And so to get back to this Herman story,

we were reunited.

We were reunited.

And it was really, really something.

And he, Herman, wanted to start drinking.

I gave him the big book.

So these are amazing gifts that I've received

in Alcoholics Anonymous, amazing sobriety gifts.

Look, eight minutes, okay.

So let me tell you, with the pandemic,

I could see that the country was closing down

from the East Coast to the West Coast.

Down the West Coast, we didn't have it as bad

as they had it in New York.

And so I started going to a Zoom meeting in New York

and it was like a whole new way of experiencing

Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and sobriety.

I'm really grateful for Zoom.

I'm here tonight because of Zoom.

I couldn't drive out to the Valley to receive it right now.

Man, I'm 75 years old and at the comfort of my own house.

I am wearing pants and I am wearing shoes.

I'll let you know that right now.

I'm fully dressed, okay.

And so taking the meetings to the prison was eye-opening

because I saw such amazing things at Terminal Island.

I saw one fellow come into the room and he goes,

I said, how are you doing, man?

How are you doing?

He said, well, I'm just checking it out.

I said, oh well, check it out.

You're welcome to be here and participate.

He said, well, I was following Phil, Phil's on the yard

and he's got something in his eyes.

It was something that I really wanted to find out

what was going on.

So I followed him to this room.

I go, well, it's sobriety.

That's what you see.

It's peace, it's contentment.

It's everything that comes without the drink.

And it was amazing to see that on the yard

in a federal penitentiary, somebody had the eyes,

the wide open eyes of sobriety that was so attractive

to somebody else that had brought them into the room.

That's the power of AA.

I was told once, Fred, when you're dealing with other people,

be the best example of the big book you can

because you might be the only big book they ever see.

So try to live your life accordingly.

That's what Bill Wilson said.

And with the pandemic came a book,

I don't know if anybody read it, writing the big book,

a history of how the big book was written, big book.

And in that I saw where originally Bill Wilson said,

"Turn your life over the care of a higher power.

Admit your faults, do an inventory and make restitution."

Make restitution, the ninth step.

And act accordingly, act sober, act accordingly.

Do not be the creator of misery because you were.

Fred, you were, you were the creator of misery.

I could talk to your wife, I could talk to your family.

They say that you created misery.

So what's the answer to that?

Avoid them, the deliberate manufacturer of misery.

Act like a sober man, act like a sober woman.

Act like a sober person, sober people.

We got crazy people in AA, don't get me wrong.

I mean, there's crazy people.

It's a disease and we get some really, really wild people

but the bottom line is they're all trying to get sober.

As a musician, I played many bars,

many bars where I would look at the people out there

and I would say, yeah, we all have the same problem,

same problem, but at Alcoholics Anonymous,

I'm with people that have the same solution,

the 12 steps, the big book, sponsorship,

altruistic way of living, altruistic way of living,

kindliness, love, purity, you know.

It's really a beautiful way of life

and I'm really grateful to be a part of it.

So with the release of my book,

I was thrown into this other world.

Oh, and Bill, I saw your bookstore closed.

I love bookstores.

I love reading, I love books.

And that's a shame, you know.

I don't know if it was due to the pandemic or what,

but you know, a lot of people had a lot of problems

but something good came of it and that was Zoom.

Something good came of the pandemic.

And if I look at my life, whatever I'm going through,

I try to look for what's good.

I try to look for what is decent and honorable.

And we read it every minute.

We're not saints.

The point, what's the point?

The point is we choose to grow along spiritual lines.

It's not a religion.

You guys know that it's not a religion.

Big book says God is, I understand God

and my concept of a higher power probably won't work for you.

Your concept of higher power probably wouldn't work for me.

But the thing is, I'm not God.

You're not God.

We're not God.

You know, and once we make that decision,

not a decision, that realization,

that my sponsor, when I worked the steps,

he told me, Fred, he says, is your life unmanageable?

Yeah. Yes.

And he said, well, I know what it was.

Whenever anybody is hesitant on the first step,

it's always make a list of the things that you can control.

Give me a list of what you can control.

And there's nothing on there except me, you know, me.

And I just love it.

I love speaking.

I love being, listening to speakers.

I just love being at meetings.

I've got something like 13,077 days or something like that.

And there's a guy in my home group,

older guy, older than me, more sobriety than me.

And what he says is, some people have too many years

and not enough days.

And I've marked those days like a newcomer.

I've marked those days because they're precious to me.

I don't want to give them up.

I don't want to come back and say,

I'm Fred, I got 30 days back.

I hear that in my New York meetings, back.

Where did you go?

You know, we've been here.

So don't leave before the miracle.

That miracle, never know what it's going to be.

That's what I was taught.

Don't leave before the miracle.

Expect great things.

Why?

Well, because you were amazed

before you were halfway through, weren't you Fred?

You know, I got a minute left

and I want to just tell you all,

I hope that you stay connected to alcohol and synonymous.

I hope that I stay connected to alcohol and synonymous.

I know people with 30 plus years

that just stopped going to me, especially with the pandemic.

Oh, I don't want to go to zoom because I can't hug people.

Yeah, give me a break.

You know, is your sobriety based upon hugging people?

No, man, your sobriety is based on the 12 steps

in the program of alcohol and synonymous.

If it's not that,

I know you're not going to be around for a long time.

So thank you then for letting me come and share.

Thank you all that are here

and just so grateful to be here.

Thank you so much.