That´s what Gabe R. tried to do before he finally hit a hard bottom on Nov. 13, 1991. Four years in the army, he had gone all out to burn all his bridges, until finally he was on the edge of a bad conduct discharge.

It all began when he was five years old, sitting on his father´s lap and sipping from his dad´s drink. Gabe comes of a large, drinking family. Some older members died of alcoholism, and the genes have carried through to his generation. The family, which includes four sisters and two brothers, moved around a lot. They were living in Orem, Utah, deep in Mormon country, when he got into serious drinking as a teenager, despite the fact that his father, who by then was a non-drinking Mormon, was managing a drug and alcohol rehab center - "sort of the preacher´s son story."

After several bouts with juvenile authorities, Gabe left Orem to live with his grandmother in Wyoming, where he managed to finish high school. From there, it was Penn State University, where his mother was teaching, but he drank himself out of school in one quarter. Before he did, though, he pulled a trick on his sister that´s hard to believe. Drunk and driving his mother´s car, he passed out at the wheel and scraped a guard rail. When he got home, he parked the car so that the damaged side wasn´t visible from the front door. When his 16-year-old sister came downstairs that night to go to a party, she never noticed the damage ´til she got ready to go home. She told her mother someone had sideswiped the car in the parking lot, and Gabe was home free. It wasn´t until many years later, brother and sister now leading sober lives and swapping old stories, that he told her what had happened.

At 19, he decided to join the army. He figured the macho military culture of drinking and brawling would fit his lifestyle. He was assigned to language school and for a year, every day for eight hours a day, was totally immersed in the Korean language. But on the day of the big final exam, he decided he could study better with a few belts. By the time he got up for his oral presentation, "I babbled like a moron for an hour, talking about dreams I´d had, all kinds of crazy stuff. And so I bombed the test."

Drinking and drugging heavily and with periodic bouts of military discipline, he found himself assigned to the lst Special Forces unit at Ft. Lewis, and from there traveled all over Southeast Asia. "But even in the Special Forces, which doesn´t have the same level of discipline as regular units, they didn´t appreciate me not showing up for work, wising off to my superior officer, getting into fights."

He was in Korea when he pulled the stunt that almost got him a dishonorable discharge. Drunk late one night, he wandered into the wrong compound and woke up, not just fellow soldiers, but a major and a sergeant major. There was the usual "scuffle" before they turned him over to his own sergeant with orders to keep him in custody, but the sergeant went back to sleep and Gabe went back to the other compound. "I was thinking how they´d mistreated me, so I pulled the guard out of his shack and was smacking him around when the major and the sergeant major came out again and got the MPs. I was arrested, but a few days later, my sergeant said an extra interpreter was needed for a big banquet, and I might help myself if I volunteered for the job. So I did. That night, I figured I´d do a better job with a few drinks, so that´s what I did, and I thought I´d done really well.

"I was sitting on my bunk afterward, drunk and feeling good about myself, when my sergeant came in and said, ´I can´t believe you got drunk tonight.´ I was shocked. I couldn´t believe he´d figured it out. I was living in my own reality." So Gabe came back to Ft. Lewis in deep trouble, and it was only what he calls two miracles that changed him from a fighting drunk to a peaceful citizen-and saved his army career.

It was his enraged 1st sergeant who started him on the road to recovery. Here´s the story:

"When I got back here, I had two Article 15s (military trial by the commanding officer) in a week. You can´t do that now. You´re thrown out first. But here I was, standing in front of my commander, and I made the speech of my life: ´I´ve worked hard, I love the army, I want to be a good soldier. Just give me the opportunity to prove myself.´"

His commander must have been a soft-hearted guy. "Private," he said, "I don´t know why, but I´m gonna let you stay. I´m taking all your rank, restricting you to Post, fining you and giving you punishment duty (Gabe describes that as "painting rocks and sweeping parking lots") and sending you to treatment. That will give you a chance to finish your tour and get an honorable discharge."

Gabe promised his commander he wouldn´t drink in the two weeks before the treatment program started. A week of reluctant abstinence followed, and then he got into a conversation with a new soldier who told him it was his birthday, and he didn´t have anyone to celebrate with. Well, Gabe couldn´t let that go. "Nineteen years old, he may die for his country, and nobody to hang with on his birthday." So he invited "the kid"-Gabe was 22 at the time-to dinner and a beer in Tacoma. As they were leaving the restaurant, Gabe thought a bigger celebration was in order, so he bought a six-pack and they went to visit a friend of his.

"Ten hours later, we were sitting in a field near Ft. Lewis. My friend had thrown us out of his house ´cause I was chain-smoking around his new baby and saying nasty things to his wife. I´m all drunk and the kid is sitting there wondering how he got into this situation. He´d only had a couple of drinks. Finally, he talked me into going back to the post, and I let him drive my truck. That was the only good decision I made that night. When we entered the post, the MP pulled us over. There I was completely out of it with no license, an unregistered vehicle, a stolen license plate and two loaded, unregistered firearms in the truck. I remember sitting in the MP station wondering why all this stuff was happening to me. Then my 1st sergeant came in to get me, and he made me ride all the way across Ft. Lewis in the back of my truck in a 40-degree rain.

"He never said a word to me. Other times, he´d chewed my ass and screamed and yelled. But this time, he seemed to realize there was nothing more to say. He´d given up on me. As I sat there in the back of the truck, I flashed back to my commander and how grateful I had been for another chance. Then some kind of strange mental twist came over me. I was astounded that I had come from there to here in a week. The power of that experience was mind boggling.

"That´s when I hit bottom, the complete demoralization that the Big Book talks about. I couldn´t kid myself anymore that I was just a wild and crazy guy. The power of that experience broke through my denial."

That was the first miracle. The second was a regulation the NCO (non-commissioned officer) alcoholism counselor used to defy Gabe´s commander, who had called him in to tell him they were kicking him out of the service. "But this NCO appeared with a regulation that said, basically, I couldn´t be kicked out ´cause I´d been diagnosed with alcoholism."

So Gabe went into a 30-day treatment program at Ft. Lewis and has been sober ever since. Besides lectures that he describes, rather unkindly, as "flavor of the month" on the causes of alcoholism, he was required to sign a contract to go to five AA meetings a week, get a sponsor and go to aftercare. From then on, it was all uphill. He gained a sobriety that is now going on 11 years old. Instead of taking his discharge, the newly sober soldier re-enlisted and volunteered for Korea, where he served two years before returning to Ft. Lewis to serve out the final two years of his enlistment.

He believes it´s harder to stay sober in the military because drinking is a major part of the lifestyle, and the constant travel makes it hard to put down sober roots. But he also found a role model, a soldier who was serving on the DMZ who rode a train for four hours every Saturday to get to Seoul and the only English-speaking meeting in the city. While in Korea, he met his future wife, who was also in the army. She is now working for a doctorate. He earned three years of college credits in his four years of military sobriety, then got his bachelor´s degree and his master of science degree after his discharge. He is now an adjunct professor and working for a public agency.

Sober he was, but the temptation to drink didn´t leave him for several years. That worried him until he read "Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers," in which Dr. Bob tells how he wanted to drink every day for two years after he quit, and sometimes had to stop what he was doing and pray for strength. "That gave me a lot reassurance," Gabe said.

Service work is a big part of his life. He´s goes to three meetings a week for himself. His first sponsor led him into Corrections service work, and that has remained his focus: meetings at the Ft. Lewis stockade, NERF (North Rehabilitation Facility at Firlands), violent offenders tank at the King County Jail, and work release twice a month.

Once again, the power of this program has changed a disaster to a busy, sober, useful life.

Interviewed and written by Dick S.