When Marvin E. was in the army´s basic training at Camp Roberts, California, "I was told to drink, cuss and chase women. I tried to do it all."

But a sergeant told him being bad didn´t fit his image. So he quit swearing, but he worked hard at the other two goals for the next 21 years. In his first temporary period of sobriety, in 1968, his ex-wife called him to say she´d just put out a warrant for his arrest for child support."Are you mad at me?" He said "Yes," hung up the phone and headed for his old stompin´ grounds in North Dakota.

That didn´t last long. He tried working in the oil fields there (who knew North Dakota had oil?), then turned to commercial gardening, laying sod for lawns. While there, he started drinking again and was soon back in Seattle.

A girlfriend told him he was drinking too much, so he went to A.A. Two months later, the woman told him she liked him better when he was drinking, so he started hitting the juice again. "Not wholeheartedly this time," Marvin recalled. "By this time, I was working at the V.A. hospital. I was afraid I was going to lose my job and my woman too." The job survived, but not the romance. "When I got back to the house, my car was gone. When I found her at a bar, she said she wanted to end our relationship, and advised me to see a psychiatrist. "Eight months later, she told me she´d been in a blackout, but I told her I couldn´t help her. We´d split. I went on a three-day drunk instead."

The drinking ended when he joined Alcoholics Anonymous "once and for all" on June 20, 1973. He´s still tapering off on the third goal (chasing women).

Quit drinking "once and for all," although he´d had two years of sobriety earlier. He was living in Bremerton when he saw a TV ad from A.A. which asked, "Are You an Alcoholic?" Since his life was utterly out of control, he figured the answer was yes, so he called the number in the ad and started going to meetings.

But that was the turning point. When he sobered up, Marvin decided to go to the King County Council on Alcoholism for counseling, and returned to the Rainier Valley group of A.A. Rainier Valley and Empire Way became his two home groups, and he´s still a regular at Empire Way after nearly 32 years of sobriety. Rainier Valley is defunct.

Marvin was born in Powers Lake, North Dakota, in the middle of the Great Depression, November 30, 1935, the youngest of two brothers and two sisters. The family moved around the state in the restaurant business as things went from bad to worse. His father lost the farm and the family was on welfare till he got a job driving a bread truck and later worked for the WPA. Meanwhile, his two older brothers joined the CCCs, and these two pioneering New Deal programs kept the family afloat. Then came World War II and Marvin´s lifelong love of the military.

Both his brothers served in infantry combat divisions, one in the Pacific and the other in Europe. It didn´t go well for either of them. The brother in the Pacific with the 96th Division was riddled with machine gun fire in the battle for Okinawa, his second invasion, and also caught malaria. The brother in Europe with the 104th Division was taken prisoner and served six months in a POW camp. Both are now deceased.

"When I was a kid, there were heroes all around me," Marvin said. "Brothers, cousins-if they had a uniform on, they were my heroes." Marvin saw his chance to join when the Korean War started. He enlisted as soon as he was old enough, expecting to join the fighting on the Korean Peninsula. Instead, he wound up as a guard at the nuclear works on the Hanford Reservation, and later served in Germany.

At Hanford, he discovered what many drunks have found before and after him: booze takes away your fear of girls. "There was this country western bar where I drank and sat with girls and danced and had a ball. It was something I´d never experienced before."

When he was transferred to Germany, He spent his time as a gun mechanic and on security duty, "rousting whores and breaking up bar fights. That´s where I first experienced fear. I thought there was something wrong with me." But it wasn´t all bad. Marvin was stationed at a base that had a nudist camp next door. He became close friends with a German girl who sang "Lili Marlene" for him. When she told him she loved him, "I ran like a chicken. But I still think about her.

"I did a lot of drinking over there. We were told not to drink the water, so I substituted beer, champagne and cognac. I know now that I was an alcoholic by this time. I was 19 years old."

Later, back in the States, Marvin re-enlisted and went to Panama for a year-and-a-half, where he liked the people, hated the corruption and earned his GED. When he got back here to help staff NIKE missile sites, drinking and AWOLs increased. One night, he woke up in a hotel and decided he might as well stay till morning. The next day, hitchhiking back to his base, his commanding officer picked him up. "I figured it was time to get out of the service, so I took an early discharge."

He´d been married three months earlier, and launched into a decade of marital and emotional chaos involving children-he had two of his own-a rival boyfriend with a gun, a fight that got him a night in the San Francisco jail, unemployment and heavy drinking. The marriage ended after three years. He moved back to Seattle and lived and drank for a year on unemployment checks.

Was that his bottom? "Not really. I moved to Bremerton and got a job reprocessing ammunition at the Bangor torpedo base. There was one bright spot. I was living in a whore house in Bremerton, and the madam became my good friend. She fed me till I got back on my feet. Saved my life. But I had to quit my job when my ex-wife showed up with the kids and I had to take care of ´em."

When he finally found sobriety in 1973, his first sponsor was Al W., at that time office manager of Intergroup. Al, Marvin recalled, told him that "You´re doing some woman a great favor by not marrying her."

Along with all his other vicissitudes, Marvin has had serious health problems, including heart bypass surgery and a hip replacement. The latter was the result of a slip on the ice at the V.A. Hospital here in 1990, where he was working in the laundry. He spent 20 years on the V.A. staff. He has never remarried, and lives by himself. "I like my freedom."

Marvin´s admiration of the military led to a lifetime of reading and study of military history. He never fails to bring a book with him when he reports for his weekly duty as a phone volunteer at the Intergroup office. That´s not his only service contribution. He´s been G.S.R. for two groups and secretary for two groups as well as coffee maker.

Ever since he was a rookie soldier at Camp Roberts, he has honored his sergeant´s advice not to swear. And he thinks that today´s A.A. could use some of the same counsel. "We come in to A.A. to change our lives, and one thing we should change is our language."

"A.A. has changed my life completely," Marvin said. "When I was drinking, my life was a fantasy. I wanted to be a hero who had all the answers. A.A. brought me down to earth. A.A. has given me strength and self-discipline. It is my life and my home. It is my faith."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.