Professing Alcoholism

I HAD been scarcely ten months dry when I took charge of an American Consulate in a city of 400,000 on the east coast of Africa. Mary and I swung easily into the routine; this was our sixth post in eighteen years of the Foreign Service. But it was my first without liquor. And the State Department was not very happy about my record. The attitude I met with most often was: "Well, you're AA now but what will you do when you get where AA isn't?" I was there and one of the first tasks was to help people understand that I don't drink.