Staying Afloat

I had been in the Navy for two years when I found out I was an alcoholic. It seems only fitting that I ended up there just as the Navy was going through its own "spiritual awakening." Before my time the Navy would have given the alcoholic an undesirable discharge. But they had discovered that the alcoholic could be saved and made whole again. In my own eyes, though, I had become the worst thing in the world that one could be--an alcoholic. And at twenty-two years of age, to boot.