one Sunday afternoon. (Since then, they have not returned.) I haven’t contacted those two girls for weeks because of the extremely dangerous situation we’ve been in. I will try to contact one of them again real soon.
We are very grateful for the chance to begin our AA group here, and we thank you for your extra help in this project. We hope that when we leave in November our following marines and sailors will continue the group as it is now. Though they will be a new bunch of servicemen, we think it’s possible there may be an alcoholic in the bunch who’ll continue the Peacekeeping Group.
God bless and goodwill to you good folks in New York.
Sincerely yours,
J.O.
Peacekeeping Group
On Sunday, October 23, 1983, the Battalion Landing Team headquarters building in the marine Amphibious Unit compound at Beirut International Airport was destroyed by a bomb, taking the lives of 241 U.S. military personnel.
This letter was written to GSO by the Lebanese student who had requested literature the preceding summer.
December 6, 1983
Dear S.,
Thank you very much for your thoughtful letter of October 27. I received it one month late due to the situation here and to the fact that the airport is closed. I am sending you this letter through the American Embassy.
As for the marines, the young man who was in touch with you was killed by the explosion. The others have left, and a new company was brought in. All of the AA literature was lost, because we used to meet in the library, located in the basement of the same building that was blown up. [GSO sent more literature, which was returned because of mail problems.] I want very much to be able to start AA again for the men in the new company, but at the moment, this is impossible. The base is located right next to the airport, and there is a lot of shelling and fighting in that area. Also, it would be very difficult for me to get on base, because new precaution measures have been taken since the explosion. I hope that things will change soon. Keep them in your prayers. Also pray for the AA group in Beirut.
Best regards from the AA members here, and they all thank you for your concern.
Sincerely,
S.M.
FOUR
Experience, Strength, and Hope
The Steps Are the Program
July 1975
The word “heal” means “make whole.” The aim of AA is to help a shattered, fragmented human being find wholeness, direction, and freedom. This begins with release from our compulsion to drink and, through our use of the Twelve Steps, gradually moves into growing freedom from fear, depression, anxiety, and the overwhelming self-concern that characterized life before AA.
Ecologists hammer persistently at the theme that destroying the natural balance anywhere will have an effect, frequently adverse, somewhere else. Nothing stands alone. Our lives are not compartmentalized. Pollution in one segment of my life will poison another, seemingly unconnected area of my life. Failure to work all of the Steps will eventually create problems such as depression, anxiety, fear, hostility, boredom, and finally drunkenness.
While the scientific method has generated sweeping advances in technology, it has also created the trend toward fragmentation and reductionism that continues today. Our ecological crisis is only one example of this unhappy legacy, which has resulted in a persistent inability to see the connection of one thing with another.
Dr. Barry Commoner, in his widely acclaimed book The Closing Circle , describes the problem this way: “There is indeed a specific fault in our system of science, and in the resultant understanding of the natural world. This fault is reductionism, the view that effective understanding of a complex system can be achieved by investigating the properties of its isolated parts.” Commoner goes on to say: “[reductionism is] the dominant viewpoint of modern science as a whole. Reductionism tends to isolate scientific disciplines from each other, and all of them from the real world.”
Commoner etches a disturbing picture of human technology, which provides power without purpose, means but no meaning. Incapable of seeing the connection of one thing to another, its hyper-specialization tries to solve problems without seeing either the real causes or the necessary solutions.
Loren Eiseley, an anthropologist who writes with a prophet’s insight, carries the same unsettling message in The Unexpected Universe . Describing man’s talent for creating difficulties for himself, Eiseley points out that each time science solves a problem, it creates two new ones. Like Commoner, he indicts reductionism and its accompanying fragmentation as the culprits.
In the 1950s, I worked on overseas construction jobs in Thule, Greenland, and Point Barrow, Alaska. I got to know some of the Eskimos in Thule and Barrow and spent some time studying their cultures. Like all non-literate groups, they originally saw everything as a unity. Their families, friends, and work, the animals, the land, the sea, and God as they understood him were all one. To the degree that they have been influenced by our technology and culture, that sense of unity has been shattered, and problems similar to ours have been created. As their culture fragmented, they became fragmented. Like many peoples in transition between two cultures, the Barrow Eskimos seemed to adopt the worst aspects of both.
During those years, my AA came primarily from the Big Book. Many times, I’ve seen in Chapter Five: “Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program… ” Is recovery simply not drinking? Not at all. Those early AAs, who understood so well the need for thoroughness, wrote on page 82: “We feel a man is unthinking when he says that sobriety is enough.” With precise clarity, these same sober drunks defined our objective on page 77: “Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us.”
In AA, we find some conventional wisdom that has flourished through the years, but on examination is seen to have absolutely no connection with the program. “There are no musts,’’ for example. Despite the frequency of such phrases in the Big Book as: “If we are planning to stop drinking there must be no reservation of any kind” and “We must not shrink at anything,” we hear AAs declare there are no musts at all. In my experience, “there are no musts” only for those members who never bothered to find out what the program is really about.
Each Step of the twelve is connected to every other Step, and they work as a unity. With deafening consistency, we hear that these are “suggested” Steps. Again, nowhere do we read this in the Big Book. “Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery:” (page 59). Totally different. What’s suggested is a program of Twelve Steps. Used honestly and thoroughly, they provide precise results.
Certainly it’s my privilege to use part of them, none of them, or all of them. Regardless of my approach, I’m still a member of this Fellowship. Tradition Three guarantees this. It seems to me that considerable confusion arises on this point, however. I don’t have to do anything to be a member of AA. On the other hand, to follow the program and get the results it guarantees, there are a number of things I must do.
It’s my right to use six of the Steps, three
