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In 1978 the Army sent me to Germany. As a Staff Sergeant I was entitled to a single room in the billets, but was assigned to a double room due to space shortage. After having traveled for nearly 24 hours and spending nearly the whole next day processing, I was beat. I went to the room, found nobody home, and crashed. About 2 a.m. the door opened and the bright light from the hallway fell across my face, waking me. Quickly, the door shut and in the darkness I heard my roommate stumble across the room and fall into bed. Still dead tired, I decided that introductions could wait until morning. I was lying on my side with my back to roomie's bed and I heard the nightstand drawer open and something plop onto the floor. Shortly thereafter, I heard the sound of running water, and then the strong and unmistakable odor of urine. Okay! That was it! I snapped on the bedside light and sat up to confront this insanity. Staff Sergeant Bob (not his real name, of course) sat there on the edge of his bed blinking in the glaring light. In what was obviously a well-established routine, he had taken a towel from the drawer of the nightstand, thrown it on the floor and proceeded to urinate into it. Profusely! This was obviously a ploy by a drunk to avoid having to navigate to the bathroom. I said, "What the hell?!" and he slurred, "Oh crap they promised I wouldn't get a roommate. I guess you're going to destroy my career now." I replied, "Just clean that mess up and we'll talk about this in the morning.
In the morning I discovered that Bob was an Air Force sergeant who was assigned as the Officer's Club manager. He was an alcoholic in denial with a dream job and unlimited access to booze. I read him the riot act and told him that if he ever did anything even similar to this crap again his career would be in the toilet for sure. Eventually I learned he was from the backwoods of Kentucky and had some bizarre stories of his survivalist relatives stockpiling weapons and scraping the radium off watches to eventually get a critical mass to build their own atomic weapon. Yeah.
So we eventually became friends and I tried to get him into church and he was convinced that he had somewhere along the line committed the unpardonable sin and therefore could not be accepted by God under any circumstances. On the nights that he worked, he came in blind drunk at 2 a.m. and made it to the restroom okay. On all other nights, he came in at about 6 p.m. with a six-pack of beer and sat in his bunk watching tv until he had drunk all six and passed out. I tried a few times to get him to see that he might, just might be alcoholic, but the Air Force had continually evaluated his job performance as excellent and with no other evidence to the contrary, he was convinced that he was just fine. I eventually got my own room and then eventually got my family over there and had our own little house. I lost contact with Bob after that, but while we roomed together I learned to sleep with one eye open, and never felt quite secure.
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