Alcohol addiction is the devil’s payday to those who tinker with its destructive power and seduction. The payday always shows up, and when it does the damage is certainly devastating. This writer experienced firsthand the sorrows of living in a family with an alcoholic dad. My dad made the landing on Omaha Beach in 1944 with the U.S. Army. He never got over the trauma of that ambush that killed and wounded many brave soldiers of liberty. Every time my dad would come home drinking, eventually the conversation always turned to the war.

My dad would sit at the kitchen table with his fifth of liquor and his pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. His yellow tinged fingers bore the stains of nicotine from his chain smoking habit. “Come in here, sonny boy,” he would call, and I would go and sit at the table beside him. He would reach out and grasp my hand and look at me intensely with his deep blue eyes and smile as tears flowed profusely.

My mom and I relived each telling of the approach and landing on that bloody deadly beach. We cried a river of tears as we sat helplessly as the over whelming pain of that awful experience flooded back to my dad’s memory. He spoke of the L.S.T. landing craft and the somber fear and anxiety that prevailed with the young men who were about to embark on a real life and death struggle.

He vividly recalled how the Germans had set up their machine gun placements and trapped the surprised soldiers in the crosshairs of death. He described the utter confusion and bewilderment all around him as he lay prone on the beach among the dead and dying. Moans of young men with severe wounds filled the air as the relentless trap seemed to go on forever.  He would always drop his head and bawl like a baby as he said, “How did I live though that?”

My friend, my dad came through that bloody massacre without a scratch on his body, and it is truly remarkable that anyone survived that landing. My dad is a hero to me for the sacrifice he made in Europe against a determined enemy.  As I relived those beach landings with my dad, I did not understand the emotional festering pain in his soul. I just knew he was my dad, and he was troubled. My dad would never mention the war when he was sober, and a team of wild horses could not draw details of the war out of him. No, he suffered no physical injury by a German bullet, but he suffered nevertheless, mentally and emotionally, with a post-traumatic haunting from that bloody beach.

Booze can never make wrongs right, or eliminate physical or emotional wounds. It will only delay the inevitable payday that will surely come. My dad received the LORD as his Savior, but never seemed to understand the blessing the Lord extended to him on Omaha Beach that year in 1944. Alcohol and smoking took their deadly toll, and he passed away at the young age of 57.  The question must be asked, what could he have done for the Lord’s service if he had given the Lord complete control instead of self-medicating with booze?