How did Veterans stop drinking?

Nikki Kraus wrote a book, and it opens on a kitchen floor.

“Spiraling, and the alcohol, and waking up on the kitchen floor and I have an empty Jack. That’s how my book starts.”

Hear it at 25:43

Kraus is a U.S. Air Force Veteran who served as a weather forecaster. This was 2017 and she was still in uniform. There was a gun on the counter that night, and the last thing she remembers is having it in her hands. Her mother found out by reading the book.

“None of it mattered. Life didn’t matter. I didn’t care what I was doing.”

Hear it at 26:43

We are starting there because nobody in this article describes a drinking problem as a problem with drinks. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, ten Veterans talked about alcohol and drugs. Six of them describe a habit of their own, and every one of the six describes the bottle, or the pipe, as doing a job: getting them to sleep, covering pain, filling a room that used to have people in it. So when you ask how they stopped, you do not get a tip. You get the story of what took over the job.

We are not clinicians and this is not advice. It is what they said.

What the drinking was for

In the service it was not even a decision. Juan Valdez, a Marine Corps Veteran and Purple Heart recipient who works with Wounded Warrior Project, describes it as part of the furniture.

“You’re drinking on the weekends or you’re drinking at night after work and you’ve got all the Marines there.”

Hear it at 8:57

Then you get out, and the Marines are gone, and the drinking stays. Michael D’Angelo, a Marine Corps Veteran, machine gunner and stand-up comic, says civilian life comes with a lot of time by yourself and that people fill it with one of about three things.

“You get your gym junkies, your Bible thumpers or your alcoholics. That’s kind of your options.”

Hear it at 33:31

He picked the gym, then a stage. Hold on to that list. It comes back.

From one of our earliest episodes, David Lonergan, a Marine Corps Veteran and fitness coach, puts dates on his: “From 2012 to 2020, even though it’s eight years, it was just a downfall of alcohol abuse.” Hear it at 16:28 When he got out, he says, there was nobody to do things with. No goal, no sleep.

Sleep comes up again in our 4th of July special, where this was said about what the drinking was for:

“I couldn’t sleep. That’s why I drank alcohol every night. I had to have something to drink every night just to think I could sleep then. But that never worked.”

Hear it at 43:24

For Jason Brooks, a medically retired Marine who was a Recon and SERE instructor, it sat on top of chronic pain and a stack of prescriptions for PTSD, anxiety and sleep. He took them, he says, because a good Marine does what the doctor tells him.

“At one point they had me on seven different medications.”

Hear it at 36:24

“I literally lost like two years of my life because I can’t remember it.”

Hear it at 36:41

And on top of the pills, the thing he grew up with: “Being born and raised in Vegas, I was a drinker. I was a heavy drinker.” Hear it at 36:48 His word for it is self-medicating.

Company, quiet, sleep, pain. Four jobs. None of them is thirst.

How bad it got, and who could tell

Here is the part that should worry you about your friends. Nobody could tell.

Steve Ulman, a U.S. Army Veteran who is now an actor and runs an off-grid solar business, was driving a nice car with money in the bank.

“I slept every other night for like a year and a half and people couldn’t tell.”

Hear it at 27:20

People complimented him on the weight he was losing.

“I was a functional drug addict and I told myself that I needed to smoke the meth to build all these websites.”

Hear it at 27:44

Billy Wiland, a Marine Corps Veteran, attorney and gym owner, came home from work in Afghanistan bitter at his country and at himself.

“The PTSD led to my wife at the time, she left me. And I was at a loss, man. Ultimately, I overdosed.”

Hear it at 5:22

His mother was in the room, praying over him, and did not know what she was looking at.

“It took me just over a year to let my whole family know that I had overdosed because I was embarrassed.”

Hear it at 18:17

A lawyer. A Marine. A year.

Rachel Veronica, a U.S. Army Veteran who is now a clinical hypnotherapist, came home from war and lost track of who she was. She spent a week in a VA hospital ward in 2015. If you are waiting for the moment it turned, keep waiting.

“I was there for about 7 days and you think that that would have been my rock bottom, but it wasn’t.”

Hear it at 3:14

She got sober in 2023. Eight more years. She had already started training to help other people while she was still using. The bottom, it turns out, does not send a calendar invite.

What actually changed it

This is where they split, and we are not going to referee.

For Wiland it was God, and he means it literally. He was raised Jewish and says that when he came back from the overdose, “this Jew totally surrendered to Jesus at that very moment.” Hear it at 30:38 He calls it a miracle and runs his gym as a ministry. One of D’Angelo’s three options, taken all the way.

For Veronica it was everything at once. Not one habit. The whole life it lived in.

“It wasn’t up until I got sober in 2023 that I changed everything about my lifestyle and who I hung out with.”

Hear it at 2:27

New people, a workout every day, no parties. She says the hard part was not the substance. It was the person she had been while using it.

“I had the identity of an addict, of a party girl, of this crazy lifestyle. That’s hard to give up when you live in it seven days a week.”

Hear it at 10:57

For Lonergan it was a mirror and a walk. In early 2020 he went to the emergency room four times in six weeks, sure something was wrong with his heart. The doctors told him it was anxiety. “So, I looked in the mirror. It’s like, okay, I got to fix this.” Hear it at 19:17 The whole plan was to feel better. He started by walking outside. That is option one on D’Angelo’s list.

For Brooks it was other people’s trouble. He became a peer mentor with Wounded Warrior Project and with a Veterans court, sitting with people where he had been. He does not claim to be finished. Some days the pain still wins. But:

“I know what it’s like to be there.”

Hear it at 37:20

For Ulman it started with the worst day. He says the first thing that moved him was surviving a suicide attempt, and the thought that followed it: if he had nothing left to lose, he might as well go after the thing he actually wanted, which was acting. Then somebody told him he was useless until he was clean. He believed them.

“I’m almost 5 years clean.”

Hear it at 28:43

He has a theory about people like him, and it is the opposite of shame.

“Addicts are relentless. We have a drive in us that is unstoppable.”

Hear it at 29:10

Point the drive somewhere else, he says, and you are not behind anybody.

Taking the beer away fixes nothing

So: God, a clean sweep, a walk, service, a stage. Five answers, and D’Angelo would say they are all the same answer wearing different shirts. Nick Merrick, a former U.S. Army Green Beret who founded Green Beret Racing, says it without the joke.

“If you’re an alcoholic and I remove beer from you, doesn’t mean that you’re not an alcoholic anymore. I haven’t solved anything except you just don’t have it.”

Hear it at 10:35

His organization pays for Veterans to go do hard things they care about. His reasoning:

“Waking up for something is way better than not going to bed for anything.”

Hear it at 10:55

Veronica would push back on part of that. She did have to remove it, and the people around it, before anything else took. Merrick and Ulman talk about adding. She talks about subtracting first. Both can be true in one life, and in hers they were, about eight years apart.

The one who never drank

Then there is Joe “Doc” Worley, a U.S. Navy corpsman who holds a Bronze Star with valor and a Purple Heart. He was hit by a roadside bomb in Fallujah in 2004 and lost a leg above the knee. He came home to a wife who stayed, a new daughter and a church mailing him deer jerky.

“I’ve never been drunk. Zero alcohol and drug issues.”

Hear it at 11:06

He does not say why, and he does not say it to look good. He says it to set up this:

“If it can go smooth for anybody, it went smooth for me. And it’s still the hardest thing that I’ve ever done.”

Hear it at 11:16

He says he does not know how people do it without the support he had. That is why he belongs in an article about drinking. Take the bottle out of the story entirely and coming home was still the hardest thing a decorated corpsman has done. Six of the others were carrying that and a habit. Nobody in this piece was weak. They were doing the hard thing with a handicap.

You do not have to wait for the floor

Kraus got out in 2018. It was years more before things turned, and she has thought about what she would tell the woman on the kitchen floor.

“You don’t have to hit rock bottom to make a change.”

Hear it at 48:46

We cannot tell you what will work. Ten people gave us at least five answers. What we can tell you is that every one of those six was, at some point, the person nobody could tell about, and every one of them is on camera now, saying it out loud.

If you want to know what treatment exists, VA keeps a plain page on substance use care that lists what it offers, from medication to counseling to residential programs, and how to reach it.