A veteran battles back
When he was 17 years old, Willmont (Bill) Griffin dropped out of high school and joined the Marines. Two years later, he was on a helicopter, a CH-53, just before Saigon fell and he pulled terrified people onboard and saw the end of a war and grew up pretty quick.
He made it home, but his brother, a Marine pilot, didn’t. Maybe it was survivor’s guilt, maybe it was just mourning his brother, because Bill Griffin was a Marine and Marines don’t leave their brothers behind.
Whatever it was, Bill Griffin had a lot of questions and started looking for answers at the bottom of a bottle.
“I think it started off as self-medicating,’’ Bill Griffin was saying. “All I know is that, pretty soon, I was a drunk.’’
He lived on the streets and drank anything he could hold down. Nineteen years ago, he woke up Thanksgiving morning on a bench in Boston Common. He was surrounded by other vets.
They brought him up Tremont Street, around the corner, to the shelter at the New England Center for Homeless Veterans on Court Street.
“They gave me a meal, a shower, some clothes,’’ he said. “They said: ‘You can stay here, but there’s some stipulations. No drinkin’ and no druggin.’ I said, ‘Sure, sure, whatever you say.’ ’’
But he wasn’t ready. They caught Bill Griffin holding a fishing pole out an alley window at the shelter. He was struggling under the weight of what he was trying to reel in: a half-gallon of vodka, which his drinking buddy Amos Marshall had put on the hook in the alley.
Bill Griffin was asked to pack his meager belongings and leave.
“I ended up in some place in East Boston that turned out to be a crack house,’’ he said.
Bill Griffin woke up one day and didn’t recognize the guy staring back in the mirror. He was 6 feet and weighed 88 pounds. The eyes staring back weren’t those of the young Marine who pulled Vietnamese people to freedom. They were empty.
“I started crying,’’ Bill Griffin said. “I looked in the mirror and just started crying.’’
He called the veterans shelter because he knew he didn’t have to explain anything to the guys who showed up in the van. They took him to detox, and when he got clean, they brought him back to the shelter, and then he got sober.
“Open arms,’’ he said. “Everybody at the shelter looked at me like: ‘Well, he’s finally ready. Good to have you back, brother.’ ’’
He got treated at the shelter for post-traumatic stress. He and four other vets founded an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter. He met his wife at a meeting.
Booze was no longer an obsession. Making up for lost time was.
They made him a security guard at the shelter, and one of his first duties was to escort his old buddy Amos Marshall out of the building. It hurt, but he knew Amos wasn’t ready.
Bill Griffin went back to school, got an associate’s degree, then a bachelor’s. He got a job as a construction inspector. He worked on Deer Island, the Ted Williams Tunnel, the Big Dig.
Eleven years ago, he enlisted in the Massachusetts National Guard.
“I took a 21-year vacation from the military,’’ he says.
He moved to New Jersey and did a tour in Kuwait with the Air National Guard. And in a couple of weeks, Bill Griffin will ship out for Iraq with his unit, the 108th Air Refueling Wing.
He is 54 years old and he is going to war.
Before he goes, he will return this week to the building on Court Street where he lost the half-gallon of vodka but found everything else.
Among those waiting to greet him, to hug him, is one of the Court Street alcohol counselors, a late-bloomer named Amos Marshall.
“This is what it’s all about,’’ Bill Griffin said. “You never leave a brother behind.’’
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. 
