I Was Drinking All Day Every Day in the Build-Up to Being Deployed to Iraq — I’d Wake Up in the Morning, Make Half a Cup of Coffee & Fill the Rest With Cointreau

Episode 75 | William Porter — Alcohol Explained: Iraq, Cointreau at Dawn & 12 Years on the Other Side

William Porter grew up in Raynes Park, South West London — fine childhood, nothing dramatic — started drinking at 14 in a park with a friend and a bottle from the off-licence. It was a non-event. But the culture of the 90s, the lads, the music, Oasis, TFI Friday, all of it normalised getting absolutely hammered as a personality trait. By the time he’d done university in Cardiff, law school in Guildford and landed a paralegal job in London, drinking was simply what you did.

Then at 26, half drunk on the sofa watching TV, an advert for the Territorial Army came on. He joined the Parachute Regiment reserve, quit drinking for three months to get through P Company selection, and passed. Then in 2005 he got mobilised and deployed to Iraq. In the build-up training, wracked with anxiety about what was ahead, he found the one thing that made the terror go away — a half cup of coffee filled up with Cointreau each morning, then drinking steadily through the day whenever he wasn’t training. Iraq itself was completely dry for six months. He came back thinking the enforced detox had fixed it. It hadn’t.

By his early thirties — married, two young sons — the pattern was drinking heavily from Friday lunchtime through the weekend, waking at 3am to drink himself back to sleep, dragging himself into work Monday and doing nothing, then cramming the week’s work into three days. In February 2014 he crawled out of five days of constant drinking and made the decision to stop. Cold turkey, three days of hell, and then — slowly — the realisation that what he’d thought was him at 100% was actually him at 60%.

He wrote Alcohol Explained in 2015, one of the most widely read and recommended books in the sobriety space, explaining the science, psychology and mechanics of alcohol addiction in plain language. Now 12 years sober, running three miles every morning, and navigating a difficult divorce without reaching for a bottle.

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