Gambling for the adrenaline rush

Gambling for the adrenaline rush

Bill:

Now, if you go up there at any given time at night you'll see a bunch of young men with what we call high and tight, and lo and behold they're Marines, and they're Marines that are serving at the OAF and OEF and what they're doing is in between deployments they're losing their paycheck, and they're not giving their paycheck to their spouse or they're not spending it on what they should be spending it on and their families, they're having that adrenaline rush by gambling.

Now, I have a great friend that I know very well and he is now nine months sober in terms of not gambling, and he would say to me, “Bill, the reason I gamble is to get across from the table from those civilians and win their money,” but the problem was he never won. He would never win and he would stay there until he lost virtually, literally all the money that he had with him and then he’d go to the ATM and get another thousand and he would lose that, and he would sometimes be a couple thousand up and he should go home, but he would stay there all night and lose all that money that he was up. So, I said I would tell him, like, you know, “You’ve got to stop this,” you know, he, so his thing was gambling and living and gambling because of the adrenaline rush that accompanied winning and beating these guys. He would look at them like the enemy, and this is what he told me, and I suspect that for most people it’s like that, it’s…for combat Veterans.