When “Stroker” Wiggs, the “Bandido” bike rider who became a Christian minister, died in January in Little Rock, Neal Benschoff lost a dear friend and role model. Benschoff, also a former member of an outlaw biker group that terrorized the countryside was, like “Stroker,” a Vietnam War veteran.
Thanks to inpatient care at Fort Roots, a Veterans Administration (VA) facility, and regular attendance at 12-Step meetings, Benschoff has been clean and sober for 12 years now. He is also being treated at the VA for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Like “Stroker,” Benschoff is now a member of the Christian Motorcyclists Association, and he spends some Sunday mornings in saloons carrying a message of recovery. Sometimes he visits the church Stroker founded, the Church of the Word in the East End community.
Benschoff sponsors men who are struggling with addictions, and he gives his testimony when asked. Troubled by dyslexia since he was a child, Benschoff has not written much of his testimony down. So this is his story as told to One Day at a Time.
Benschoff, who lost his father in a shooting incident when he was eleven and was raised by an alcoholic mother who consorted with mostly bad men, including a member of the mob, was not well prepared for life. And because of his untreated dyslexia, school was a nightmare.
When he was 17, Benschoff and a Los Angeles high school friend stole a Chevy Impala. The friend got caught and was charged and convicted of the crime.
When Benschoff got the news, he figured his buddy would snitch on him and fled to the Marine recruiting office and signed up. This, he figured, would get him out of town with a decent cover.
He got away with his part of the theft, but the Vietnam experience and its aftermath of addiction and law breaking over the next 30 years, combined with his troubled childhood, almost did him in.
Benschoff went to Marine boot camp in San Diego the summer of 1966, and in September he got his orders and headed west toward Vietnam on a Continental airlines flight from Los Angeles. He was excited and happy. He had escaped the law, and he was a Marine with a paycheck and a great adventure ahead of him.
Three days later Benschoff arrived at Da Nang, Vietnam’s major port city on the South China Sea, boarded an Air Force C-130 and landed at the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), a no man’s land between the North and South Vietnam forces where most of the fighting took place.
He realized then he had made a mistake.
“Our mission up there was to search and destroy. At first, we were fighting these farmers in black pajamas and funny hats, but later the NVA [North Vietnam Army] came in, and things got a lot tougher,” Benschoff says.
“There were daily mortar attacks, and we saw a lot of death,” he said. “The second day I was there, a helicopter came back from the field loaded with dead and wounded and when the door opened blood poured out.”
Most of the soldiers drank alcohol daily and smoked pot or pot laced with opium. Much of it came from the farmers.
After 12 months and 25 days and a couple of minor shrapnel wounds, Benschoff, by then a corporal, flew home with what was left of the 130 men he went over with. Seventy, barely half, had survived.
“When we went over to Vietnam, everybody on the plane was jazzed,” Benschoff said. “When we came home, everybody slept.”
He took thirty days leave in Los Angeles when he got home and began drinking “a quart of vodka a day and two quarts a day on weekends.”
He didn’t know it then, but the emotional scars he was treating with alcohol and hard drugs would persist for another three decades before he would begin to get well just short of the year 2000. Today, he says, he is as happy as he has ever been. Of his earlier life, he says, “I tried to act like normal people, but I could never bring it off.”
His current life style contrasts strongly with the mayhem and violence of the thirty years preceding his recovery.
In March 1968 Benschoff mustered out of the marines at age 22 vowing that “nobody’s gonna put me in that position again.”
He felt, like many Vietnam war veterans, that his country had turned its back on him, and for a brief time, deeply resentful, he and some other vets turned their anger on the white robed Hare Krishna followers peddling flowers and love at airports.
Benschoff, a tough guy from the time he was a kid, was small at 5’ 5”, and he compensated by becoming an amateur boxer who also raced cars and motorcycles for money.
“I raced everything,” Benschoff says, “and I could make $100 or more a race.”
There was also the death of his father, a significant factor.
Benschoff was brought up within three miles of the Pacific ocean and his father owned a small company which made surfboards and other products associated with surfing and diving.
When Benschoff was eleven, the company foreman shot and killed his father at the office with a rifle. In a bizarre twist, the father’s death was ruled a suicide at first. Later evidence confirmed, however, that the foreman had indeed shot his father, but before he could be brought to trial, the foreman, himself, committed suicide.
The death of his father, especially under these circumstances, and the drunken behavior of his mother, who died of an overdose of pills and alcohol at the age of 53, helped push him into his wild life of drinking and drugging financed by his love of racing.
After his tour in Vietnam, Benschoff married “another drug addict” and began to work for North American Rockwell as a machinist. He also took courses and eventually became a union carpenter.
Not surprisingly, Benschoff’s first marriage didn’t work out. Both were heavily into drugs, and he began riding with outlaw motorcycle gangs. He also became a major drug dealer. He made his own cocaine buys in Mexico and in Columbia through a Florida connection. Later he began manufacturing methamphetamine.
Benschoff sold most of his drugs through four notorious biker organizations which he declines to identify.
“Outlaw bikers sell a lot of drugs,” he said, “and two other products, women and guns.”
Benschoff faced danger almost every day.
One of the biker groups he supplied, actually put out a contract on him to have him killed, but Benschoff eventually worked it out with the gang. He was never afraid, he says, and that gave him an advantage and made him successful.
Benschoff says, “ I was good at the drug business, because I wasn’t afraid to kill people,”
And he did it, he says, with either a gun or a baseball bat.
Benschoff wasn’t afraid of being killed either.
“I wasn’t afraid to die,” he says, “because it would get me out of the pain of living. I learned that in Vietnam.”
Benschoff still has no fear of death, When asked about it, he says with a wink and a smile, “I’m not afraid to die now, but it’s not because of the pain. It’s because I know where I’m going.”
Today, he owns his own home and a Harley Heritage motorcycle. He has a pretty healthy bank account, draws full disability from the VA and stays in contact with his ex-wife (a second marriage) and their two children living in Colorado.
“I try to do the right things with people,” Benschoff says. “Life is good now. I follow through with things, I sponsor. I do what I say I will.”
Benschoff, who sponsors a number of men, says he wanted to tell his story in the hope that it would encourage others to adopt a spiritual focus and seek recovery from their addictions.
