JAMES WIGGS of Little Rock went home to be with his Lord and Savior on Jan. 20, 2011, six years ago. At the time of his death at age 64, Wiggs, better known as “Stroker” a former member of the notorious bandido riders was now a member of the Christian Motorcyclists Association. Wiggs was also a founder and Pastor of “Church of The Word” located in Little Rock’s East End community.
When Stroker died, fellow biker Neal Benschoff lost a dear friend and role model. Like Stroker, Benschoff was a Vietnam War veteran and rode with the legendary biker preaching Christianity in wayside bars.
When I first talked to Benschoff, shortly after Stroker’s death, he was getting inpatient care at Fort Roots veteran’s hospital in North Little Rock and regularly attending AA and NA 12-Step meetings while also being treated for Post Traumatic Stress disorder. For wartime veterans, especially those who may be struggling, Benschoff’s story may be an encouragement.
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 seventeen, 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, so he 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 lawbreaking over the next thirty years, combined with his troubled childhood, almost did him in.
Benschoff went to Marine boot camp in San Diego that 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, boarded an Air Force C-130, and landed at the demilitarized zone, a no-man’s land between the North and South Vietnam forces where most of the fighting took place.
He realized then that he had made a mistake.
“Our mission up there was to search and destroy,” Benschoff said. “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.”
“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 twelve months and twenty-five days and a couple of minor shrapnel wounds, Benschoff, by then a corporal, flew home with what was left of the 130 men he had gone 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 of leave in Los Angeles when he got home and began drinking “a quart of vodka a day and two quarts a day on weekends.”
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 he and his wife 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 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 out the conflict with the gang leaders. He was never afraid, he says, and that gave him an advantage and made him successful.
“I was good at the drug business, because I wasn’t afraid to kill people,” he says. And he did it 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.”
Referring to his Christian faith, he said, “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.
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