Vanguard University (www.vanguard.edu)
- Vanguard Newsletter Spring 2003: Volume 2, Number 4
VU junior Greg Esslair came to Vanguard via two tours in Vietnam,
and a 14-year “tour” as a homeless man on the streets. Now he’s heading
toward his degree and pouring back into the community where he once panhandled
for alcohol money.
“I’m a re-entry student,” he says, laughing. “Really re-entering
— from orbit.”
Esslair’s odyssey began in 1968 when he lightened a prison sentence
by joining the army. After being honorably discharged, and acquiring a
limp from a mistreated broken leg in Vietnam, he came home and settled
down with a wife and a job at the Anaheim power company, but he eventually
drank himself out of a job, marriage and home and in 1980 began living
on the streets.
“I knew my problem,” he says. “I never went through denial. I was
a four-star drunk. I paid psychologists and went to a witch doctor, acupuncturists,
hypnotists, but I couldn’t stop drinking. It was either going to be God
or nothing.”
For 14 years he limped and begged change in the same area of Tustin,
showering only when taken to jail every few months. Finally, a jail doctor
told him he may as well keep drinking because he had cirrhosis of the liver
and wouldn’t make it six months.
With that death sentence hanging over him, Esslair was released and
promptly broke into an abandoned gas station one night when it was pouring
down rain. There, in the dry, empty office, he “rambled on” to God, recounting
everything he could remember of what he calls “the most disgusting life
you can imagine” — his own.
“Everyone I knew was worse having known me. But the truth was coming
out that night,” he says.
Finally he asked God to release one drop of His power and have it
fall on his bond of alcoholism, and at that moment Esslair had what he
calls a Pentecostal experience. When it was over he no longer craved alcohol,
and didn’t wake up in cold sweats thinking
about the war.
“It was every bit as real as if Christ had walked into the room and
said, ‘Okay, what’s the problem?’” he says.
He was homeless for two and a half years more, but his life was changing
from the inside out. No longer drunk, he was able to file a claim for veteran’s
benefits. Then he met a preacher who encouraged him to go back to college.
“I said, ‘Get real.’ I’d burned out half my brain cells. Hadn’t
been to school in 30 years. I thought it was a stretch.”
But he enrolled in classes at a community college, and to his surprise
passed them. Then he got HUD housing and moved into an apartment. A welfare
program gave him
temporary jobs, one of which was in Costa Mesa city hall, next door
to Vanguard. From his fourth floor window Esslair looked out on the Vanguard
campus and had a
visual dream of himself under the trees studying the Bible.
In his mind it was beyond possibility.
By November 1999 he had finished everything he could do in a community
college. The Orange County Register did a story on him which led to a phone
call from then- Vanguard president Wayne Kraiss who invited him to his
office and offered him a scholarship. Esslair was almost unable to
answer because the view over Kraiss’ shoulder gave him a clear view
of the fourth-story window at city hall where he’d worked. But now he was
on the other side of that view.
Today, Esslair is in his fifth semester studying religion and has
received a full scholarship from the state of California. He can only take
half a load because of his commitments as a chapel speaker for the OC Rescue
Mission, coordinator of the Shelter and Hunger
Partnership for his church, Main Place Christian Fellowship, and
chaplain for the OC chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America.
He has also returned to Vietnam five times as a short-term missionary
to help orphans and lepers.
He can tell you, almost instantly, how many years, months, weeks
and days it has been since he was saved that night in the gas station.
And as for Vanguard, he says
it’s truly a dream come true.
“When I drive on campus it’s like a little chunk of heaven,” he says.
“I absolutely love it.” |
Greg
Esslair was a "plankowner" of the Chapter and one of the original Charter
Members. He served two tours in Vietnam the last tour as a Military Policeman
in Saigon. His other tour was as an infantryman and dog handler. Greg loved
the military and had many great stories to tell of his encounters with
the brass who never seemed to find humor with his antics. Greg commented
on how he often felt like a fireman as he rose up and down the ranks like
a ladder with his pursuit of barracks humor and parade grinder antics.
He joined the Chapter during it's formative years and became a member of
"
