Free Cash: The Autobiography by Johnny Cash, Jonny Cash, Patrick Carr Page A

and hard talk since we landed in Bremerhaven—men jacking themselves and each other up for action the way they do—but I didn't want any part of it, and I didn't really understand why so many men did. I had no problem sharing a barracks with blacks, and I couldn't imagine hating them so much that I was willing to wage a private war on them. It's quite a thing, the inno- cence of youth; my views haven't changed since then, but I've certainly learned more about race hatred along the way. One point about that fight. There in Bremerhaven you had a lot of men, black and white, who'd been very strongly encouraged to kill people (North Koreans, Chinese, Russians), then jam-packed together and told to behave like gentlemen for a long, hard, boring voyage fol- lowed by enforced idleness ashore. They were a boiler waiting to explode. My own personal nonviolence didn't last long in Landsberg. Once I knew how to drink beer and look for a girl, it was no big thing learning how to drink the hard stuff and look for a fight. Finding one wasn't difficult, either. The United States Army didn't have any bases nearby, so we were denied the chance to do combat with our natural enemies, but the Germans obliged us willingly enough; someone would always rise to the occasion. It was just part of the evening's fun for angry young men and red-blooded guardians of democracy. The air force broadened other horizons for me. I went to London and I saw the queen (her coronation, in fact, in 1953). I went to Oberammergau, home of the famous Passion Play, and fished (Bavaria has the world's best trout fishing). I went to Paris and watched the girls at the Folies-Bergere. I went to Barcelona and watched the girls everywhere. I heard flamenco guitars played in caves. I bought my own first guitar for twenty deutsche marks, about five bucks American at the time,
and carried it back to the base with me through the freezing German winter. I'll never forget that walk, four miles though knee-deep snow; I was numb all over. Up to that point I'd had to be content with just singing, and of course I sang all the time, both alone and with the other guys. In a way it was just like it had been back in Arkansas, except that the context and the content were often a little different. At first, in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, I really missed singing with everyone in church, but marching music was fun, too. I still remember the first song we sang that way, a group effort written collaboratively by my whole flight of fifty-seven men and sung on the march: Oh, there's a brownnose in this flight And his name is Chester White. He's got a brown spot on his nose And it grows and grows and grows. My guitar survived until 1957, by the way, when my brother Tommy and one of my nephews, horsing around at my house in Memphis, smashed it to pieces by accident and neglected to mention the event until one day when I happened to notice it was missing. I didn't care; by then I had a Martin. The air force appreciated my nonmusical talents and tried to hold on to me, promoting me just before my hitch was up—“We've made you a Staff Sergeant a little early, Sergeant Cash, and we would like for you to seriously con- sider reenlisting and making a career of this”—but it was far too little, way too late. They'd kept me in Germany for three years with no home leave whatsoever and only three telephone calls back to the States, and on top of that they told me that if I stayed in the air force, I'd never leave the Security Service. “What if I want to be in the air force band?” I asked.
“No way,” they said. “You've taken an oath of secrecy. You can't go anywhere. You're still in, even after you're discharged.” For one horrible moment I thought they were trying to tie me up for life, but they weren't; they let me go. It was a good thing they did. The beer and the wurst were wonderful, but I was dying to be back in the South, where the livin' was easy; where