On the morning of September 4 he called from Dyess, and she was thrilled to hear his voice. In a letter he wrote her later that same day, he asked her to send him a large photo so he could put it over his bed in Germany and look at it every morning and night. He enclosed a photo he’d had taken at the base. He ended by urging, “Write, honey.” Seven days later, he wrote her the first of several letters from Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, where he and other members of what would eventually be named the 6912th Security Squadron were being assembled before they left for Germany. He signed it “Love, Johnny.”
While they were waiting to be shipped out, Bob Moodie, whom John had met at Brooks, invited him to spend the weekend at his folks’ place in Rhode Island. On the way, they stopped off in New York City, and John took an immediate liking to the place. He especially loved all the bookshops and movie theaters, but the most notable thing was seeing his first Broadway play. A stranger, noticing the two young men in uniform, gave them free tickets to the musical comedy Two on the Aisle. John loved the experience and became a lifelong fan of Broadway theater.
Cash’s group left the Brooklyn Navy Yard on September 20, 1951, for Germany aboard the USNS General W. G. Haan, a seventeen-thousand-ton ship capable of carrying just under four thousand troops. Writing to Vivian once they were under way, he signed his note “Oceans and oceans of love and devotion, Johnny.”
On the first day at sea, Cash was walking back to his double-deck berth when he noticed the guy on the bunk beneath his was reading the Bible. When he looked closer, he saw it was Ben Perea, whom he recognized from Keesler Air Force Base.
“Do you read the Bible often?” Cash asked.
When Perea nodded yes, John replied, “Me too.”
The next day Perea caught John’s attention again, this time sitting on his bunk singing “Beautiful Brown Eyes,” an old country song revived earlier in the year in a recording by Jimmy Wakely. John stopped and sat alongside Perea. It was the start of a friendship that lasted throughout their Air Force days and beyond. Ben was a shy, deeply religious young man who would avoid the excesses of German nightlife, and John admired him. John was also drawn to Perea because his father was a railroad man. Plus, Ben was Catholic, and John had a new desire to learn all he could about the religion.
The pair spent hours and hours on the ship and in the barracks in Landsberg singing songs. Ben didn’t think John was much of a singer in their early days together, but it was fun having someone to sing with. During the trip, they pretty much sang popular country hits, which meant a lot of Hank Williams and Eddy Arnold. Ben remembers they probably sang Jimmie Davis’s “You Are My Sunshine” most of all because it was such a simple but moving song.
When he wasn’t singing, John was lying on his bunk writing letters to Vivian. In one, he mentioned that Vic Damone, who was a well-known pop singer at the time, was aboard the ship and had organized a choir that met every night.
“How do you like that?” he wrote. “Pretty big time, huh? Me singing with Vic Damone.” John may actually have worked up enough nerve to sit in with the choir on a couple of numbers, but he didn’t have any contact with Damone. His only singing partner on the ship was Perea. But again, he wasn’t inclined to let the facts get in the way of a good story.
IV
It was the first week in October when the giant transport ship arrived at the port city of Bremerhaven on the North Sea coast of West Germany. Cash and the other new members of the security team boarded a train for the long ride south to Landsberg, near Munich. The air base was a former outpost for the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, and it was notorious in Germany because Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while imprisoned there in 1924. The surrounding area was a breathtaking mix of rivers, lakes, park grounds, and mountains. It was ideal for fishing, sailing, and skiing—all of which Cash pursued over the next three years.
Before he could explore those attractions, though, John spent time checking out the amenities on the base itself and was delighted to find a movie theater. During that first week, on October 13, he and Ben Perea saw a gritty low-budget Warner Bros. film titled Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison. John liked the movie and mentioned it in a letter that night to Vivian. In later interviews, Cash always said he wrote “Folsom Prison Blues” after seeing it. In truth, he would write it long after seeing the film.
During the long high-pressure hours in the radio intercept room, he started feeling like a prisoner himself. He did begin to toy with a song about Folsom Prison, but nothing came of it at the time. As much as he loved music, John didn’t know much about songwriting yet.
Ben remembers that John often jotted down musical ideas in a spiral notebook, but they were usually spin-offs of existing songs—either parodies or blatant copies. Over the next few months, John forgot about Folsom Prison. He didn’t return to the idea until he happened to hear a song in the barracks two years later—a song that gave him the blueprint for his first signature hit.
In his early letters to Vivian, John noted that the locals treated Americans like gods. “I don’t know why, but they do,” he declared. “They would even get out in the street to let one of us pass. They must think we are over here to protect them. I can just see me protecting them. All I want is a nice fox hole.” The playful reference to a foxhole was as close as he could come under the strict Security Service rules to explaining the tense, anxious atmosphere around the base.
Massive numbers of Russian troops were stationed in the Soviet zone of Austria less than a hundred miles away, directly across the Danube River from Linz, Austria, where more U.S. Air Force units were based. “The Russians were talking big and making lots of military noises all along the line dividing them and U.S. forces,” says Bob Mehaffey, the supervisor of Cash’s forty-man unit. “This was just after the Berlin Airlift, and the Russian military was still very upset about that. We knew that the Russian armor along the border was far greater in numbers than ours, and the Russians could be deep into West Germany before our military could sufficiently react. They could overrun us in twenty minutes—and there was constant tension. Air Force people were rarely assigned weapons, but everybody in our unit, including John, was assigned a carbine.”
This tension added greatly to the strain of already grueling monitoring sessions for members of the 6912th squadron. Typically, Cash and others worked in eight-hour shifts, but they were sometimes increased to twelve hours or more during emergency conditions or when the team was short-staffed. Every effort was made to keep the shifts to eight hours, Mehaffey says, because “we lost a bunch of operators who couldn’t handle the pressure and went bonkers. Some returned to the unit pretty soon, but some never did.”
An operator might get so fatigued that his body couldn’t tolerate it and he’d lose control emotionally. Mehaffey recalls one especially tense twelve-hour session in 1951 when one of his most stable operators suddenly got up from his chair and walked full speed right into the wall and just kept pounding his head against it and crying. Mehaffey rushed over and asked what was wrong, and the operator said helplessly, “I can’t find the door.” Mehaffey took the man to the medical offices, where doctors medicated him and sent him to bed for twenty-four hours. In this case, the operator did return to work.
Years later, Cash told an interviewer about a meltdown of his own at Landsberg. “One night, after I had been in Germany for about a year, I just got fed up,” he said. “We were working the second floor and, before I knew it, I picked up my typewriter and threw it plumb through the window. I started crying. They sent me to the dispensary and gave me a couple of aspirins. I got the rest of the night off.”
Mehaffey doesn’t recall any such incident. Most likely Cash was severely worn down, and he made up the story to convey his feeling of confinement. Cash did feel alienated in his new environment to such a degree that he sometimes felt he was himself at war—against the system, authority, the regimentation, and, increasingly, the temptations. Thousands of miles from home, he was in a typical military culture
in which everyone around him, it seemed, was beginning to sample what for him was forbidden fruit—women and booze.
Once again John stood out among the operators. While most others monitored transmissions from other Iron Curtain countries, including East Germany, Hungary, and Romania, John was one of those given the most challenging assignment. He had to monitor the transmissions of the Russians themselves, who sent Morse code signals with such speed that most U.S. operators simply couldn’t keep up with them.
Chuck Riley, an airman who later earned a degree in economics at the University of Toledo, was impressed by Cash’s mind. “John was no hillbilly stereotype. He had a tremendous level of intelligence. We had lots of interesting and drawn-out conversations on world affairs and historical things. He had a remarkable vocabulary and a quick wit. As great as his musical talent, I always thought his intelligence might have been an even greater gift.”
Almost immediately after arriving in Landsberg, airmen began receiving “Dear John” letters from their girls back home saying they were sorry, but they had found somebody new. To make matters worse, one of the biggest country hits at the time was Jean Shepard and Ferlin Husky’s “A Dear John Letter.” Even the non–country fans at Landsberg remembered it playing on radios and phonographs throughout the barracks.
According to Mehaffey, the reaction to the letters was so traumatic that the soldiers in his unit developed a ritual to help one another cope with the news. “When someone got a ‘Dear John’ letter, we’d have him stand on top of his footlocker and read the letter to everybody in the barracks. Not everyone did it, but a lot of them did. It somehow took the pressure off.”
For months, John privately feared bad news whenever he picked up his mail. Constantly trying to reassure himself of her love, he wrote to Vivian every day—sometimes two or three times a day—and he complained when she was even a day late writing back. He was frantic during the times when he didn’t hear from her for a week or more. In a letter to Vivian soon after his arrival in Landsberg, John was already scolding her for not writing.
“I still didn’t get a letter from you honey, and I’m getting pretty desperate,” he wrote on October 16. “The mail clerk is scared of me now, I give him such mean looks every time I go to check my mail, which is twice a day….The boys have been telling me that you didn’t love me anymore. That’s why you don’t write, but I don’t believe that. You do love me don’t you my darling? I love you. Yours, Johnny.”
Cash was relieved when Vivian’s letters finally started arriving regularly, but any break in the chain would set him off again. Over the course of his deployment, the letter count between them easily passed the one-thousand mark.
When he soon received an eight-by-ten photo of Vivian, John rushed to the PX and bought a frame for it. He put the picture on the wall above his bunk—a “Hands Off” note attached. The others in the barracks reminded him of all the “Dear John” letters, predicting it wouldn’t be long before he got his heart broken. One airman even dared him to bet $10. John took the bet, promising, “Viv is different.”
Noticing the photo was still on the wall months later, the airman paid up.
Cash was convinced that Vivian was the girl of his dreams, and that made it only natural for him to share one of his dreams with her—the one about being a singer on the radio. In a letter that first fall, he told Vivian that he had just bought a harmonica to keep himself occupied in the barracks, and he spoke about having his own band once he got back to the States. He also wrote about getting together regularly with some guys in the barracks to play guitar and sing. While Perea sometimes joined them, the lineup consisted mostly of Cash, Ted Freeman from West Virginia, Orville (Wayne) Rigdon from Louisiana, and Reid Cummins and Bill Carnahan from Missouri. They called themselves the Landsberg Barbarians.
When John saw how well Rigdon played guitar, he bought himself a German model for $5 and asked Rigdon to teach him how to play. But John still had trouble getting the hang of the chords and gave up trying to master the instrument; he merely strummed along while singing. Over the next three years, he would update Vivian on records he had heard or repeat that he was going to have his own band one day. He was especially proud of the time he bought a set of albums containing several Jimmie Rodgers songs he hadn’t heard before—and the purchase late in his stay of a tape recorder so he could gauge the progress in his singing by making recordings of his voice.
On days off, the airmen frequented one of two clubs in Landsberg. Though the base was integrated, the white airmen tended to go to Der Goggle, while the African Americans favored Der Ziederbrau. On the nights when the squadron filled the places, there weren’t many German patrons. Not many men, anyway. Women were always there.
“Remember, this was so close after World War II that the German populace was still having problems with hunger, real poverty,” Mehaffey explains. “Buying somebody a meal was a big gift. If you wanted a woman, there was no problem. You could pick one up on the street or in a club and she’d take you home with her if you bought her a meal.”
When they had three days free, the Americans, often as many as fifty to one hundred of them, headed by train to Munich or the smaller town of Starnberg, where they would take over a hotel and turn the bar into their own private club. The guys would play music, drink, and look for women. Unlike in the barracks with the Barbarians, John was not the center of attention during these parties. In photos from one of those early nights out he looks fairly anonymous, except for one in which he, obviously a bit tipsy, leans toward the camera while fooling around with a fiddle.
In Cash’s 1975 autobiography, Man in Black, he wrote about the dark side of his German experience: “As the long weeks and months went by, Dyess, Arkansas, and that little church, and the things I had learned there, and the life I had lived there became more and more distant. From beer, I graduated to German cognac and having more wild times.…The booze and the profanity began launching me into all kinds of other habits which soon became second nature.”
Mehaffey, who was responsible for keeping tabs on all his unit members, suggests that Cash acted pretty much like the rest of the security team in his early months in Landsberg. “Johnny wasn’t much different from the rest of us,” he says. “Like all of us, he was young, foolish, looking for adventure. Women, drinking, gambling, fighting, and freedom like we had never had before. Johnny was right in there, no worse, no better. Understand, we didn’t think we were wild—and by the standards of the time, we were pretty mild. Our fights were, for the most part, a blow or two and over.”
One thing that did strike Mehaffey about the young airman was how certain he was about his career goals.
“We were all kids,” he says. “None of us knew what we wanted to do—except Johnny. From the beginning, he knew he was going to be a singer. I can still see him sitting on a metal GI cot with the mattress rolled up, strumming that guitar.”
In the endless letters to Vivian, Cash chronicled in detail his coming-of-age experiences—focusing on the conflict between his religious beliefs and his prurient desires. Oddly, he alluded to his transgressions, including the drinking and veiled references to womanizing, in several of these letters—all the time encouraging her to be faithful and to wait for him. The letters are an absorbing mixture of guilt and restraint, devotion and confession, trust and accusation. Mehaffey sensed Cash’s emotional tug-of-war. There were times, he says, when the guys would all be whooping it up in a club and he’d notice John sitting off by himself, glum and staring into space, looking lost and alone.
In a letter to Vivian early in 1952, Cash confessed that he had been with a girl once in Augsburg and another in Munich. “Darling, those girls don’t mean a thing to me,” he reassured her. “You should know that. I just see them one night, and never see them again….Baby, I’d trade 100 of girls like that for one kiss from you.”
To his daughter Kathy, the hints of infidelity were a sign of his insecurity “about her finding somebody better than him. I th
ink his remarks were a test to see how she would react. He wanted to see if she’d stay by his side—and she always did. She never seriously dated anybody while he was gone, and that was important to him.” She adds, “The sense I got from all those letters was that he was also horribly lonely. He was trying to give himself pep talks all the time, telling my mom how great everything was going to be.”
The earliest known mention of marriage came in a letter dated July 18, 1952—apparently in response to something Vivian had written. John began the handwritten note by telling her, “Yes, I wish we could be married soon too honey.” Shortly after, he replaced his usual greeting—”My Darling Viv” or “Hello Sweet Darling”—with “My Wife to Be.”
Cash didn’t hide his feelings from his pals in Landsberg. William Harrell, one of the other interceptor operators, remembered John saying he wanted to marry Vivian so much that he was thinking about converting to Catholicism, even though the religion seemed a bit mysterious and foreign to him. From time to time in letters, especially the early ones, he’d just throw in a question to Vivian. Out of the blue, he’d ask something like, “Honey, what is Catechism?”
Another time he asked, “Darling, if a Protestant marries a Catholic girl, the wedding has to be Catholic and their children have to be brought up Catholics, don’t they? And they can’t name their own kids. Someone else names their kids, don’t they? Maybe that’s not right, but that’s what I’ve heard.”
Johnny Cash: The Life Page 5