Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn Read Free Book Online

all the boasting on the ride down, John bragged about his own experiences with women. From the way he talked, you’d think he was a real ladies’ man. In truth, John had dated a few girls in Dyess, even gone steady with a couple of them for a spell. But he hadn’t come close to a serious relationship, much less sexual intimacy with any of them.
    Still, he was no virgin.
    When he was fifteen, J.R. and some other boys hooked up one night with a girl who was known around the small town as “easy to get.” At her urging, Cash insisted, they took her to a riverbank, where she lay on a blanket in the moonlight and had sex with each of them. Even though the girl seemed eager, the experience was unsettling and left John with such a deep sense of shame that he never referred to the incident in either of his autobiographies or in any of his formal interviews.
    But he did speak of the night to a friend in the late 1990s. From the way he described the girl, it was possible she was at least somewhat mentally challenged, and John was still so sensitive about that night that he apparently changed the girl’s name to avoid embarrassing her or her family as he discussed it with the friend. According to A.J. Henson, J.R. never mentioned the name or the incident to him.
    The only other time J.R. tried to have sex in Dyess, he told the same friend, was with a “nice young girl” he met while working at the roller rink in town. He somehow talked her into going to bed with him, but he was so nervous that he “couldn’t get it up.” The girl thought that was hilarious, leaving J.R. too embarrassed even to try to get intimate with any other girls during high school.
    Now on the way to New Orleans, he listened to the other trainees talk about all the women who would be waiting for them—just like John had seen in so many of the war movies. He wanted a girlfriend, even if only so he could show off her picture to the other guys and look forward to her letters. Expecting to go to a dance or perhaps the local USO social club, he was shocked when his pals took him to a brothel. All the stories about “conquests” in New Orleans had really just been trips to houses of ill repute.
    John’s first instinct was to walk away, but hormones took over. He went to a room with one of the prostitutes, and the experience reminded him of the night on the riverbank. It wasn’t just that it was against his Baptist teachings; the encounter was cold and clinical. He wanted to have sex again. He wanted it badly. He was still only nineteen, after all. But he realized what he wanted most of all was sex with a genuine connection. John returned to New Orleans a few times, but there is no indication that he visited another brothel. Mostly he stayed on the base, reading and singing country songs.
    During his final weeks at Keesler, John was rewarded for his hard work when he was approached about joining a new, elite group of radio intercept operators. The USAF Security Service was set up in the fall of 1948 in response to the increasing complexity of enemy communication techniques. Security Service bases were located in Alaska and several foreign countries, including Japan, Korea, and Germany.
    After interviews and a detailed security check, John was formally invited to join the unit and given his choice of duty in remote Adak, Alaska, or Landsberg, West Germany. They were choice outposts, reserved for the most promising intercept operators. The selection process didn’t focus just on test performance, but also weighed character, intelligence, and emotional stability. John opted for Landsberg because he wanted to see the sights of Europe.
    To his great frustration, the security operation was so top secret that he was prohibited from telling anybody, including his family, about the delicate nature of his assignment. All he could say was that he was going to be stationed in Landsberg. But first he had to go through four more months of intense training to sharpen his