Willie by Willie Nelson Page B

the marines didn’t enter my thinking. I decided I wanted to be a jet pilot.
    The first thing that happened at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio was they marched us down a road between rows of tents, heading us straight to the barbershop.
    There were hundreds of tents. Everybody was living in tents because they didn’t have barracks. Guys were sticking their heads out of the tents and yelling at us. Their heads had no hair on them. The guys were yelling, “You fucked up! You fucked up!”
    I’d always had longer hair than other boys. I was a long-haired musician before hippies came along. I would let my hair grow for months, go to the barbershop and get it cut real short, and then let it grow a long time before I got it cut again. It was mainly to save money, but people called me a long-haired musician.
    Marching down the road toward the barbers’ tent at Lackland, my hair was long enough that if I let it come down over my eyes it covered my face. I brushed it straight back, and it hung down over my collar.
    The air force barber sheared me like a sheep.
    I had already learned enough about the air force to realize I wouldn’t make a jet pilot. It took years of concentrated dedication to be a jet pilot. I just couldn’t see my future at the controls of a jet. For one thing, I tend to be a little absentminded. An absentminded guy should not fly a jet.
    I marched out of the barbers’ tent with a billiard ball for a head, and I knew right then I had changed my mind about being in the air force. I started to figure how I could get out. During my physical, the doctors had spotted on the X rays that I had a lower back problem. I told them, “Yes, I hurt it baling hay.” They made a note of it and sent me out to do my basic training.
    Going through basic I didn’t have much problem with my back because I was mainly getting up at 4 A.M . and doing a lot of running. I had been accustomed to going to bed about the time the air force expected me to get up. The training cadre sergeant would come out of the dark moving into our tent and blow his whistle and shout, “Drop your cocks and grab your socks! Rise and shine, you sorry shitasses!” We’d be off and running for the next sixteen hours.
    But there was no lifting to speak of. I was used to running from my glory days with the Abbott Fighting Panthers. Marching didn’t bother me a bit. I sort of liked the feeling when the whole platoon was marching in step and the cadre sergeant was calling out the cadence, “You had a good girl, but she left! You’re right, she left!” Running long distances with a pack on my back wasn’t so bad, either. I would see bigger guys falling out all around me, fainting and throwing up, and I would just grin and keep running. I made it through the obstacle courses—climbing ropes and crawling under barbed wire and all that—ahead of nearly everybody and would look back and see the field littered with the struggling bodies of guys who thought they were star athletes.
    I finished basic at Lackland and was promoted to private first class. They gave me one stripe to sew on my sleeve. I had no sooner putmy stripe on my khaki shirt than one of the guys smarted off about it. He said there wasn’t no little redheaded fucker going to tell him what to do. It pissed me off. I hit him. He got up and hit me back. We got to fighting, knocking over cots and wrestling through the side of the tent.
    The air force took my stripe away after one day. That was fine with me. I realized I didn’t want to have leadership thrust on me by the military. I didn’t want to become a squad leader or any such shit as that. I didn’t want stardom in the air force.
    They sent me to Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls for some additional basic training and then stuck us trainee graduates in a bus and hauled us to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. They kept us at Scott while they tried