Tyrone Wylie: Mr. Personality
Tyrone Wylie is one of the regulars at the Sunday morning McDonald’s meet-up of former G.I.s. His outgoing personality and candid opinions keep the group lively. He met me for our interview outside the old city wall, where he had parked his sleek, black Mercedes.
Ty drove me to his building, a couple miles south of the old city. He pointed to a very Germanic eagle perched on a wreath over the entrance, its wings spread wide. The year of the building’s construction, 1938, was cast into the concrete, but another ornamental feature—probably a swastika—had been removed.
Ty shares a comfortable apartment with his girlfriend, who is 30 years younger than he. “She calls me an old antique,” he laughed. He showed me family photographs and then gave me a quick tour of the building, where he has lived since 1988. “We all own our own apartments here,” he explained.
“Okay,” he said, “there are four apartments on this side, and if you go out back, there are another two apartments. In this building, out back, there is a Columbian, a family from Syria that just came here, a Russian family, and these are my direct neighbors; they are Chinese. We got the UN. The kids never saw a black man. At first, they were kind of scared of me, just like the German kids.” Tenants get together for barbecues in the building’s grassy common area.
Tyrone’s girlfriend, who works the night shift, was sleeping, so we walked a few blocks to a little cafe for breakfast and a fascinating discussion. “This neighborhood is starting to get run down, but it’s the second most expensive area in Nürnberg,” Ty said, “and we’re not far from Luitpoldhain, the old Nazi rally grounds, and Merrell Barracks.”
“Basically, it's not bad living here in Nürnberg...I really don't need a car, cause the Straßenbahn (streetcar) is right there. It takes me like one minute to catch the Straßenbahn. I got a bakery, two flower shops up the street, and grocery stores. My doctor is across the street. A lot of times she comes and makes house calls. When I go there, we sometimes sit for a half hour, bullshitting and stuff, you know? One time my girlfriend was sick, and she made a house call. And my dentist is over by the hotel up the street. There's a Mercedes dealer over there, but my Mercedes dealer is over by the airport.”
Tyrone and I discussed changes to his neighborhood since the 1960s, when I was in Merrell Barracks. I mentioned a G.I. hangout called “The Snack Bar,” where the hamburgers were not like American burgers, but the girl who served them was pretty. Ty said that the first McDonald’s in Nürnberg was opened on nearby Allesbergerstraße in 1973.
“Other than that,” Tyrone said, “the Straßenbahn (streetcar) system got much smaller when the new U-Bahn (subway) system was built in the 1970s.
A Military Dependent
Tyrone was born in Philadelphia and lived there until he was six. His stepfather was career military, however, so Tyrone lived in Ft. Knox, Kentucky, and Ft. Benning, Georgia, in the 1950s. Then his dad was deployed to Schweinfurt, Germany.
“I remember,” said Tyrone, “in '58, when I lived in Schweinfurt, as a kid, eight or nine years old, seeing people get into trash cans, looking for food. That sticks in your mind for a long time. As a Black American, seeing white people having to go through trash cans to get food…”
After three years stationed in Schweinfurt, Germany, the family went back to Ft. Benning. From 1962 to 1966, they lived in Lawnside, New Jersey, an all-Black town, while Tyrone’s dad taught ROTC at Temple University in Philadelphia. “When we lived in Jersey, it was like 12 miles from Philly,” said Ty. “My grandmother and all my aunts and uncles still live there, so I spent most of my summer time in South Philly. I remember as a kid, we used to be sitting on the steps in the summertime, and nobody bothered us. There wasn't no shooting. It was great living in America in the ‘60s. We got along with the Italians. I always went to Italian stores, bought my comic books, and bought my sausages, and had a great time.” Racism raised its ugly head at Ft. Benning, where he was called the N-word. “They called me that so much that, after a while, I thought it was my name,” joked Tyrone, “but where I really saw racism was Hawaii.”
Tyrone’s dad was assigned to Schofield Barracks, in Hawaii, during Ty’s junior and senior years of high school. “Hawaiians did not like white people,” he said. “I went to school with Hawaiians. One of my first summer jobs was picking pineapples for Dole pineapple company. That was a tough job. I kind of got an idea how picking cotton would be. Hawaiians, to this day, hate white people. They had a saying, ‘kill haole,’ which meant kill white people. Originally it was supposed to mean foreigner, but after a while haole was interpreted as white person. I was called a popolo, you know, for a black man. They called me the royal Hawaiian because a lot of Hawaiians are just as dark as I am, you know? They had a thing called Kill Haole Day, where they would actually beat up on the white kids in school.” He graduated high school in Hawaii in 1968 and joined the Army.
Military Service
Tyrone took his basic training at Ft. Old, in California and AIT (Advanced Individual Training) at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. His training in electronics, with a specialty in Combat Surveillance Radar, lasted a full year. He graduated with the rank of Specialist 5, equivalent to sergeant—quite an achievement.
His first deployment was with the 1st Infantry Division in Lai Khe, Vietnam, called “Rocket City” by the G.I.s, because the airstrips were frequent targets of the Viet Cong. “It got so bad that we put a bullseye on the goddamned mess hall,” Tyrone quipped.
In April, 1969 the 1st Division stood down, and Ty was sent to Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, where he was assigned to the 269th Field Artillery Radar Detachment on a mountain. He and four other Americans lived with Vietnamese Popular Forces (PF) and Regional Forces (RF).
From there, Ty was assigned to a Special Forces base camp for a couple of months.
“Crazy motherfuckers,” Ty recalled. “I talked to this one guy, a Latino. He said that they were in a firefight, and he talked about a Viet Cong running across the rice patties, and he went and chased him, ‘cause he always wanted to kill someone with a knife. The captain was there, right? He had just extended a year. I asked him how come, and he said he liked killing people, and I thought, it's time for us to fucking go.”
Then Ty’s team went to some place not too far from Tai Dong. He was in Vietnam a total of 11 harrowing months. When his camp in the mountains was overrun, and many of the Popular Force Vietnamese soldiers were killed, he became painfully aware of his own vulnerability, hours from support. In one instance, when support helicopters did arrive, Tyrone said that he had been more worried about getting killed by the flares being dropped by friendly forces than by the “pretty-ass” rounds fired at him by the Viet Cong.
After Vietnam, Tyrone was home on leave when he received orders for Germany. “I got to Merrell Barracks December 31, 1970,” he said, “I’ll never forget that—New Year's Eve.” He received a warm reception from the working girls downtown before he caught a cab to Merrell Barracks. There, the guys clued him in about “The Wall” (red light district).
“There was no need to go to The Wall,” Tyrone soon learned, “because the girls were like flies. They came into the NCO Club at Merrell Barracks, in the back door. That's where I met my first wife. Second one also.” Tyrone was at Merrell Barracks in Nürnberg for ten years, from 1970 until 1980, except for a few short stints at various Army posts around the world.
In 1980 the Army sent him to Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, ten miles from Tombstone. However, by then he had an apartment in Nürnberg, and he had grown weary of the Army. He simply flew “home” to Nürnberg, saying that he would return when he “felt like it.” After two months AWOL, he returned to Ft. Huachuca and announced that he was quitting the Army. He was placed in psychiatric treatment for two months and then discharged from the military.
“Somebody I didn't know was controlling my life,” Tyrone told me. “I already had one divorce because of the Army. I just got tired. I was going around cussing out colonels.”
“One colonel told me I was an embarrassment to his Army. I said, ‘Since when does the Army belong to a fucking colonel?’ He looked at me like I was crazy, man. I'm looking at this dude—this was 1980—If you're a Lt. Colonel, you been in the Army at least, what, 20 years? This fucker didn't have no combat patch. How in the hell can you be in the Army 20 years and not have no combat patch? Korea or Vietnam or some goddamned place. That pissed me off.”
A Civilian Career in Germany
Upon his discharge from the Army, Tyrone initially worked for Quella, a retail catalogue company like Sears, for six months, and then as a civilian employee of an American company, selling mutual funds and insurance policies to G.I.s stationed in Germany. However, in 1986, the Garmisch hotel where his company was hosting a Christmas party for its employees caught fire, and Tyrone suffered lung damage from the smoke. He had to quit his sales job, which required him to talk all day.
Ty’s wife, whom he had married in 1985, told him about an opening in her company, Telefunken; it was a third-shift, production job in a factory, doing low-level work, such as checking resistors. After 12 years in the Army, Tyrone had gained valuable technical skills. His military training and experience in electronics impressed his supervisor, who gave the most challenging repairs to Tyrone. He recalls that period fondly, working with a diverse group of guys from Turkey, Greece, Russia, Romania, and North Carolina.
Tyrone told me about working in Germany, where one can work next to someone for 20 years, and still address that colleague as “Sie,” the formal pronoun for “you.” “I call my boss, Peter, ‘dude,’” Tyrone laughed, “the Germans know that I'm an American, and they make an exception for me.”
Telefunken became Telefunken Microelectronics, later acquired by Mercedes.
“Oh man, it was a blast then,” Ty said, “We got Mercedes stock at a low price, and you could lease a car from Mercedes. Every year you could get a new car. Only thing you had to do was gas it up. You didn't have to pay for insurance or maintenance; everything was paid by Mercedes. Every year I got me a new car.”
The company was then bought by Continental, known for selling tires, but it manufactured automotive parts in Nürnberg. Tyrone made parts for brakes, including some for President Obama’s limousine. He worked 26 years at Continental/Telefunken/Mercedes. He was a union representative from 1980 to 1989.
Tyrone participated in a five-year, pre-retirement system called Altestagzeit. For two and a half years he did his normal job, but made 15% less money. This 15% was paid into a fund, along with a contribution by the government. During the second two-and-a-half-year period, he stayed home, collecting his full pay, while still an employee of the company.
“I spent 12 years in the military wearing a uniform every day. I spent five years selling mutual funds, insurance and stuff, wearing a suit or sports coat, you know; I spent 26 years at Condi wearing a smock, you know; and now since 2010, I wear a T-shirt, I wear shorts, I wear my Birkenstocks. I just want to...that's why I love the Caribbean. I got the time share thing going. I get down there, and all day long I wear my Birkenstocks,
Views on Politics and Social Issues
“When Obama was here two weeks ago, he was treated like a rock star,” said Tyrone. “He was so dignified, so eloquent…not just blah, blah, blah, like the guy now. Trump is an embarrassment for us Americans in Europe.”
“Everybody thought that Hillary was going to win, even up to election day,” I said.
“I called my sister,” Ty said, “and she said, ‘this asshole won!’ And my sister is quiet, calm, collected, and you can't make her mad; she don't cuss... And my cousin in South Carolina, Donald Trump! when you mentioned the name Donald Trump, she freaks out. She said that he came to some kind of meeting two months ago, a lot of people just left. And I was saying just last month he's got to stop fucking with the Germans, ‘cause we got to live here. We've been living good. In the early ‘70s, we had the terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang, but other than that, the Germans liked us. And you got to understand, every family in America has a son or a cousin in Germany.”
“Yes, a very strong connection,” I agreed.
“…and if he screws that shit up, we're really fucked. Either he don't understand it or the people who work for him don't understand it. Sometimes we argue, but...”
“They (Germans) are our strongest ally,” I said.
“Putin has a plan, and his plan is working out good, because we are fighting among our allies,” Tyrone observed.” He ain't got to say anything, just smile, and people don't seem to understand. Because of Donald Trump, China is number one.”
Tyrone told me about some peculiarities of being Black in Germany. “I'll never forget, when I lived in Feucht, out in the country, about '74, '75… My neighbor had two daughters, Eva and Dagmar. Eva, who was three of four at the time, used to walk my dog. Eva, because of me, thought all Americans were Black. She was with her mom one time, and her mom pointed out an American. Eva said, ‘No, he's not American, he's not Black.’ And there were little kids talking, saying something about Außlanders (foreigners), and I said, ‘Well I'm an Außlander.’ They said ‘No, you're not an Außlander, you're an American.’”
Tyrone had this to say about Norbert, a fellow member of the veteran’s group that meets each Sunday at McDonald’s: Confederate flag in his car, little stickers—All American stuff you know, long hair and racist stuff—I would kill for that man. He is so nice. Don't ever judge a book by its cover. And you only learn stuff like that by meeting people and talking to people. His daughters are coming next month; he has three daughters, right? All from German wives, because he was married to German wives. In fact, from what I understand, Norbert is a naturalized American. I'm not quite sure, but I think his mother came to America... and Norbert loves me too, I gave him a beer mug. Sometimes I say to myself America wouldn't be as fucked up as it is if Americans would travel more and meet new people.”
Love and Marriage
“My girlfriend now is Yuliya, from Ukraine. She’s Jewish. We’ve been together since September of 2010.”
Tyrone’s first marriage was in 1974, to a German girl, Gabriele. I asked him what happened. “I was a big asshole. I was jealous. She was really pretty. I remember one time I took her to America, and we went to the Playboy club in Baltimore, and everybody was looking at her and stuff you know?” Tyrone and Gabriele met in 1971, married in 1974, and divorced in 1976.
“And then I was a bigger asshole,” he said. “I met my second wife, Karen, in 1977, and we got married in ’85. We separated a long while, and we finally got divorced in 2012. But she just called yesterday, and we're friends, right? My girlfriend don't like it, but we're friends. In fact, the stuff that I do for my girlfriend now, if I'd done it for my wife, we would probably still be married. I was the kind of person who, when she had worked all day, I would expect her to come home and cook food, do shopping, and all that while I sat and watch TV.”
“This woman I got now, Yuliya, we've been together seven years in September. She used to work for an outsourcing company with my company at Continental. I got her a job there for a while. I got a lot of people jobs there. Her and her family came from the Ukraine. They had Jewish refugee status. At the time, because of her father and grandfather, they had a choice. They could have gone to Israel, they could have gone to America, or they could have gone to Germany. The grandfather died, so they decided to come to Germany. Her and her father. Her mother still lives in Moscow. She is Russian, and her father is Ukrainian.”
Tyrone described the frustrations of dealing with the American Consulate in Munich. When his girlfriend, who had a Ukrainian passport, wanted to go to the U.S. on vacation in 2012, she was denied a visa. The Consulate offered no explanation; it merely kept telling her that she could reapply. She finally applied for, and within five weeks, received German citizenship as a Jewish refugee. As a German citizen, she had no problem getting a visa to visit the U.S. Tyrone said that even he, an American by birth, a combat veteran, was denied admission to the American Consulate because he did not have an appointment.
Formerly, as a permanent resident of Germany, he had to have his American passport stamped by the German Außland Amp (Foreign Office) when it was renewed every ten years. Now he gets a card resembling a driver’s license. “Back in the old days,” said Tyrone, “the card was hard to get because they had that Catch 22; in order to get a resident visa, you got to have a job. In order to get a job, you had to have a resident Visa. Being married to a German did not automatically give you a resident visa.
“When you get out of the military over here,” continued Tyrone, “your passport is still good for three months. After three months you have to go back to America, or you got to find a job.”
Ty got into the German social system when he started working for Quella. “People think that your biggest problem in America when you become unemployed is that you lose your house,” he said. “That's not the biggest bill. The biggest bill is your medical. Once you get into the system in Germany, they take about $85 a month, and it's paid for by my retirement.”
Healthcare
“They just take it out of your pay and that's it?” I asked. “Imagine being able to get insurance in the States for $85 a month!”
Now also with the medical insurance, it covers when you go to the doctor. Okay, now I got another medical insurance I pay every month, private, so that means when I go to the hospital, I'm in a private room. I get whatever doctor I want, I get the newspapers, I get the TV, I get to pick whatever meal I want. But the basic insurance is paid for by the German government, right? I'm in a room with maybe two or three people. I just don't get the services...”
Tyrone’s doctors, a married couple, make house calls and take time to develop a relationship with their patients. One is a general practitioner, and the other is a surgeon.
Nuremberg Trials: the German Court System
“Okay,” said Tyrone, “I've been to Fürtherstraße, where the courthouse is, nine times: two times for divorce, and seven times for fighting. My girlfriend says, ‘Since I've been with you, this is a pretty interesting life!’ A synopsis follows:
One-time Tyrone and his girlfriend had been out for a couple drinks with a Serbian friend when a Turkish motorist gave them a dirty look. When the man got out of his car and approached them, Tyrone punched him. He pressed charges against Tyrone. The judge dismissed the case, telling the Turk, “You were looking for trouble when you got out of the car, and you found it.”
Another ruckus came about when Tyrone reprimanded a young man for speeding in a school zone. The man and his father—both Turks—attacked Tyrone, who resorted to his knife for protection. The police broke up the fight and confiscated Tyrone’s illegal knife. Once again, the court sided with Tyrone, fining the father €2,000 and jailing the young Turk for two weeks. The police returned Tyrone’s knife to him.
Tyrone was an equal opportunity scrapper; he went to court for fighting with a Greek, the Turks’ traditional enemy. That time he got off with a 100 DM (Deutschmarks—the former German currency) fine.
The final incident Tyrone related involved a truck driver who had blocked Tyrone’s car. In the fracas, the driver bit Tyrone’s finger, necessitating a tetanus shot. This time, Tyrone filed the complaint, and the court awarded him 500 DM. Tyrone treated his lawyer to dinner with the money. “It was just the principle of the thing,” he told me.
“I've had some good times,” Tyrone said, “and I've had some bad times, but basically it's good. But you got to realize that you live in Germany. A lot of these Turks that live here, they've been born in Germany but can't speak German, which is all messed up. They live in the Turkish section of town, or the Polish section of town, or the Russian section of town. They think their life is gonna be better. But if your name is Akbar Mohammad, you know, and you got a German passport, it don't mean shit. Are you going to show your passport to the skinheads while they're beating the shit out of you?’
“Is the skinhead problem pretty bad here, Tyrone?”
“Nah, we're in West Germany. East Germany has been pretty bad. It's always been pretty bad, and eight or nine months ago, the German government finally admitted that it's bad. Leipzig and places like that. And the bad thing is, back in the old days the East Germans had a lot of African students from the Congo and places like that. They would come to Germany to learn, and they stayed. Now they got a bad problem. East Germany has a bad problem—neo-Nazis and that. Other than that, I remember one time, there was a skinhead—it was about 15 years ago—up at the post office, man. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and he left. When they're by themselves, you know, they don't do anything. They don't start no shit. Like I say, one time, back in the '70s, there was a GI down by the Bahnhof, right, a couple Germans beat up the GI pretty bad, right? It happened a couple of times. The third time, guys came from Merrell Barracks had all the exits blocked off, and they beat the shit out of those guys. They didn't mess with the GIs back in those days. One time there was a Turk guy who was talking shit to one of the GIs here at a disco and told him to come outside, and he was going to kick his ass. The GI went outside and killed him. Nothing happened. In German law, if you're sitting in a bar, and a German guy tells you to come outside, he's going to kick your ass, you go out there and you fuck him up, that's his problem.”
Thoughts of Home
“How often do you go back?” I asked.
“I try to go home every two years. I went home last year, and I'll be going home in June, because we're going on a cruise with the family. She don't want to go because she got a problem with flying.”
Tyrone, a Black man living in Germany, and I, a white man living in rural Wisconsin, talked about key issues of common concern: education, jobs, understanding one another, and what connects us all as humans.
“Just talk to people,” Tyrone said, “Every morning I turn on my iPad and read the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today. One guy was saying my whole attitude changed by just talking to people. I started talking to people of different cultures, and you understand where they're coming from. But as far as Black Americans, they will never change until they change the attitude that these mothers and fathers have get in their head that it's more important for their kid to be a basketball player or football player than it is to be a doctor or lawyer. Until that attitude changes, Black America will always be the same.”
“There are only so many pro sports jobs,” I agreed.
“For a mother to push her son into sports,” Tyrone said, “a basketball player might play only five or six years, and then they're broke. We need more senators, more doctors, more lawyers—that's what we need. We don't need more basketball players. People that play sports, in my opinion, they're nothing but paid clowns. They are paid entertainers. When they get too old to entertain anymore, we don't need them. We get rid of them. But you can be a doctor until you're 70. You can be a lawyer until you drop dead.”
Checking the time on my phone, I told Tyrone how much I had enjoyed our conversation, but that I had to get back downtown to meet with Carl. Tyrone drove me downtown, but first he went into his apartment and came out with a beautiful German beer mug, which he presented to me as a memento of our interview and a sign of friendship. I treasure both, having gained a deeper understanding of life as an American living in Germany.
