TURKEY - CHAPTER 5

We had regular floor shows in our chow hall and on our patio about twice a month. The chow hall was our largest room but it had terrible acoustics. These floor shows were usually British but every now and then we had a German floor show. Before each show we had a tradition of initiating the new members of the Detachment with the following chant. ( You, you, f_ck you). Because of the language I never participated but Mike Cannon and myself had to endure this welcome when we first came to Erhac. Every week five current movies were flown into the Detachment. Each night after supper a bed sheet was hung from the wall and a movie was shown on a 16 millimeter projector. Because the chow hall was hot and the acoustics were so bad we began watching movies on our patio. We also started having many of our floor shows there or in the recreation hall. During a movie, if there was a nude scene, the projector operator would run the the scene over and over or freeze the frame to the boisterous cheers of the men. By the weekend the projector operator would replay the more popular movies of the week. If the weather was bad and our plane couldn't land the movies would get pretty old after a while.

Our food was excellent and one thing that I can say about a remote assignment is that you are fed very well. We had steak at least twice a week and were served four meals a day. An American civilian ran our chow hall and his cooks were Turkish. We had a recreation hall that had two pool tables, a ping pong table, and a foosball machine. The NCO Club was a large trailer and the only place in the Detachment with air conditioning. Needless to say I spent a lot of time there. We also had several slot machines in the NCO Club and I saw men blow their entire paycheck in those things. Beyond the occasional floor show, movies, recreation hall and NCO Club there wasn't much to do at Erhac. Many of our men spent much of their off time drinking out of sheer boredom and since I didn't drink I put many of these guys to bed or helped them walk it off.

Debbie and I wrote each other everyday while I was in Turkey. I felt very fortunate because I saw the look on many of my friends faces who rarely got letters from home or heard from their wives and girlfriends. G.I.'s today are very fortunate to have cellphones and computers because this makes it possible to communicate instantly with their loved ones. We had no way to communicate except by letter. I only had two ways to hear Debbie or Robbie's voice. That was either by cassette tape or driving 180 miles, which was about a 4 hour drive, over a dangerous two lane road which was narrow, curvy, and mountainous to our radar site at Diyarbakir. I was able to make this trip four times during the year I was there but we could only do it on our 72 hour breaks and we never did it unless we could go as a group. It was dangerous to go alone or with just two or three men. Usually we left in a group of anywhere from six to eight men and most of the time we drove a Dodge six pack or a mini bus leaving early in the morning. The Sally Fields movie, Not Without My Daughter, is a true story about a woman who with her small daughter, endured a harrowing escape from Iran. I believe that the scenes at the end of the movie were probably filmed in this area of Turkey where we were because the scenery is so barren and looks very familiar.

Along the way to Diyarbakir we passed a huge lake at Elazig Turkey and second only to Crater Lake Oregon this was the bluest water I have ever seen. The terrain around it was very brown and barren but the blue of the water really stood out. At some point we crossed over the Euphrates River and drove along it's banks and there was also a fascinating village that sat on the side of a mountain. You would see men squatting down on the side of the road in their salvars or (Seven Day Shitters) in the middle of nowhere. There was a high mountain range that we had to go over that had little or no guardrails and you would see the wreckage of trucks or vehicles that had gone over the side of the mountain. I had seen enough Turkish drivers to know that many of them were dangerous and they would sometimes drive on the wrong side of the road. On one of these trips I was rounding a very sharp curve going over a mountain when I suddenly swerved over into the left lane. My intuition had been right because a car was in my lane.

Another time we were riding in an International Scout and I was sitting in the last seat in the rear. It was in the winter and it was raining. The guy who was driving was driving like a maniac on these narrow curvy roads and I had warned him several times to slow down. Suddenly the Scout went into a spin and we made several revolutions in the middle of the road. Everything went into slow motion but finally the vehicle came to a stop and by the grace of God there were no cars coming in the opposite lane. I was wearing a parka and I covered my head as I bent down in the seat bracing for a crash. When the vehicle came to a stop I slowly raised my head over the back of the seat in front of me and everyone was looking at me. Since I was the ranking enlisted man in the group I told him that if I he didn't slow down I would drive the rest of the way but fortunately he drove very safe after our mishap.

As we neared Diyarbakir the terrain became flat and desert like and Camels and sheep became more prevalent. Diyarbakir was a very important radar site that was part of our Cold War early warning system. The Airmen that worked there bragged that they could hear the Soviet pilots brushing their teeth in the morning. Diyarbakir wasn't Incirlik but it was a larger Detachment than Erhac. The facilities were much better than ours and it had a nice chow hall, movie theater, bowling alley, NCO Club and a miniature golf course. In the middle of the Detachment was a huge stork nest on the top of a pole. The storks were the Detachments mascots. After arriving at Diyarbakir we would settle into the transient barracks and schedule our morale calls back home. Because of the time difference in the United States we had to schedule our calls in the very early morning hours. These calls had to be planned ahead and I would notify Debbie by letter when we were going to Diyarbakir. I didn't want to risk missing her after going to all that trouble. When our call went through the reception was horrible and we could barely understand each other. It was worth hearing her voice, however.

We would leave at some point the next day and return to Erhac. There were many Turkish people that were very nice to us but a few would show outright hostility. Once on the way back from Diyarbakir we stopped to ask directions from a crowd of men standing by the side of the road. I was sitting on the passenger side as they walked up and one of the men flipped a lit cigarette and it landed in my lap. Another time we were fairly close to Malatya when a lamb ran in front of our vehicle and we accidentally ran it over. A crowd of people came running up and were jabbering excitedly in Turkish but we had no idea what they were saying. We were apologizing for hitting the lamb but we didn't feel like it was our fault. It didn't matter because they didn't understand us and we didn't understand them. We drove the rest of the way into Erhac. The next morning our interpreter called us together and told us that an angry group of farmers were at the main gate demanding payment for the lamb. Not wanting to create an international incident, we took up a collection and paid the farmer what he was asking, who owned the lamb.