TURKEY - CHAPTER 8

After the New Year Mike Cannon and myself began planning a trip to Athens Greece. I was getting "short" which was GI slang for getting close to my redeployment date back to the "world". I have always been interested in history but I did not appreciate the historical past of Turkey at the time. It was home to the ancient city of Troy and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. The city of Istanbul was the ancient Roman city of Constantinople and the WW1 battlefield of Gallipoli was near Istanbul. Revelation's Seven churches of Asia Minor were in Turkey and it was the birthplace of the Apostle Paul. Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark landed after the great flood, was probably 200 miles east of Erhac. Cappadocia's underground cities were in Turkey and Topkap palace, which was home to the Ottoman sultans was in Turkey. There were also many Roman ruins there but I was not aware of all of this in 1970 and 71. If I had known this I would have visited some of these places on my 72 hour breaks. I now regret that I didn't but I was very familiar with the historical importance of Athens Greece because of Nashville's own replica of the Parthenon and our nickname as the Athens of the South.

Getting around the Middle East and Europe is pretty easy if you are willing to fly on just about any kind of military aircraft that has space available. On the morning of Friday February 26th 1971, we flew to Incirlik on a C-130. Most 130's carried a certain number of parachutes but I never counted more than 14 and many times there were more passengers than parachutes. I always wondered who would get the parachutes if the plane went down. From Incirlik we boarded a C-131 Medi-vac which was a milk run and it seemed like we landed at every landing strip in Turkey and Greece to pick up patients. I learned to appreciate Air Force flight nurses as I watched them tending to passengers who in most cases were very sick or in critical condition. The whole plane was configured for stretcher bound patients and we sat in the few seats that were available in the rear. When we finally arrived in Athens I was ready to kiss the ground because we had been on that plane for so long. We arrived on Friday night and checked into the transient barracks. I slept on a bunk bed that didn't even have sheets on the mattress but before going to bed we ran into a friend that had been a cop at Kingsley Field when we were there. He got orders for Greece at the same time we had received orders for Turkey.

The next day we took a taxi to a car rental place where we rented a VW Beetle. Not thinking, we filled the tank up. A Volkswagen will run forever on a full tank of gas and we were only going to be there for two days. We drove along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea killing time until we could check into the Hotel Sivilla. The hotel was nice and had been recommended to us by others who had been there. I didn't know it at the time but the hotel was popular with many GI's because the housekeeping staff served both as maids and as prostitutes. On Saturday and Sunday we toured Athens and soon discovered that the Acropolis was in the center of the city. It is an amazing sight that can be easily seen from anywhere in the city because it is the highest point. The ruins of the Parthenon was on Acropolis Hill. Athens is a beautiful and romantic city and all I could think about is how much I wished that Debbie had been there to share the experience with me. The Sunday that I was there, February 28th 1971, was my 21st birthday. Although Athens had been the scene of terrorist attacks against the American military, and Americans in general, I felt very safe there. I was struck by how many beautiful women there were in Athens and you would see them walking alone by themselves late at night without a care in the world.

The weather was beautiful all weekend but on the Monday morning that we left it was dreary and rainy. We got a hop out on another C-131 that was configured for passengers this time. There must have been an in-flight emergency of some kind because one of the flight crew began searching around on the floor for something. When he found what he was looking for he took out a pocket knife and cut a square hole in the carpet. He then reached down into the hole and seemed to be turning a valve of some kind. The plane never seemed to be in trouble but it didn't do much to calm my nerves about flying. We landed in Istanbul and from there we got a hop out on a C-130 late that afternoon. The plane made a stop in Ankara after dark and I thought that we had landed there to pick up more passengers. Instead, the rear ramp of the plane was lowered and I noticed an Air Force ambulance backing up to the ramp. Thinking that we were about to take on a patient I was shocked to see a metal silver colored GI casket when they opened the rear doors of the ambulance. The casket was brought on board and strapped down right between our seats on either side of the plane. I later learned that it was the body of an Air Force Lt. Colonel who had been killed in a car wreck and he was being shipped home for burial. I hope that someone placed an American flag over the casket before it arrived at its destination. I was kind of taken aback when the load master propped his foot on the casket while giving us our flight briefing.

 I was counting the days after I returned to Erhac from my R&R to Athens. There had been another embarrassing moment for me when I got off a midnight shift one morning and took the keys for the nuclear storage area back to the barracks with me. For about thirty minutes nobody could get in or out of the storage area. We had an ORI or Operational Readiness Inspection during early Spring. An ORI was a regular inspection given at Air Force installations all over the globe to test their combat readiness. During the year the Turks never took care of their alert aircraft but we were tasked to guard the nuclear weapons uploaded on the Turkish F-100's anyway. These aircraft would sit day after day in the stalls without attention and over time the aircraft would be covered with pigeon poop. There was no way the pilot could even see through canopy if they had to fly and these planes were supposed to be ready to fly in a matter of minutes. I doubt they could have even been started, much less fly. The ORI was a comedy of errors even though the Turks cleaned their planes for the inspection. During a scramble one of the pilots ran to his fighter without his helmet and the truck that was supposed to start the fighters had to be boosted off. The Turkish Airmen had no concept of Two Man Concept or a No Lone Zone and I was pulling my hair out trying to enforce it. 

Nuclear weapons, unlike conventional weapons, have to be armed in order to explode. Some of the training we received at Erhac was different from any training I had ever received at Kingsley Field. We were trained to arm the nuclear weapons on the ground and also to destroy them if we had to. In order to arm them we used a device that reminded me of a car battery. If needed Command Post would provide us with matching codes that would arm the weapon. There was also the possibility that the Turkish government could be overthrown by a regime hostile to the United States and if that happened we were trained to blow up the weapons with TNT and plastic explosives. A block of TNT was rectangular and had a hole in one end. We were taught to place a blasting cap over the end of a waxed fuse and then taking a pair of crimping pliers we would crimp the end of the blasting cap on to the end of the fuse. You were taught to do this while holding the blasting cap behind your butt in order to minimize the chance of serious injury in the event that the cap exploded. I was sweating bullets while doing this and then we would slide the blasting cap inside the block of TNT. The fuse was long and we had time to take cover before the TNT exploded. If your block of TNT failed to explode, you were required to buy EOD, (Explosives Ordinance Disposal) a case of beer because they would have to go back and disarm the TNT. We also trained with plastic explosives that kind of looked like putty. You would stick a blasting cap into the putty that had dynamite wire connected and then you would use a detonator to send an electrical charge to the explosive. It was all dangerous work and I hated that training.