TURKEY - CHAPTER 1

It was good to be home even if it was just for a few weeks. I love Tennessee in the late Spring and Oregon can't compare in my book. All too soon my leave was over and my departure date of May 31, 1970 arrived. Orders called for me to fly from Nashville to New York on American Airlines, From there I would fly Pan American to Istanbul with layovers in London and Frankfort. At Istanbul I would change to Turkish Airlines and fly into Adana Turkey, with a layover in Ankara. Adana is the home of Incirlik AFB. There I would process into Tuslog Detachment 93, which would be my duty station for the next year. After processing in at Incirlik I would fly military aircraft to Erhac AFB near Malatya Turkey. This all sounded simple enough to me. My heart was heavy as I packed to leave that morning. Debbie drove me to the airport where I kissed her and Robbie goodbye. I boarded the plane and through my tears I could see Debbie waving from the observation deck while Robbie played near her feet, too young to understand what was happening.

I arrived at New York's LaGuardia airport where I took a bus over to JFK. I never expected to see a Pan Am 747 jumbo jet waiting there on the ramp. These planes had only been in service for about a month. I was assigned a seat in the middle aisle but I couldn't see out of the windows. My flying companions were a woman and a little boy that were also on their way to Turkey. The lady was flying over to meet her Air Force husband stationed somewhere in Turkey where dependents were allowed to be with their husbands. The take-off went well and the weather was good. I talked to the lady next to me for about forty-five minutes or so. After a while I fell asleep, which is unusual for me since I am a nervous flyer. How long I was asleep, I don't know because I was sleeping so soundly that I didn't feel the plane shudder or hear the explosion in the number four engine. Whatever happened it was enough to wake me up and I gradually became aware of passengers in the window seats to my left nervously looking out of the windows. Passengers from the middle seats were standing in the aisle looking low over their shoulders. The lady I had been talking with earlier told me that there had been a loud bang. The pilot's voice came over the intercom as he said ladies and gentlemen we are shutting down our number four engine and will be returning to New York. Our estimated time of arrival will be one hour and fifteen minutes and for safety reasons we will be dumping fuel.

Trying to appear brave in front of the lady my heart was pounding out of my chest. The flight attendants were walking through the plane turning off all lights except for the aisle lights, which was to conserve power. It was night and with most of the lights off the plane was pretty dark. A rumor began spreading among the passengers that a woman had passed out in the rear of the plane. After what seemed like an eternity the hour and fifteen minutes passed but there was no sign of New York. The pilot came on the intercom again and said that it would be another 15 minutes. I was getting worried by this time because the tail of the plane was very low and it reminded me of the listing deck of a sinking ship. Our pilot made at least two more announcements that the landing would be delayed. The lights of New York finally came into view but the tail was still low. Just before touchdown the plane leveled off and we made a perfect landing. The passengers erupted into cheers and applause. A tremendous wave of relief swept over me as I watched the red and blue lights of the fire trucks and emergency vehicles racing out to meet our plane on the taxiway. After reaching the terminal I spotted a stewardess crying and being comforted by another stewardess as we were filing out of the plane.

I was terrified at the thought of getting back on to another plane that night. This was probably the closest I ever came to going AWOL and it took all the courage that I could muster but I hung around. I felt like the frightened Confederate soldier at the battle of Stones River who was under heavy fire. He saw a frightened rabbit scamper past him running for safety. The soldier shouted "Run cottontail. I'd run too but I have a reputation". This unplanned layover gave me one last chance to talk to Debbie before I boarded the plane again. It would be the last time I would talk to her for a long time. It was unsettling to learn that we were boarding the very same plane. After boarding we were fed while mechanics repaired the broken engine and it took several hours. The plane was hot without air conditioning. We were finally given the green light and we were off to London again. This time the flight was very routine. After a nine hour flight we landed at Heathrow Airport way behind schedule. I didn't know until a few years ago that my friend Mike Cannon from Kingsley Field was also on that plane but we didn't know it. He read this account on line from his home in Provo Utah and told me about it after we reconnected a few years ago that he was also on the plane that night.

Instead of the Pan American Airlines plane that I was originally scheduled to fly on I boarded a Turkish DC-9. As soon as I walked on to the plane I smelled the country of Turkey. It had a unique smell that I could never put my finger on. I smelled it the entire time I was in country and it wasn't a pleasant smell. We flew to Zurich Switzerland and then on to Istanbul landing there around midnight. Although it was very late at night the airport was crammed with people and it was old and dingy. It reminded me of a scene from a movie. As I walked toward customs people were waving and hanging over railings in the upper levels of the airport. The dress of the women in the airport ranged from mini skirts, which were popular at the time in western countries to women wearing the more moderate Hijab, and finally to women dressed in the more extreme Niqab, which was a Muslim woman's fundamentalist dress. The Niqab is a face veil worn by Muslim women in which the eyes are the only thing uncovered. Their bodies are covered from head to foot in black. Turkish men either wore western style clothing or what we called (Seven Day Shitters). The Turkish name for these pants were salvar, pronounced (shalvar).They were very baggy in the crotch and they usually reached just below the knees. Men that wore these were more prevalent in Eastern Turkey. M.C. Hammer popularized them in his music videos in the 1980's.

Many men also had mustaches and smoked god awful cigarettes that stunk to high heaven. Turkey was one of the most progressive of Muslim countries at the time. This was because of Kemal Ataturk who was the father of the modern Turkish state. He was a military hero that defeated the British at the battle of Gallipoli in WW1. Turkey was an ally of Germany then and because of that alliance the British conquered much of the old Ottoman Empire in WW1 and all that was left of it after the Versailles treaty became the modern day country of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire had been referred to as the "Sick man of Europe" before the war. Ataturk ended Sharia Law and secularized the country because his goal was to westernize Turkey and bring it into the twentieth century. After WW2 Turkey and Greece became a crucial front in the Cold War and the containment of the Soviet Union. Britain had been their primary defensive partner after WW2 but the war had nearly bankrupted the UK. This is when president Truman developed the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and established American military bases in Greece and Turkey. It is my understanding that since the rise of radical Islam Turkey is now moving in a more fundamentalist direction today.