Misassigned, Jailed, Frozen Alive,
But Everything Else Was Çok Iyi at
Det. 30 TUSLOG, 1956-57

Thousands of American military in Turkey spent their tours of duty in Ankara. While much different from "the sites" -- the front lines of the late 1950s -- their duty also was challenging, strangely rewarding and spent in the most interesting country in the world. I'll begin by telling you that I studied Russian language two full years in college. Only a handful of people did that 60 years ago. You probably say, "Big deal, that's how you wound up in Turkey," but think again. You know that's not how military personnel works. Completely ignoring my supposedly critical language skills, they sent me off to personnel school, of all places. And when it came time to assign graduates, they placed an alphabetical list of troops to be assigned next to an alphabetical list of assignments. My name, which begins with an "S", fell opposite the "T" assignments. I was lucky; the guy before me got Thule. That's how Air Force personnel really works, and I'm afraid I probably furthered the tradition.

My Turkish adventure started in March 1956. A few days after being delivered by MATS from McGuire to Wheelus, somebody decided to send me and two other Air Force lieutenants -- George Rollison of West Virginia and John Williams of Georgia -- on to Turkey via British Overseas Airways, carrying only orders, no passports. When we landed at Cairo, Egyptian soldiers dragged us off the plane and threw us into jail. Mentioning the Geneva Convention didn't impress them at all. They tormented us unmercifully for two days before they got bored and let us go. Istanbul was fantastic, but the first glimpse of the treeless Anatolian plateau in winter was extremely depressing to this Ohioan. Although a lot of the world is like that, I had never seen such a thing. I would not have believed then that one day I would come to love that place, those people and that particular moment in time. In fact, I would write a book about them. And 50 years later I still would think that way, white cheese, ekmek and rosepetal jam is the perfect way to start a day.

My first Ankara home was the Turist Otel in Ulus, where every morning an endless stream of horse-drawn wagons, carrying the city"s drinking water in huge wicker-encased green bottles, clipclopped by my window on cobblestoned Ataturk Bulvari. My second home was a shared house overlooking the original Kavaklidere vineyards. In all, I would live in seven places in the city. The Sheraton Hotel now stands where the vineyards were. The rumble on Ataturk Bulvari today is not from wagon wheels on cobblestones, but from the subway trains running below the street. The city"s population, which was 500,000, is now an incomprehensible 4 million. The horse population is zero.

Assigned initially to Det. 1 TUSLOG, I soon would become the very first man assigned to the newly activated Det. 30, where I would be in charge of the personnel records of Det. 30, Det. 1, HQ TUSLOG, and a couple of other units we didn"t talk about. The next winter we worked out of offices at an old streetcar barn, use of which the Turks traded us for a road-blacktopping machine. The carbarn would become the home of Maj. E. G. Frederick's Sunset Express, the truck line that supplied all of our remote sites (see Stars & Stripes story).

Like any barn, our offices were unheated, only it was because the Suez crisis interrupted the oil flow. The icy cold made signing three morning reports exactly 133 times every day with gloved and numb fingers an interesting exercise. I still can see the carbarn gang at their desks in that Thule-like atmosphere, dressed in heavy winter coats, exhaling steam: M/Sgts. Tucker, Bergman and McNair, Simonovich, Saddler, White, Kennedy, Larson, Rapske. . .

Of course, we all lived off the local economy and, because the Suez crisis cut off the oil supply, our house that second winter also was unheated. That made bathing difficult, as did the sometimes total lack of water. As it was, during those driest of years, water was rationed by being turned on only an hour or so in the middle of the night. But our house had the added disadvantage of being on the prime ministers water line. That was because every time the prime minister went away from home, they shut down his line completely, and we didnt even get what others got. Fortunately, he took short vacations and we kept an emergency supply in 55-gallon drums borrowed from the motor pool. The shortages were bad, but there was a more-than-offsetting perk.

It would be months before we would get a BX, commissary or any other amenities, so the Air Force considered even Ankara a hardship assignment. True, living off a local economy is always challenging but, in this case, our government was way too generous. While the official exchange rate was only 2.8 Turkish lira to a dollar, we were receiving as high as 15 TL for a dollar. So, we all could afford to live it up a little.

A child of the Great Depression myself, I seized the moment, having lunch daily across the street from TUSLOG HQ, at the gleaming white-marble American Embassy. Evenings, I dined at Karpi, which was Ataturk's favorite, or at Serge's, where they served up mounds of caviar (the good stuff), or Bekir, or Club Washington, a glitzy place owned by a personable Turk who once ran a restaurant in Washington DC. After dinner, we would move on either to the Ankara Palas, another Ataturk haunt, or to the Gar Casino, both of which featured some of Europe's best cabaret entertainment.

Now I'm sure that some of us didn"t belong in those places (I"m afraid I didn"t) and sometimes showed it, but the Turks bent over backward to treat us with kindness, courtesy and respect.

Turkish-American relations actually were pretty good in those days. We had kept Russia from grabbing the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and probably occupying Istanbul itself, and the Turks had rescued us from being surrounded and slaughtered in the darkest days of the Korean War. And the things we were doing together in 1956-57 made our relationship even stronger. In 1957 Turkey issued postage stamps celebrating Turk-American Isbirligi (cooperation). That was the start of my Turkish stamp collection. which I assembled with the help of a savvy old dealer in Kizilay. Unfortunately, our military, like all of the armies of all times, is made up mostly of kids, and the world ends up judging us all by their behavior. On my watch, for example, a drunken airman urinated on a monument to the founder of the republic. Another airman, as neighbors watched in horror, managed to strangle a goat outside his apartment after several bloody but failed attempts to dispatch the animal with a bullet and by clubbing. Another airman and his live-in Turkish girlfriend committed suicide. Sadly those are the kinds of things that are longest remembered, not the contributions we made to the victims of the Bolu earthquake (a campaign that I ran), or the volunteer work the military wives did at the orphanage, or the rodeo that TUSLOG put on for Turkish kids. It"s nobody"s fault; it"s just that bad news always trumps good.

Ankara"s altitude and climate were extremely invigorating for an asthmatic like me and I never felt so good. I soon was exploring the walled town and archaeological sites of the city.

Then I discovered our lightly used special services Jeep and, when no one else was out shooting wild boar or pulling man-size catfish out of the Euphrates, I made sure the vehicle didn"t just gather dust. Guide book in hand, I started exploring some of Turkey's 10,000 historical sites and natural wonders.

In 1956-57, Turkish tourism hadn"t started; not even Turks visited sites that later would attract millions of foreign tourists. There were no tourist-grade hotels, and almost no asphalt roads. You may think I"m exaggerating, but I made multiple visits to Cappadocia, Bogazkoy and Konya in 1956 and 1957 without seeing a single tourist. Not one. I visited Ephesus and Pergamum without meeting a single tourist.

While there were no tourists, I"m sure I"m not the only American that was amazed at the number of small boys who popped up everywhere you went. You could pitch a tent or lay out a picnic in the seemingly most isolated place and immediately be surrounded by small boys, curious and eager to try out their English. Turkey was growing faster than we could have imagined. Between 1956 and today, the nation"s population has soared by 50 million -- from about 22 million to about 72 million.

Some of my best memories actually involve car troubles. For example, returning from Konya one night, my Jeep"s headlights conked out and I almost was hit by a careening truck. Luckily, I spotted a single glowing light bulb, which turned out to be a coffee house. Also luckily, the place was the village garage. While my lights were being fixed, the men and I "talked" about Ankara. Learning that I lived in Kavaklidere, they grinned knowingly and kept repeating, "Sarap, Dans, Sarap, Dans" ("Wine and Dance, Wine and Dance" I guess that was Kavaklidere, all right. But they also had heard something else about the city that winter: "Yok yumurta" (an egg shortage). So as I was leaving, they presented me with a gift of a dozen eggs. I must say, that was "ok iyi! Truly wonderful!

That brings me to perhaps my most memorable experience. A neighbor, who was a USIS cultural affairs officer, wheedled an invitation for me to join a Gordium excursion headed by the U.S. Ambassador Fletcher Warren. At King Midas" just-opened tomb, Dr. Muzaffer Senyurek, Turkey"s leading anthropologist, and famed archaeologist Dr. Rodney Young of the University of Pennsylvania crated up the bones of the 2,700-year-old monarch of the golden touch, placed them in the trunk of the vehicle I was driving, and I personally chauffeured them to Ankara University. The dirt road was rough, and I drove carefully, so as not to jolt him unnecessarily. Regrettably, nothing turned to gold, but our visit turned out to be a Life Magazine cover story.

That crazy lira exchange rate was almost as good as gold, though, making it possible for me to visit nine countries in Europe and four other countries in the Middle East. The Euopean tour was great despite my breaking out with three-day measles on top of Notre Dame Cathedral and arriving back in Turkey with only a silver half dollar in my pocket. The Suez crisis also turned out to be a blessing by keeping tourists out of Lebanon, Egypt and the Holy Land. Can you imagine seeing the Cairo Museum and the Pyramids with no other tourists around? I did, and it was great.

Eventually, I was joined by my wife Katy and infant son. They came over on the same passport, and that later proved to be a problem when she and I left for sightseeing in Europe. Customs officials looked at the passport picture, frowned and said accusingly, "Where is bebek?" It took a while to explain. It wasn"t as serious as a car missing from a beyanname, say, but it was very embarrassing. Apparently Turkish mothers were more responsible. They didn"t just fly off to Europe and leave children with sitters, even if it might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

One day, in the back of an Ulus antique shop, Katy found a perfect birthday gift for me, a brightly painted three-panel, canvas-and-wood dressing screen more than a hundred years old.

Maybe owned by some 19th Century Turkish Hugh Heffner, each panel depicted a bare-bellied dancing houri, one with arms akimbo, another also bare-breasted and twirling a veil and the third holding a flask in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other. It was unquestionably Turkish, but also unquestionably out of place in 20th Century Ankara, certainly in the light of day.

"I"ll take it with me," Katy said. The shop owner looked doubtful but summoned a taxi, loaded the shoutingly conspicuous object into the back seat and helped my wife into the front. The driver was so openly amused that all of the way home to Guven, several miles down Ataturk Bulvari, he continuously honked his horn at other tax drivers, signaling them to come alongside and to look at what he had in back. Katy had found the perfect gift for her husband.

Among my extra-duty assignments was to write and publish a guide for Americans being assigned to Ankara. There already were about 5,000 Americans in the city and, up until that time, there had been no guide. The price of gasoline, readers learned, was about 25 cents a gallon, which probably meant an "iki buçuk" (one of those pink 2½-Lira notes that, if you were a good haggler, also might get you a taxi ride).

Oh, yeah. I was the guy in charge of changing dollars into lira for VIPs who arrived in Ankara at odd hours. I kept a bucket of money under my bunk and I met some interesting people who were brought to my place in the middle of the night. In the case of generals, I delivered, like the pizza guy, to their hotels. Funny thing. Keeping a bucketful of money in Turkey didn"t worry me for a minute. Back home, I wouldn"t have been able to sleep.

Another of my extra duties involved working with Lt. Larry Alkire of Iowa, who created a newspaper called The TUSLOG Times, which was distributed throughout the country. The most interesting thing about the Times is that it was printed in Ulus by an all-Turkish crew who understood no English, and whose foreman spoke only French. It was fun for me, because I was a journalist in civilian life and, hey, the paper wasn"t half bad!

A lot of scary stuff happened in 1956-57: Hungary, Suez, Sputnik. And by being overseas, we almost completely missed Elvis. The big event in Ankara was the grand welcome for the Shah of Iran and Queen Soraya. Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie made a much appreciated goodwill appearance at the Buyuk Cinema and Johnny Ray sang "Little White Cloud That Cried" and "Cry" from a flatbed truck in the JAMMAT parking lot.

I"ll mention one not-so-great moment: Early in my tour of duty, three jet aircraft mechanics wandered in from Wheelus. "We don"t have any jet planes, only prop-driven aircraft," I said reflexively, sending them packing, right back to Libya. Anyone reading this will guess what was wrong with that decision. The trio just as quickly reappeared, after I was strongly advised to get myself up to speed on our mission.

Although I was proud of what we were doing, I was never meant to be in the military and, unfortunately, proved it about every chance I got. As I departed Esenboga the last time, with Ankara receding from view, I said to myself, "I"m never, never coming back." I didn"t realize it at the time, but I meant I was finished with the Air Force, not Turkey. Turkey had cast a spell over me, and I have returned there five times. I have thousands of pictures and own a couple hundred books about Turkey. I"ve even written a book myself, titled The Turcophile File, "555 Reasons Turkey Is Easily the Most Interesting Place on Earth." Some travelers take it with them to Turkey.

FYI: Turcophile isn't in the dictionary, but I say it"s a word, and I"m sticking to it. It means somebody who loves all things Turkish. You can call me a Turcophile.

Just Thinking About Turkey
Afterthoughts 2009 by Darwin Sator

The other day I was enjoying thinking about Turkey, which isn't unusual, except this time I made some notes:

I remember the time my car battery died in Iznik. I walked and walked until I found a garage and they loaned me a bicycle to ride back to my car. It had been years since I had ridden a bike, so I promptly fell off -- right in front of a moving truck. In America, the truck driver probably would have leaned on his horn and yelled epithets at me. In Turkey, the driver got out, picked me up, dusted me off, and put me back on my bike.

Then there was that time about 10 years ago. I had rented a car in Istanbul and immediately found myself in morning-rush-hour traffic. The car had a shift pattern that was unfamilar to me, so I was having a hard-enough time just driving. Then, I touched something wrong, which made the windshield wipers race a mile a minute. It wasn"t raining, and I couldn"t figure out how to stop them. I had gone a few blocks like that, in that horrendous traffic, when a police car stopped me. I thought, "Uh-oh, What have I done?" The officer walked up to my car and, recognizing a tourist when he saw one, reached inside my open window, turned off the wipers and, without comment, just walked away. Whew!

Another time, my wife Katy and I pulled into a gas station in some really out-of-the-way place in central Turkey. The owner asked where we were from and when we told him, he asked, "Would you talk to my daughter?" She was 12 years old, the man explained, and she was learning English in school. Sure, of course, we said, so he brought out a table and four chairs, placed them between the gas pumps and we sat, had tea, and talked for an hour. Katy, it so happens, was an English teacher and she enjoyed it, and so did I.

One of my most challenging driving experiences resulted from the mistake of entering an extremely narrow street in old Ankara on market day. By the time I recognized what was happening ahead, I had gone too far to back out and the street was too narrow to turn around. I was considering abandoning my car when about 10 men took me on as their project. After much discussion, they had me back up to a spot where there was an open-front shop on each side. First, they had me pull up a foot or two, actually into the shop on the right, then back up a foot or two, actually into the shop on the left. Gel! Dur! Geri gitmek! Dur! Gel! Dur! Geri gitmek! Dur! Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It seems like I did that a hundred times before the car finally was pointed in the opposite direction. It was The Great Escape.

So many of my favorite memories of Turkey are of things that would be unimaginable in the United States. One such memory was 50 years ago when my wife Katy and I visited the Seraglio with our year-and-a-half-old son Niels. At that point, the baby was really tired and a little irritable, as were we. Seeing that, the guards at the gate said, "Leave him with us; we"ll take care of him." We did. Then, after we toured the Seraglio and were approaching the exit, we could hear our son laughing loudly -- the guards were teaching him to play peekaboo. They must have been entertaining the kid for two hours, and they were still laughing, too!

I don't quite know how to say this, but I want to try, because it bespeaks the hospitality of our Turkish friends. My wife and I were on a bus tour a few years back and, as we often did, we wandered off on our own, away from the bus. Well, Katy had an unexpected emergency and had to dash up a little hill, into some brush. There's no way to do that gracefully, of course. When she came back down the hill, a woman who had been watching all of this, came out of her house with water and a towel and personally washed the stranger's hands. In Turkey, we met quite a few Good Samaritans.

Have you seen the television commmercial in which a guy scares his wife by picking up a hitchhiker carrying an axe? Well, once we were hunting for an ancient Phrygian monument far off the beaten path. I stopped to ask a farmer, the only human being I had seen in miles, if he knew where the monument was. Yes he did, he said. He'd come with us and show us, but he"d have to bring along something. Of course, I said. That something turned out to be a pitchfork so large and intimidating that, with the rear car windows rolled down, the wood handle stuck out one side of the car and the knife-like steel prongs out the other. When the ruts got too deep to negotiate, the farmer would get out and fill them with stones, so we could continue on. We found the wonderful monument we were looking for, took pictures, drove our new friend home, and he invited us to dinner.

I remember, about 20 years ago, calling my family in Ohio from a telephone in Diyarbakir. The connection, through Izmir, wasn"t the best that night and I"ll never forget the operator urging me: "Speak up, Sir. America is a very long way." I chuckled about that, accepting it as meaning that telephone calls between Diyarbakir and the U.S. were really rare. Months later, however, I was sound asleep in my Ohio bed at 3 o"clock in the morning when the phone rang. Expectiing the worst, it was instead, to my great surprise, two 12- or 13-year-old boys I had met on a street in Diyarbakir and they apparently were calling me as a school assignment. America and Diyarbakir weren't that far apart after all.

About 50 years ago, again, something happened that I wish hadn't happened. We had a small baby and we had a maid from the country to help out. We also had a refrigerator in which we kept milk for the baby and a few other perishables, some of which came from the base exchange. The maid was welcome to whatever she liked, but what she liked best, she confided one day, were American hot dogs. It hadn"t occurred to us, but hot dogs are usually pork, and she evidently had eaten a lot of them. We didn"t want to tell her that, so we didn"t. We just felt very guilty, and we didn"t buy any more hot dogs until we left Turkey.

Another unfortunate incident long ago was this: I was living in one- half of a little house in Ankara, and I came home one day to find a neighbor throwing trash over the fence into "my" yard. Well, that made me mad, so I started flinging the stuff back over the fence as fast as he tossed it at me. The man announced in perfect English, "You have no rights, because you are not a Turk." Well, he was absolutely right but, you know, he must have decided that although I was a damned foreigner, at least it was good that I wanted to be neat and clean, because he never did it again. I'd like to talk to the man today. Maybe we could become friends. An American friend of mine, who happened upon that ludicrous scene 50 years ago, still calls it one of the funniest things he ever witnessed.

The world has turned completely upside down in the intervening years. For example, "my" house and my would-be adversary"s house are both gone now, replaced by large office buildings. Another thing that brought the dramatic change into focus came in 2000, as I recall, when Katy and I treated ourselves to a fancy lunch at Pandeli's in Istanbul's Spice Market. I remember vividly that the cost of that lunch, including tip, was 100 million Turkish lira! I can"t even begin to imagine how much suffering that kind of inflation must have caused.

More memories of the road:

Back in 1957, when all American cars had balloon tires with innertubes, my Jeep had a flat at Sungurlu. Fortunately, I made it to a garage, but it would be a long day. An obviously yeni (young and inexperienced) garage employee took the wheel off the Jeep, took the tire off the wheel, took the tube out of the tire, tested it for a leak, patched a hole in the tube, put the tube back into the tire, inflated the tire and put it back onto the Jeep.

"ok fena!" the garageman said. The tire was still leaking. So he took the wheel off the Jeep, took the tire off the wheel, took the tube out of the tire, tested it for another leak, patched a second hole in the tube, put the tube back into the tire, inflated the tire and put it back onto the Jeep.

""ok fena!" The tire was still leaking, so the garageman took the wheel off the Jeep, took the tire off the wheel, took the tube out of the tire, tested it for still another leak, patched a third hole in the tube, put the tube back into the tire, inflated the tire and put it back onto the Jeep.

Are you tired of this story? Well, it's only half of the story, because that sequence was repeated three more times --six times in all. There were six holes in that tube! I didn"t lose my cool, though. I was just thankful that the garageman stuck with it to the end. But I did learn a lesson: Never leave home without a spare tire.

Then, back in 1988 I rented a car in Antalya and drove it for a week before dropping it off at the company's office in Ankara. As I was leaving the Ankara office, I was called back in by a man with a frown on his face. I was sure he was going to want to charge me for some scratch or dent that I didn"t cause, as sometimes happens in the United States, but that wasn't why he was frowning. It turned out that he was concerned that I had been OVERcharged in Antalya, and he proceeded to count out a stack of lira notes and hand them to me. Now I may be wrong, but I can"t imagine that ever happening in America.

I've always tried to book hotel rooms far in advance --maybe months in advance --especially in small places. Trouble is, it is extremely difficult to estimate times of arrival when planning a trip from 7,000 miles away. Heck, sometimes it's difficult estimating the DAY of arrival. So, several times I've approached my destination in the Anatolian darkness, typically around midnight, dreading that I won"t be able to find my hotel, that the hotel won't have received my reservation, or it had given up on me and had given my room to someone else. What invariably happens, though, is that I am greeted at the door with something like: "Welcome, Mr. Sator. We were worried about you." Now, that's music to the ears.

Lastly, that brings me to my favorite road experience --in 1957 -- during a bleak winter of fuel and food shortages. I had vehicle trouble between Konya and Ankara but managed to reach what turned out to be a teahouse/garage in a tiny village. While the vehicle was being repaired, I tried to tell the men, in my best pidjin Turkish, what Americans were doing in Turkey and what life was like for us in the big city. Well, they had heard about all of the shortages in the cities that winter and, learning that I had a wife and small child in Ankara, they sent me off with a dozen fresh eggs. That gesture still warms me.

Thinking about Turkey is always heart-warming.