Posted on 03/13/2003 8:07:07 AM PST by Pokey78
Odd place, Incirlik airbase. Outside the gates is the usual homely, jerry-built jumble of Turkish shops and restaurants which service the base. Their owners sip tea on little stools set out on the broken pavement under webs of sagging telephone cables. In the shop windows are sheaves of T-shirts with endearing messages such as ‘We’re coming, motherf—ers!’ (illustrated with a picture of the Statue of Liberty giving the finger), as well as Arab headdresses, olive-wood camels, Aladdin lamps and other desert-dweller paraphernalia for those customers who are confused as to whether they’re in Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Every few minutes there’s a distant rumble of jet engines as fighter planes leap off the runway into near-vertical climbs and disappear into the haze.
Inside the gates, however, one enters the eerily ordered world of the Pax Americana. It’s a transported vision of American suburbia, only with F16s instead of SUVs. Everything is neat and organised, including the carefully trimmed lawns tended by Turkish gardeners in regulation straw ten-gallon hats, which make them look like Mexicans. Everyone is very polite and professional, and strides around in pressed uniforms looking stern and fresh-faced and purposeful.
As well they might. Incirlik will be — if the Turkish parliament finally gives its approval — one of the hubs of the US air war on Iraq. In a few days the men (and women, for there are several female fighter pilots) of Incirlik will be, as Russell Crowe so eloquently put it, unleashing hell. It’s a jarring thought, as one strolls among the shade trees and signposted avenues of the base, past Baskin Robbins and Burger King, that all these nice people who live in this swell place are here to fly and service the deadliest killing machines ever invented.
And, by God, those planes look malevolent, brooding in their hangars like sleek insects, dripping with deadly appendages. They’re quite beautiful, a testament to man’s evil genius for perfecting ways to destroy other men. And the US Air Force has a kind of genius too, because the man they put at the controls of this awesome firepower is as nice a guy as you could ever hope to meet — Captain Pat Driscoll, based out of Langley AFB, Virginia. Driscoll, 27, is small, fit, neatly handsome, quietly spoken, a churchgoer and family man — in short, the kind of man you’d want piloting your plane, the exact opposite of a trigger-happy Top-Gun jock. He lets me and another correspondent take turns sitting in the cockpit of his F15, which is the size of a large truck but flies at 1,000 miles an hour. We ask about the Gatling gun he has mounted under the wings.
‘This puppy puts out about 3,000 rounds a minute,’ says Driscoll, patting the barrel affectionately and smiling benignly like a Quaker Oats advertisement. ‘So we have about 91/2 seconds of trigger pull. But about one second is enough to shred a plane.’
Driscoll is not a man, I suspect, who suffers from long, dark nights of the soul. I ask how the Gatling sounds.
‘Uh — it kind of growls, actually.’
We go on a midair refuelling flight on board a KC135, carrying 200,000 lbs of aviation fuel ready to fill up F16s and F15s high over the Syrian border. As we taxi on to the runway, our escort, a female sergeant from the public affairs office, exchanges small talk with the boom operator about the crucifixes they bought at the base store. After an hour in the air, we’re told that the mission has been aborted due to bad weather, so we fly out to sea and dump 20,000 lbs of fuel into the stratosphere so we’re light enough to land.
‘It’s no more environmentally unfriendly than just burning it in the engine,’ the sergeant assures us with the enthusiasm of a congressional candidate.
Back on the ground, we go shopping in a vast warehouse-like mall at the centre of the base, known as the BX, which offers all the luxuries of home — Tyson chicken, Pop tarts, Cheerios, Adidas sneakers, frozen apple pie. There is a special military Burger King, decorated with big posters of a cartoon NCO called the Grill Sergeant. There’s also a Pizza Hut, a ‘morale tent’ which houses an Internet centre (with heavily censored web access which excludes, for some reason, that evil site e-Bay), and a bookshop.
Very revealing, this, like a recce of a man’s bookshelves while he’s off fixing the drinks. I counted no fewer than 26 editions of the Bible in stock, catering for all tastes, ranks and intellects, from the Early Readers’ Illustrated Bible (enlisted men) to the Maxwell Leadership Bible (officers), not counting an equally large shelf of related literature. There were, I add for the sake of fairness, also two editions of the Koran, but the charming black sales girl from Alabama didn’t recall anyone ever having bought one. On the opposite rack, in the manner of Orthodox churches with depictions of Heaven and Hell facing each other on opposite walls, were Letters to Penthouse, volumes I–XVI, and other racy literature of the ‘he possessed her in the most physical way possible’ variety (I quote). For visual stimulation, customers must make do with People Magazine and the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, apparently the most subscribed-to mail-order publication in the US military.
The base bar is a giant prefabricated barn — which the major who showed us round proudly assured us could be collapsed and packed up in three hours, presumably when the call comes that a portable bar with a 2,000-man capacity is urgently needed elsewhere.
It was around noon when we visited, and the staff were clearing up. ‘Uh, that is a typical British table you see there,’ said our major, gesturing to a table entirely filled with empty beer bottles, approximately 15 times more than on any other. My heart, naturally, swelled with pride. ‘Those Brits really know how to let their hair down.’
The walls were covered in graffiti, drawn with marker pens thoughtfully provided by the USAF and censored daily for offensive comments. The bar manager, a formidable woman in her forties, was overseeing the addition of a bikini to a crude drawing of a naked, high-octane broad of the type which might have decorated the Enola Gay.
All good, clean fun. There are about 1,500 service people based at Incirlik, 200 of them Brits, and they rotate the entire personnel nine times a year, giving just about every combat pilot in the force a chance to fly real missions over Saddam’s fire while they patrol the no-fly zone over northern Iraq. There have been no casualties in 11 years.
Ask almost anyone on the base what they think they’re doing here, and no one answers ‘just following orders’ or ‘I was sent’. No M*A*S*H-style, Catch-22 cynicism here. It’s ‘Defending my country, I reckon’, or ‘We’re here to sort out a pretty tough neighbourhood’, or even ‘I think the message of the Bible is righteousness — and I think we’re here doing the right thing by the people of Iraq.’
Moral clarity descends, like righteousness, in rivers round here — and perhaps it’s always been easier that way: for soldiers throughout history to believe that they are risking their lives for a higher cause than just politicians’ folly. No one needs an army of thinkers (the Spanish Republicans tried it in the Thirties; it didn’t work). Yet there is something disturbing about the almost messianic sense of mission here. There’s a massive disconnection between all the good intentions and the disastrous consequences they can bring.
While you’re on the clean, well-ordered world of the base, it all somehow makes sense, and you find yourself nodding in sincere agreement and admiration at what the US is sending these fine young people to accomplish. It’s only when you get back outside on to the bustle of the Turkish street that things become more confusing — and you trip on the broken pavement stones because you’ve got too used to fine, straight sidewalks.
Owen Matthews is Newsweek’s correspondent in Turkey.
Why is this disturbing to this fellow? Does he want conflicted feelings and tortured souls controlling potentially nuclear armament? Why does the author long for dissent and internal conflict everywhere? Does he find this missing because he needs affirmation of his own perverse views?
The base sounds perfectly normal. The Turkish town outside sounds perfectly standard (I've been nearby). The reporter, though, sounds like he has lots of problems.
Of course, inferring that enlisted men are such idiots that they need an illustrated children’s Bible to grasp the concepts. The author’s attempt to portray the military personnel as living in a fantasy world is also extremely irritating. Of course HE can see the reality that they are denying. Sheesh, what a pompous……
Oh, I don't know ... every time I was assigned to Korea, I always felt something like that whenever I left Camp Casey (and Casey was not, by any stretch of the imagination, comparable to his description of Incirlik). My first tour there, the Base PX (and the only PX within approximately 25 miles) was a 14x60 mobile home. Our barracks were quonset huts ... heck, the courtroom was in a quonset hut with an oil-fired heater that had to be refilled just about every other day or you'd run out of fuel and the toilet (and the court reporter) would freeze solid. I successfully read through the entire Camp Casey and Camp Hovey libraries (even including the Barbara Cartland books) about halfway through my one-year tour of duty. Heck, during my first tour, there were still three "massage" parlors (Steam-and-Creams) on post.
About the only concrete on post was in the "turtle-traps", wide, deep concreted ditches on each side of the one-and-a-half lane road. They were called "turtle-traps" because we called ourselves "turtles" (that reason because, at the "Turtle Farm" .. aka, the 2nd Inf Div Replacement Center .. the in-processing hut for the newbies and the out-processing hut for those who'd finished their year assignment were right next door ... but it took you all year to get from one to the other) and, since the EM Club was at one end of post and most of the hootches were at the other, there was an increased tendency of drunken GIs falling into them (often doing great bodily harm).
Yet, for all of its primitiveness, Camp Casey was The Emerald City compared to downrange Tongduchon, all located well within relatively short-range artillery fire from the DMZ. It was definitely a world of difference.
So, I didn't read it as really condescending. As a matter of fact, it read to me as something written by a civilian who has no idea what or why we in the military do what we do every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year (some of us for 20-plus of those 365-day cycles). The description of the American servicemen and -women was particulary good, especially if you read it as if it were an anthropological report, written by someone seeing, for the first time, a truly alien culture and not really understanding it.
Yeah, this twit needs to be b##ch slapped for sure.
He shoots and scores. You should put out a column or two yourself, buddy. Seriously.
I was trying to put myself in this person's shoes with the description of the book store. How strange it must be for that author. Your world is in an existence where your co workers have little variation in thought, background, or habit. To go from that to getting a superficial look at what things must be in place when you are trying to create a "fist" out of "fingers" as diverse as semi-literate Louisiana backwoods boys and Academy trained scholar/warriors; LA ex-gangbangers working side by side with Nebraska preacher's daughters. An amazing thing it is, really. Too bad that aspect probably went totally over the author's head. The other thing that needed to be explored is how the US civillian and military cultures produce the F-15 driver featured in the story. That was missed completely.
They block E-Bay because a few soldiers were engaging in the unauthorized activity of auctioning off their excess MOPP-4 suits.
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