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In the era around 1969, everyone departing (enlisted) got this certificate and a Zippo lighter from the Black Sea NCO Open Mess.

On the evening when we had 70 days left on the Hill until DEROS, we became officially short. We went with all our friends to the club, ordered a quart bottle of V.O. (which we had to drink to the last drop). On the bottle was a ribbon which was then woven around our watch band to signify that we were short.

Certificate - Honorary membership The Sexless Society of Sinop Turkey

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We used to go to the NCO Club when we first got to the Hill. Then some beggar got the idea of having an EM club and restricting those who were E-4 and below from going into the NCO club. Our favorite waiter at the EM club was Charlie (an Anglicization of his Turkish name, no doubt), who was a prisoner on work release. Whenever we would order "root beer", he would say "Oh, rupee!" We would laugh about it thinking that he just couldn't hear the words "root beer". One day he wrote us out a complete ticket, which was unusual, and on the ticket he had penned the word "rupee". I never figured out if that was a good Turkish word or just his bastardization of English.

Alcohol was forbidden in the residence halls ("kazarma" in Russian), but that normally didn't stop us. On evenings when there was no watch to stand at Ops, we would call Charlie at the EM club (we were in Washington Hall, which was right across the street from the back door of the EM club, as I recall); and he would sneak us out a case of Ruffino. Over that year, Ruffino became my favorite wine and still holds a place in my heart to this day. We would each get a bottle and drink to the sounds of Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Mothers of Invention ("Oh, my hair's getting good in the back), the Beatles, Eric Burdon and the Animals ("House of the Rising Sun") and whatever other albums we were able to latch on to.

We would always try to walk in at least pairs on the way to Ops, especially after dark, because Roland was always lurking in the no-man's land between the residence halls and the Ops complex. Quite often he would come charging across the open area, braying at a high decibel level, with amorous intentions on his mind (obvious when Roland had amorous intentions, I don't know how he could run in that condition without tripping over something). Often times for sport we would imitate his bray to excite him if he was nowhere in sight (better to know where he was). Bill Handrick (who, unfortunately died of cancer of the tongue in 1997) was one of the better at getting the sound just right.

As an initiation to the "yenis" in NAVDET, the whole organization would stand down our watch and go to town to one of the seaside outdoor cafes, where we would introduce them to Turkish food (as most of you remember, the first experience inevitably resulted in the "Turkey trots"), Turkish beer, and most importantly Raki. The Yeni, seasoned drinker or not, would be told to chug a shot of Raki, which in 95% of the cases would exit the body the same way it entered within seconds. There were many times the NAVDET would go to town in force to drink the Yeni Hotel and several other restaurants completely out of wine and beer. (And that with only an average of about 15 of us).

At the Midnight Movie, the back row of the theater belonged to the NAVDET. Eight to ten of us would go nightly. Occasionally, yeni army guys would sit there, but since they hadn't grown used to the rowdiness and down-right crudeness of life on the Hill yet, it wasn't too hard to gross them out to the point they would gladly move. During the year we were there, the movie "Firecreek" with Jimmy Stewart hit the theater. The central character in the movie was the town idiot, a young teenager who no one in town (Firecreek, New Mexico) knew his history, so he was named by the townspeople "Arthur Firecreek". It was so bad that the next night during an unusually bad scene in another movie, some of the Army guys started chanting "Arthur Firecreek, Arthur Firecreek!" This continued for several nights when a scene would come on that no one could stand. We in the NAVDET then christened the "Arthur Firecreek Award", which would go the worst movie of out year on the Hill. By the end of our year, the consensus was a spaghetti western entitled "Ringo and his Golden Pistol". (I have the movie on tape as the result of finding it buried in the TBS listings in the middle of the night several years ago.)

We referred to the lifers as "beggars" since we figured they were in the service only to get the money and have to do no work, since they foisted the work off on us first termers (GAFfers, as we called ourselves). In the Ops area, there was a large red light that would flash anytime a Turkish worker or other uncleared person was in the building to warn us to put away loose classified material. I fashioned a "BEG" rubber stamp out of a Pearl eraser and we stamped "BEG" on several spots on the light. Every time it would flash we referred to it as the "BEGlight" and said it warned us to watch out for beggars.

One of our good Army friends from language school, Stuart Ferency wound up on the Hill with us. His father, according to Ferency, had a whole warehouse of Cuban cigars that he had stashed before the ban on Cuban products. About once a month Ferency would receive a box of Cuban cigars in the mail. He would cut them in thirds and pass them out to all of his friends, so we could discover one of the real joys of life. Always the evening we got our Cuban cigar ration, we would get a large group together in the residence hall to play Monopoly while we smoked. By the time we got well into the game, there would be a thick haze above the table. I wasn't always sure it was all cigar smoke.

At the chow hall, we in NAVDET got to eat on separate rations, so had to sign a sheet when we paid our money. We often signed as "Mickey Mouse", "Donald Duck", "Natalie Wood", or any other false name we could come up with, until we got a call from the Navy detachment at Karumarsel, saying they couldn't get reimbursement for such names.

The Turkish guy who ran the chow hall (can't remember the name) also ran one of the premier restaurants downtown where we would often eat. We always claimed, but had no proof, that he would order extra food through the commissary service for the chow hall, then tape things like whole roasts to the inside of his leg in those big baggy Turkish pants and smuggle the food downtown to serve at his restaurant.

Turkish women were pretty much off limits to us infidels. Even longing looks at them downtown would upset the Turks. Larry Lavoie got an attachment for his camera that would take pictures 90 degrees to the side, instead of straight ahead. He got quite a few nice pictures while pretending to take pictures of buildings. We had one black guy on the Hill who became a Black Muslim and was then able to have a Turkish girlfriend. There were several Turkish girls who worked on post at the BX and Library who I remember: Ayshen Arcelek, Nezihe, Hariye Altinkok. I've often wondered what ever came of them.

The NAVDET houseboy was Nazmi Ozturk. He also seemed to be the local head of the mafia. I think he may have migrated to Australia a few years after I left Sinop.

When the end of our tour came and we all were to get orders to other locations, about four of us asked if we could just extend for another year on the Hill, since we had discovered the real beauty of Turkey by that time. The powers that be were sure we had either gone mad during our year in exile or were hooked on Turkish hash. At any rate, they were not even amenable to the idea, even though we pointed out that with a year of expertise in the Black Sea problems, we would be invaluable to them, whereas new guys coming in would take half the year to learn the skills we had developed.

The only American women in Sinop were the Chaplain's wife and 11 year old daughter (Sheila, even at 11 she looked pretty good after a year) and a dependent wife who came over of her own accord and lived at the Yeni hotel.

On the fourth of July, the NCO club advertised free beer. Little did we know they were giving away Carling's Black Label that had probably been in storage two or three years longer than it should have been. It was so nasty that most of us went ahead and bought beer rather than drink the free stuff.

One day in about July or August, a huge waterspout was sighted just off shore, heading straight for the residence hall we were in. A lot of the guys had never seen one and ran outside to take pictures. Having grown up in Tornado Alley, I was a little more wary. Fortunately, the thing dissipated when it hit the cliffs below us.

One day two Army officers had accosted two Turkish women on the beach and we were all put on alert and restricted to the base for several days while the community cooled down. That evening, we looked out the window down toward the town and saw a whole procession of lighted torches coming up the hill. We thought the Turks were going to come up and slaughter the whole bunch of us to get even with those two officers. It turned out the next day that that had been the particular night of the year that the cranes flew through going south. Many of them, after flying across the Black Sea, would land on the first available piece of land they could find to rest. The Turks would go out and club them while they slept and have a good meal of roast crane.

On the days at work when things were slow, we would tune to the Turkish civil air frequency in the early afternoon and hear "Valvestem, this is Grey Ghost". This was the signal that the mail plane was coming in from Samsun, and we would call the barracks to let them know that the mail would be delivered in about twenty minutes. In exchange for that info, whoever was at the barracks would bring our mail up to us at Ops.

A group of us took a charter flight home for Christmas. The evening before we were to leave, we went to the midnight movie and saw "The Blue Max", a story of a WW1 German aviator starring Robert Redford and Maximillian Schell. When we came out of the theater, it was snowing. We had to go by bus to Samsun the next day, then to Ankara, where we caught the flight to the states. A couple of weeks before we were to fly out, I showed up at work with a huge bandage on my chin and told the beggars that I had fallen and injured myself pretty seriously and was likely to be bandaged for awhile. They apparently believed me. The night we got on the bus and left the base, I took the bandage off and had a nice goatee started at a time when goatees were illegal in the Navy. Despite some glaring looks from an Army Colonel seated across the aisle, my beard survived long enough to make me feel at home in the rapidly hippy-izing US. The first words I heard when we got back to base in January were "Shave it off, Phillips!"
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