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Feeling a sort of "homesickness", reliving the various bases and ports...

For me, the best TDY station was CDI Karamursel, just across the water from Istanbul, Turkey, n 1973. It was a joint American/Turkish air base, but all you'd see if you went there were Americans, including the 200 or so high-school kids from around the various bases in Greece and Turkey. I worked at the AFRTS station there, TDY from the home network station at Incirlik, to fill in the evening shift while they were getting their new body in. My wife, who was back at Incirlik and working for DOD Schools, managed a three-week TDY to Karamursel, so we got to live on base and travel around the area extensively. It was great duty, a fun job (who would guess that the armed forces had disk jockeys?), and spending half of the TDY with my wife along was great, as well.

From Turkey, we PCS'ed halfway around the world to Clark AB (Angeles City, Philippines) , where I worked at the American Forces Philippines Network station. Heaven on Earth! Mild weather year round, except for the monsoons (you quickly learned that getting wet wasn't bad, when you went into the A/C, you'd dry off quickly) and during the typhoons (one of the worst memories was trying to cook a turkey on Thanksgiving with Sterno cans - typhoon's eye went right over Clark and we were without power for a couple of days). Again, my wife was working for DOD Schools, teaching adult education classes, and she got to go to a couple of bases that I didn't, so it made the tour good for her. She had family in Manila, so we got down there quite frequently, and up to the family home in Bagio, up in the mountains. Rare was the weekend when we stayed on base. I was all set to extend my enlistment and stay at Clark for another year when I ran afoul of a top-sergeant that took a dislike to me, and wound up headed back to the states to go back to college. Ah well, all good things had to end.

Least favorite posting: Grand Forks AFB in Grand Forks, ND. PCS'ed there after Vietnam. Filled out my dream-sheet for anything near the water on either coast of the US. Instead, they give me a land-locked base in the geographic center of North America. Not only was it dry, it was cold! There was still ice on the roads when we left in April! And, clearing the snow off of ICBM launch silos had to be the worst augmentee duty possible, though they do eat well out there in the missile fields.