I remember when I received my first notification to go to Turkey. I was standing in my dorm room at the University of Georgia. It must have been December, 1979. The phone rang and it was the ROTC office. "Is this Michael Lopergolo?", the ROTC officer asked. "Yes, it is", I answered as nervousness crept up my spine. "Mr. Lopergolo", the man went on, "you're going to Turkey". When he told me of the pending assignment my intestines almost turned to water and I almost lost it. The country recently had undergone a coup. Race ahead 9 months………..
My Pan American World Airways flight landed at Ataturk airport in October of 1980 and I became a little uneasy when several armored personnel carriers met the plane out on the flight line. When I exited the aircraft, it was like I was in another world. Everything was brown and dusty, all the vehicles were dirty and of course no one spoke English. I spoke no Turkish whatsoever having taken Italian for 2 years in college. This was not how the Army had described it to me. My luggage was lost, the phones didn’t work, and there was no one to meet me to take me to my new assignment. Needless to say, my first impressions were not positive.
After muddling my way through customs, I tried the telephone but soon realized I had no coins and the operator spoke no English. I wasn’t even sure who I was going to call although I felt like calling my Mom to get me out of there. After an hour or so I heard the distinct sounds of an American from off in a distance. I moved over to them and as luck would have it found out they were from another military unit but were picking up another new arrival, not me. They did, however, take me to my new assignment 40 miles out of their way.
The drive out of the city was very “eye opening”. Turkey was more remote and rural than I could have ever imagined. The homes were shacks (at least in my opinion) made of what appeared to be mud bricks. To this day (nearly 30 years later) I distinctively remember the ride down the long road out of Istanbul to Cakmakli. It was very, very bumpy and of all the mud huts we passed, only one of them had a light on. It was a bare bulb hanging in the center of a one room hut. I remember the hut seemed so cold. I began to wonder what the next year would hold for me in such a remote place. I would soon come to realize, however, that no matter how remote or dusty, old, rural or dirty the country of Turkey appeared on first impression, it and its people would very shortly be endeared to me for the rest of my life.
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