One of the more amusing stories I can tell:
During Northern Watch...the Brits, French and Americans utilized the base. The French came one day to decide “enough” and were going to leave. They had brought around thirty of these small Renault-trucks as part of their support apparatus. They had no interest in keeping the trucks (I’d say they were all 3-to-4 years old and with low mileage, but prone to break-downs).
So the Brits got with the French and made a deal. Far as I know....no money exchanged hands...just that on morning after the French left...a French officer would hand the keys to the trucks over to the Brits, and the trucks were all in a locked compound. Simple deal.
So the morning arrives. The Brit officer shows up and the French officer, but the gate is wide-open and the trucks gone. Then they notice a Turkish Army private driving by in one of the trucks. They end up going to investigate and conclude that the Turks have this unwritten rule...whatever is abandoned on Incirlik....is their property, end of the story.
The trucks were now Turk property.
If you notice, no permanently based aircraft have ever been taken into Incirlik. Everything comes and goes. The Americans know the rule by heart.
Whichever idiot Air Force officer gets stuck with closing Incirlik is looking at a massive amount of stress. Everything will be grabbed at various stages and it’ll impossible to announce this closure without it happening within forty-eight hours....forget about some six-month schedule. They might as well truck everyone to the nearest sea-port and board some cargo vessels to leave.
That must be a general 3rd world rule- what’s yours is ours, whats ours is ours
At the end of the war in SEA I spent the last 6 months of the US deployment in Thailand, 2 different bases
Our sole mission was to stay at the bases and pull 24 hour 7 day shifts so the bases wouldn’t be totally stripped before they were turned over
The Thai military had done an “inventory” you see, and anything that was missing on the day we turned over the bases (like power generating equipment)- had to be replaced.
One building lost a massive HVAC unit before this all- night duty was implemented
The “inventory” team, we assumed, was doing a shopping trip to see what they could steal before we left
There was s legendary story about a base in the Philippines where the Filipinos drove a fire truck off the base with sirens blaring and lights flashing- never to be seen again