The first thing I noticed about Turkey, after thirty-one years away, was that it had become much louder.

Not noisier, exactly. Louder.

The ferries on the Bosphorus sounded their horns as they came and went. Traffic crawled along the waterfront in great, impatient waves. Waiters called across pavements. The city seemed to be talking to itself, constantly and at full volume.

In early 1993, I had arrived in Turkey with a kit bag, wearing a uniform and with the vague assumption that I would be going home before too long.

I was wrong about the last part.

Not permanently, obviously. I did eventually go home. But Turkey stayed somewhere in the background. It waited. It sat behind many other memories made in the decades since, other postings while still in the military, other jobs, marriages, bills, birthdays and all the ordinary business of life.

Then, in late 2025, my wife suggested Istanbul as a holiday destination for the following summer. She had never been to Turkey – and truth be told, I had never made it to Istanbul.

“Why not?” she said. I could think of several reasons. The first was that I had already been to Turkey. The second was that I had not really been to Turkey at all, and deep down I was afraid to return.

The country I remembered was a place of tents and dust. Aircraft noise was ever present as was long periods of waiting. It was waking daily to the call to prayer at neighbourhood mosques, the smell of aviation fuel in the morning and the taste of tea poured into small glasses in the evening. The Turkey I knew years ago was a place where you could spend hours doing very little and then suddenly find yourself moving quickly because something had happened.

It was Incirlik in the early 1990s. It was northern Iraq - and it was a long time ago.

We began in the usual way. The Blue Mosque and the Topkapı Palace as well as the Grand Bazaar on the European side of the Bosphorus.

My wife took photographs – lots of photos. I took a few too, although mine were less about what was in front of me than what was missing.

At the ancient Egyptian obelisk outside the Blue Mosque, looking along what was once the Hippodrome of Constantinople, I found myself thinking about a tent.

It was not a particularly remarkable tent. There were many of them lined up, back to back, side by side with narrow walkways separating the front of one and the front of another. Eight men to a tent was the norm. It was hot inside, colder at night and dusty almost all the time. It was not the sort of place anyone would choose to live. But for a period in the 1990s, it was home.

I had joined the RAF at the start of the 1990s after dabbling with a period in the Army in the late 1980s. A few years later, between 1993 and 1995, I was spending extended periods on and off in southeast Turkey, a few miles outside Adana at Incirlik Air Base.

The official words backing my stay in the country were Operation Provide Comfort and Operation Warden.

The reality was rather less tidy.

The British contribution of which I was a miniscule cog formed part of the effort to enforce a no-fly zone over the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq after what is now commonly termed the First Gulf War. The intention was to prevent the Iraqi president at the time, Saddam Hussein's forces from using aircraft against the predominantly Kurdish population.

For those of us on the ground, the operation was a mixture of routine and uncertainty.

There were aircraft. There were briefings. There were orders. There were weather reports and maintenance schedules. There were also tents. A lot of tents. And heat.

It was not the romantic heat of a holiday brochure of the time. This was the heat of metal, concrete and canvas. It was a heat that seemed to come from everywhere. Heat that made even ordinary tasks feel deliberate and very hard work.

My present-day Istanbul hotel was only warm by comparison, cool even thanks to a rather noisy air conditioner.

With my wife asleep beside me. I was awake early most days. Pre-dawn, I lay there staring at the ceiling and light creeping in round the curtains as I remembered my time roughly 460 miles to the east more than three decades earlier.

The strange thing about memory is that it does not always return in order.

You do not necessarily remember the beginning and then the middle and then the end. Sometimes you remember a smell. Sometimes it is a sound. Sometimes a particular patch of ground.

Oftentimes you remember something that you had not thought about for years and realise that, somewhere in your mind, it had never actually gone away.

I remembered the tents first and foremost. I remembered the noise of aircraft.

And I remembered April 1994. US Army Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by US Air Force F-15s over northern Iraq in a so-called friendly-fire incident. Twenty-six people were officially listed as killed. We were later given a different, higher number.

A short time after the incident, I was sent into northern Iraq.

That is one of the things that memory does to you. It turns an event into a series of small details. I remember being told I was going. I remember the pre-deployment medical. Two nurses checked my teeth, scars and tattoos. I was told it was in case at some point in the future these could help identify my own remains.

Before the Black Hawk incident the routines were reassuring. Then when something goes badly wrong, the pattern breaks.

After the helicopters were shot down, there was an atmosphere that I remember more clearly than any particular conversation. The feeling that the machinery of the operation had suddenly become visible. Mistrust of our American allies crept in.

I went into northern Iraq as part of the British response. The details are much less cinematic than people might imagine. There was no soundtrack. No heroic music. No neat division between danger and safety.

There was work. There was dust, always. There was waiting. A flight aboard a small Cessna type aircraft took me to forward operating areas closer to the Syrian and Iraqi border regions. The names Gaziantep, Diyarbakir and Batman became part of my daily conversations.

There was the constant awareness that the environment was not yours and that you were operating inside a conflict you had no control over. Then one day, aboard another Black Hawk it was my turn. By this time I was a lone 23-year-old Brit headed into north Iraq for a reason I didn't fully understand other than skills that I had been trained in were needed on the ground.

The northern Iraq I saw from the air and on arrival was not the northern Iraq that exists in my imagination today. 

It was a place of roads, rolling brown hills and the hillsides dotted with villages. It was people trying to live around the consequences of politics and war for the most part.

I remember the landscape clearly, even now. I remember the sense of space. And I remember sitting on a rooftop with my Kurdish allies looking out at enemy positions. Showers were taken with an M-16 standing in the corner and a US-issue pistol on a shelf next to the shampoo.  

And I remember returning to Turkey – the same way I had come in – only in reverse.

That journey remains in my mind as a kind of transition between two worlds.

Decades later I took a ferry across the Bosphorus. The boat was crowded. People stood outside taking photographs. A young boy played a small accordion for tips. The skyline seemed almost unreal, with minarets rising above the city and modern buildings away to the port side behind them.

I watched Asia move closer - the continent I have called home for 30 of the 31 years I had not been back to Turkey. 

My wife was looking at the shore. I don’t know what she was thinking.

I was thinking about a side of Turkey that was not the Istanbul of the tourist maps. I had not come to the country back in the 1990s for the Blue Mosque. It is unlikely I even knew it existed. I had come because the RAF had sent me.

In those days, I knew the country through military transport, briefings and the place we were stationed. I knew the smell of the air around the base and the practical geography of getting from one place to another. I knew where we could - and were often limited to going - when we had time off and the small rituals that made an unfamiliar place feel briefly familiar.

The friendships formed in military life are often difficult to explain to people who have not experienced it.

You spend long periods with the same people in conditions that are not normal. You see each other tired. You see each other irritated and under stress. You see each other being funny when there is nothing particularly funny happening.

Then you go home and try to adjust.

Thirty-one years after I had left Turkey in uniform aboard a four-prop C-130 Hercules, I was walking through the streets of Kadikoy on the Asian side of the Bosphorus with my wife. We had arrived aboard a far more luxurious Emirates aircraft.

I found myself thinking about what we had considered luxury in the early 1990s.

A shower that worked. A proper bed. And a telephone call home – 10 minutes every week we were given. I often gave my 10 minutes to the older, married men on the condition they checked on a football score I wanted to know. At the time I was still in my early 20s and had no one special to call. I hadn't even told my father I was headed to Turkey. He only found out when I was back in the UK.

Today, people complain when a hotel Wi-Fi connection is slow. I moan about it too.

That is one of the uncomfortable things about getting older. You can remember what you once considered impossible and still become annoyed when your phone loses a signal.

I had come to Istanbul as a tourist. I had expected to be impressed and in many ways I was. I had not expected to be haunted by memories. But memories belong to the living so that was a blessing at least.

The operation in northern Iraq had a purpose. There was a political argument behind it and as a result a military mission and a humanitarian justification. I have had a soft spot for the Kurdish people ever since, having lived and worked alongside them for a while.

But the people who carry out such operations often experience them at a more basic level. Then eventually, you leave.

In my case, one day many years later, standing in Istanbul, the realisation hit me that the country I thought I had left behind had been following me for decades.

A street would remind me of a village I had passed through. A particular smell would take me back to a camp.

My wife and I visited the Topkapı Palace. I stood looking out over the water.

The city stretched in every direction and I thought about the young man I had been. I was not particularly philosophical then. Most people in their twenties are not. You think about the next day and where the next beer is coming from.

You do not think much about being thirty-one years older or imagine standing in the same country decades later with a wife beside you, trying to work out what the younger version of yourself would make of it.

I have sometimes wondered whether the young people serving in military operations today will experience the same thing. Perhaps they will, but with mobile phones and access to the Internet I doubt it.

You can leave a country and still return to it every time a particular smell or sound reaches you. I have never stopped thinking about Turkey.

On our last day in Istanbul, my wife and I went back towards the Bosphorus.

We had walked a great deal by then so we sat outside a cafe near the Egyptian Bazaar and drank tea. The city continued around us.

For years, I had carried the Turkey of the 1990s as if it were still waiting somewhere. But it was not. The tents were gone as was the young man I had been. The operations i took part in had ended. The world had moved on. So had I.