When my tour was up, I left The Hill riding in the back of a truck. Because of the
weather (March, 1958) we burrowed into pile-lined sleeping bags, trying to 
keep warm from Sinop to Samsun, and from Samsun to Ankara. Even so, it
was cold enough that I remember it to this day. Lunch on the road consisted of 
sandwiches from the messhall washed down with straight bourbon.  I was so
cold, that bourbon didn’t even burn on the way down.

As a kind of compensation, we were given first class flights from Ankara to 
Wheelus AFB, in Tripoli, Libya, where we caught MATS (Military Air 
Transport Service, the predecessor of MAC) flights to the States. I was 
booked on KLM, first class to Rome. There we stayed overnight, and, 
because we were traveling first class, we were put up in a deluxe hotel. The
second leg of the flight was on Alitalia to Wheelus. That was an incredible 
experience for me, both the flights and the hotel. Nothing before had 
prepared me for either the pampering by the flight crews, the food in first 
class, or the opulence of that hotel in Rome. 

There was a mixup in my orders and flight operations at Wheelus had me 
booked on a flight to the States 10 days after I reported in. Typical 
bureaucracy, I was told if I just showed up, I could leave immediately, but,
since I was already manifested, I was stuck there for the whole time. As a 
casual, there wasn't anything to do except eat and sleep. The messhall 
there was probably the worst I've ever encountered (so much for the myth 
of Air Force chow), so I ate either at the PX snack bar or at the NCO club. 
The transient barracks  was directly in the flight path and every morning I 
was wakened by F100’s  taking off. The weather was just cold enough that
they always used their afterburners, really a nasty way to wake up.

From there it was just a reverse of my trip over. I caught a MATS flight from
Wheelus to Charleston, SC and civilian flights from there to Detroit, my 
hometown.