Turkish troops invaded a divided Cyprus on July 20, 1974. This post is from a personal perspective. At the time, I was a clueless 21-year-old in Greece. (After five decades, my memory is a bit sketchy on many of the details, but I’ll tell you how sure I am as we go along.) I won’t go into details about the invasion, as much has been written by far more knowledgeable people. A simple internet search will yield numerous descriptions of the military operation, complete with images and analysis. The Wikipedia article is here , for starters.

I boarded the USS Forrestal on a rainy night in Norfolk, VA in March 1974. By morning we were at sea, bound for a six-month tour of duty in the Mediterranean. My unit was a 14-man band attached to an admiral’s staff. The Atlantic crossing took about two weeks, including time to sail around a storm.

Sometime early in the deployment (probably late April or early May) a trio (piano, bass, drums) flew from Spain to Athens on short notice in a transport plane. There were no seats, only nylon straps normally used for cargo. The flight was long, cold, and uncomfortable. Still groggy from the flight, we were taken to a palatial home and set up our equipment outside in a garden. We played cocktail-style music, even though it was around noon.

At some point during or shortly after playing, we were approached by a Greek officer with an abundance of military bling on his uniform. He complimented us on our play and left after a bit of small talk. Someone (I can’t remember who) later told me that he was a member of the ruling junta of Greece. Unbeknownst to me, he would be tried in a few weeks and given a life sentence.

The band spent April through July performing in Spain, France and, primarily, Greece. In addition to concerts in Athens and Piraeus, we roamed the countryside, often performing in towns with little running water or electricity. Wherever we went, we were greeted warmly.

When we weren’t on tour, we stayed at a small base, a “listening station” near Nea Makri. It was a small station, but had many amenities, including an outdoor pool and a gym with a basketball court. The Navy hired locals to do a lot of the day-to-day work. For example, all the cooks in the mess hall were Greek locals.

On the morning of July 20th we woke up in the barracks. Imagine our surprise when we found that there were no staff to cook our breakfast. The permanent staff on the base knew what was going on, but it took a while before we heard it: Turkey had invaded Cyprus and almost all the men in Greece had been mobilized to prepare for war.

Within an hour or two we boarded our gray Navy bus and drove to Athens airport. It was a tense ride. There were “soldiers” stationed on most street corners. They were young men with long hair and plain clothes, wearing helmets and carrying rifles, who eyed us suspiciously. In Greece, it was said that Turkey would never have invaded without a green light from the US, or at least the CIA. At the airport we boarded a plane and flew to Naples. From there we went back to Forrestal and headed out to sea.

The last weeks of our Mediterranean deployment, the Forrestal circled Cyprus, always out of sight. What bad luck; I never visited Istanbul, Alexandria or Barcelona as a result of the invasion. Well, at least no one shot at me.

As a typical American in my twenties, I was completely ignorant of the political situation in Greece and Cyprus up until that point. Before my draft, my focus was on Vietnam and how to be patriotic without using the meat grinder. The news in the early summer of ’74 was dominated by Watergate hearings. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the Turkish invasion of Cyprus was in response to a Greek-backed coup d’état that had taken place a few days earlier.

For Cyprus, the bottom line is that the island remains divided and the core issues of the conflict between Greece and Turkey (our NATO allies) have still not been resolved 50 years later.