This paper explores the cultural history of military summer camps (askeri kamp) in Turkey. As part of the Turkish army’s efforts to establish itself as a distinct and self-sufficient social group, military summer camps began to emerge inside coastal military bases in the 1940s, offering 3-week-long vacations to military families via an annual lottery system and at a nominal fee. Initially designed as partitioned-off campsites inside military compounds with limited number of tents and social amenities, summer camps grew in size and number during the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into freestanding developments designed in the image of American military bases with semi-detached houses, pristine beaches, sports facilities, and dining, dancing, and entertainment halls by the 1980s. For decades, immediate families of active and retired military officials spent their summer holidays at these camps where they experienced an idealized and militarized version of a modern summer vacation in which nature, nation, and health coalesced in idyllic unity. While summer camps are still a defining feature of Turkish military families’ lifeworlds, due to the conservative changes that took place inside the army’s social institutions during the Justice and Development Party rule, they are also objects of nostalgia for generations of secularist military families who associate their camp memories with brighter days of Kemalism and a more virtuous and harmonious society. Based on long-form interviews with military families who spent multiple summer holidays at various summer camps between the 1950s and the 1990s and by drawing on their private archival materials, this paper examines the complex web of relationships between militarism, secularism, and the environment in Turkey and brings to light a long-ignored element of Turkey’s modernist experiment.