A houseman who followed American troops from one installation to another for over two decades, Sermet leaned as if to whisper: ‘They stored nuclear weapons down the airfield. It was a secret. None of our business. I was just supposed to do my laundry, get my Salems, and wait for my yellow papers [checks].’ Imparted during our interview with a furtive pleasure still alive more than thirty years into his retirement, Sermet’s words to describe his longest stint with an American detachment in Corlu echo the mixed emotions that many civilians who worked on US military bases in Turkey went through: confusion, uncertainty, material expectation, the pleasure of access, the sting of infantilization, the burden of secrecy, and the paradoxical experience of fulfilling chores at the geopolitical seams of the Cold War which could burst anytime. Moreover, his reference to the airfield and foreign cigarettes signals how US overseas bases, and the Cold War at large, have transformed the communities and geographies adjacent to them. Corlu is one of these places bearing the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and spatial imprints of the Cold War in Turkey. Still home to an army corps HQ, it was already a critical garrison town before the establishment of a new base for US soldiers. As Turkey joined NATO, Corlu and the larger Thrace region became incorporated into the collective security architecture against the USSR. The deployment of a US detachment, along with nuclear-capable Honest John missiles in the 1960s, remolded Corlu as a stronghold in a vulnerable Cold War frontier of great geopolitical importance, adding an international layer to the town’s significance for domestic defense purposes. Yet, the Cold War brought to Corlu and its inhabitants more than just imported troops and armaments. Based on written and oral accounts of locals and soldiers who served on the base from the late 1950s through the 1980s, this study seeks to reconstruct the daily life in and around a moderately sized US base in Turkey. It explores how the Cold War precipitated unexpected encounters between the host town inhabitants and guest American soldiers, introduced new goods and patterns of consumption, sparked political debates, brought new forms of spatial organization and infrastructures, offered new sources of income to a select few, and enabled licit and illicit flows that the Cold War elite had not foreseen.