Rescue Effort Transforms Turkish Outback : Refugees: Farm fields throb to the rhythm of allied copters and the footfalls of troops as half a dozen nations provide relief for needy Kurds.

It is only two weeks, but it seems ages, since Ron Gahagan moved into a tent in a green field here and wondered how to keep the sheep out. Now he is master of ceremonies of what must be the most bizarre bus route on earth.

Gahagan, an army major from Spartanburg, S.C., calls his service Zakhu Tours International.

Buses leave every two hours for the short ride across the damaged international bridge from Turkey into the town of Zakhu in northern Iraq and refugee camps beyond it.

Passengers are all military personnel and reporters. There is a fiercely armed guard. Chocolate chip cookies are served. No visas are required as the bus chugs without stopping past a disconsolate handful of Iraqi border guards baking in the sun.

What have the Yanks wrought in the backlands of southern Turkey? In the name of an unprecedented mission to rescue and resettle half a million refugees, what haven’t they?

The sheep are gone. The young wheat is churned to dust. Today, farmers’ flat fields outside of Silopi, a few miles from the frontier, burst with industry and energy. It is the same in the mushrooming camps for Kurds on the Iraqi side of the frontier.

On both sides of the border, and in the terrible mountain perches where refugees struggle for survival, there is a commitment, pathos--and sometimes anger--as military and civilian Americans labor in discomfort in places they never heard of to complete a job they never dreamed of.

Silopi throbs. American, British and French helicopters come and go all day long from both sides of the Istanbul-Baghdad Highway. Several thousand troops of half a dozen nationalities live in tent cities. It is hot, grim duty, but there are now showers, a laundry, a mess hall. And, at last, the PX has caught up with the American troops.

Long and dusty lines of tractor-trailers with relief supplies await unloading. Boys sell soft drinks, sometimes even cold ones. There are taxi drivers galore, as though sprung from the fields themselves. Money-changers sell Iraqi dinars, Turkish lire, American dollars; anything that folds--and gold that doesn’t.

Too much of the donated and purchased relief supplies are falling off pallets and trucks to suit allied officials. Newly arrived military police, low key to avoid offending the Turks, patrol the depots here and farther north at Diyarbakir. An American soldier riding in the cab is better than Lloyd’s to ensure safe arrival of a truckload of blankets to the mountains.

National flags flew proudly over Silopi for a few days. There was a small and jaunty Stars and Stripes, a tasteful Union Jack and a big French tricolor, but the Turks objected, it seems, and the flags are gone now. Not everybody likes that.

An American Air Force sergeant snarled at an uncomprehending Turk who had asked by gestures for the American to move his truck: “Just a minute! This may be your country, but you make me take down my flag, you can wait.”

Zakhu Tours International flies no flag. It needs none: Its buses are the inspired American answer to the flying carpet. For days, a scruffy international press corps dueled angrily in the dust for coveted rides to Zakhu--forbidden Iraq!--with the same panicked frenzy of refugees wrestling in the mud for scraps of food. Now everybody rides ZTI.

The danger on the ride is not for the passengers but for the boisterous children of Zakhu. They have become instant addicts of the soft-drink powder in American field rations. They dart in bright, daring knots in front of the buses. They run alongside, accidents waiting to happen, waving flags of their own: empty black plastic soft drink envelopes on sticks.

Silopi has become a huge base for helicopters from all four U.S. military services. They lug troops and supplies from dawn until dusk, often flying in mountains at altitudes close to their operational limits.

“Let’s think about what we’re doing, and let’s try not to hurt anybody,” urged Warrant Officer Randall R. Miller of Tulsa, Okla., one recent morning to the crew of his Army Chinook helicopter--call sign Cyclone Six One, known as “Phantom” to the men who fly it--of the 502d Aviation Regiment based in Mannheim, Germany.

Flying to the refugee camps is dangerous: Time and again, particularly in the early days, hungry refugees swarmed aboard the helicopters, endangering themselves and the machines. More than once, refugee mothers begged crew members to carry their babies out with them.

With the danger, though, comes satisfaction.

“I like to be helping the kids. That’s why we’re here,” said Sgt. Paul Richards of St. Croix, Virgin Islands, one of Phantom’s crew.

Guardian of the massive fleet of helicopters, cargo planes and jet fighters that swarm daily over the skies of southern Turkey and northern Iraq is an unseen AWACS command plane. Helicopters talked to the AWACS, which answered to the call sign “Cougar,” one recent morning.

Cougar sees all. The copter crews asked directions and advice and fed Cougar a steady stream of reports. When they were finished, a voice from above replied:

“COUGAR COPIES ALL.”

What the helicopters call Landing Zone Raven, and ZTI knows as the last bus stop, is the wheat field outside Zakhu where the first of a number of tent camps is being built for the refugees.

There are no refugee children there yet--they are still dying by the hundreds in the mountains each day--but they are never far from the minds of the Marines or Kurdish volunteer workers who are building the camp.

Those who have seen the children of the mountains do not forget. Army Master Sgt. Frank Jordan, a grandfather of three activated by the Maine National Guard from his job in the composing room of the Bangor Daily News, has seen the children.

“There was one 10-year-old girl; her sciatic nerve was severed, she was paralyzed, couldn’t talk, had diarrhea. You knew she was going to die,” said Jordan. “That’s not easy to take.”

The American civilians on the Turkish-Iraqi border this spring tend to be aid workers and journalists. A lot of them have seen it all before. Still, there is a special horror in Turkey this spring. Coming down out of the camps is like getting out of jail. A ride on ZTI across a hostile border is a relaxing excursion in the country.

Like the U.S. service personnel, the civilians are stamped by what they have seen.

Mary Beth Sheridan, an American reporter for the Associated Press, spent a mud-caked week in the mountains. “Even the macho photographers cried,” she said.