BENTWATERS PARKS, England — The honking of thousands of free-range geese has replaced the roar of warplanes at a former American air base that enjoyed its heyday during the Cold War.

RAF Bentwaters has been closed for more than a decade, but it still has a warm place in the hearts of people who were based there.

“Best place we were ever at,” said Gregg Smith, now retired from the Air Force and living in Minot, S.D.

“Best eight years of my life,” another former resident says on the Web site dedicated to the base, www.bentwaters.org.

“Nothing but good memories,” says a third.

The base closed in 1993 during the massive drawdown of U.S. troops in Europe after the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union both fell apart.

The military dropped from roughly 300,000 troops throughout Europe to the current level of about 100,000. Scores of bases were closed — big ones and small ones, well-known ones and anonymous ones. The U.S. military presence in Europe was altered forever.

Troops come and go constantly from bases all around the world, but when a base closes for good, the impact is different. Servicemembers know they will never again be stationed there.

“Your memories, that’s all you’ve got left,” Master Sgt. Yancey Blanchard, who was one of the last airmen at RAF Bentwaters, said during a telephone interview from Andrews Air Force Base, Md., where he is now stationed.

Smith said the difference was that when people left, they weren’t replaced. He was an air-traffic controller at the base when it closed. So was his wife, Gail.

“We had a great vantage point. You’d see plane after plane leave and you knew they weren’t going to come back,” he said by telephone from Minot, where he is a civilian air-traffic controller.

“The houses were empty and you knew no one was ever going to be in them again.”

He and his wife, he said, could not bear to drive past the empty homes of friends who moved before the Smiths left.

Military members might be undergoing the same type of transition in the future if a plan to again transform the military footprint in Europe is realized. The military has discussed the possibility of shuffling troops back to the States and to bases farther east in Europe, which would mean shutting the gates forever on some current American bases.

No final plans have been announced, but if the possibility moves closer to reality, troops will experience the same anxiety their brethren did in the early 1990s.

“Everybody was praying it wasn’t going to be us [to close],” said Smith. “You almost felt like, ‘What did we do wrong? Why are we closing?’ ”

When the dismantling of the Soviet Union experienced bumps, he said, there was actually a sense of elation on the base that the Cold War was not quite dead.

Blanchard said he and his buddies tried to look at the transition as simply a permanent change of station move.

“No big deal,” he said.

But it didn’t work, he said. As buildings closed and services vanished, there was a sense of sadness that doesn’t accompany the normal duty station transfer.

“Don’t think of it as just another PCS,” he said as advice to anyone who is caught up in a base closure in the future. “Because it’s not.”

RAF Bentwaters became active late in World War II, home to a Royal Air Force squadron. It was turned over to the U.S. Air Force in 1951. A variety of aircraft flew from there for the next four decades, most significantly F-4 Phantoms from 1965 to 1979 and A-10 Warthogs from 1978 until the base closed in 1993.

It became famous in 1980 when some airmen claimed to have seen a UFO in a forest near the base. The sighting has been the subject of books and documentaries and attracts UFO-ologists to the area even today.

For Sarah Brown, the roar of aircraft and the constant parade of Americans coming and going were important parts of her childhood. She lived just outside the base fence on her father’s farm.

“We always had Americans living next door,” Brown said. She remembers such unusual treats as Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups provided by friendly Americans to local children.

She recalls riding ponies with other children near a particularly secure corner of the base and having guards point rifles at them.

“We thought that was fantastic,” she said.

The loss of the Americans had an impact on the local economy for a time, Brown said. At the same time, the nearby base of RAF Woodbridge was closed.

More than 10,000 active-duty members were stationed at the twin bases.

The biggest impact was on the housing market as rents went down, with hundreds of houses suddenly thrust onto the market. That has since rebounded, Brown said.

But the social impact, too, was great.

“When the bases closed, part of the communities were taken,” John Cattermole said in an e-mail response to a question. He was born in Woodbridge and married the daughter of an American airman.

American cars were more numerous on the roads than British cars. American accents were considered normal in the pubs and shops.

Some of the base now is a manufacturing park. The entire area is known as Bentwaters Parks. Brown’s family bought a large part of the base in 2001 and rents areas to farmers to run geese or sheep.

Film companies have used the runway and the base roads to film everything from car commercials to scenes from feature films. A museum dedicated to the base’s Cold War history is in the works in the old command bunker.

Little on the base has changed. Airmen stationed here during the 42 years it was in American hands would have no trouble finding their way around.

Blanchard visited in the mid-1990s and took pictures of his old dorm room.

“It was really eerie,” he said.

Staff Sgt. Lyle Brandstrom Jr. was a security forces cop near the end in 1993. Now at Camp Doha, Kuwait, with the 886th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron, his e-mailed response to a request for recollections mentioned ghosts named Peg Leg Pete and East End Charlie.

He also remembers British veterans from World War II with tears in their eyes as the base closure neared and the Americans prepared to leave.

He might have had some, too, he admitted.

“Everyone was family toward the end,” he said, even more than normal as the reality of the end came closer and closer.

“Bentwaters was my Camelot,” Brandstrom wrote. “Someday I hope to return to the grounds of RAF Bentwaters and see if the magic still exists or if it has faded with my memory.

“But for now, it will always be a green, sunny, bright, warm patch in my mind.”