Getting Tanked

Enjoying the spirit of fury at drive a tank.

- David Merrill

There’s nothing quite like the sound of a tank in motion. The deep rumbling roar of the engine combined with the squeaks, squeals, and chinks of the treads. Before it’s even in sight, you know something strong and primal is coming. Taking in these sounds, one begins to understand just how bizarre and foreign this modern war machine must have seemed when it first debuted on the dirty, rough battlefields of World War I.

The idea of what a tank exactly is seems to be a generational thing. Since I was born in the early ’80s, the word “tank” conjures images of giant cartoon G.I. Joe battles intermixed with footage from Desert Storm. A firsthand look wouldn’t happen until much later when in the military, and even then they were mostly on the periphery. And though I’d crawled inside one of two modern tanks, I’d certainly never driven one or pulled the proverbial trigger on one.

As it turns out, you don’t have to go through the arduous process of joining the military and receiving weeks or months of tank training to do either one of those, so long as you can make your way to Kasota, Minnesota. So make our way there we did.

Of course there would need to be some preparation. For training purposes, I watched Fury, Beast, and 1995’s GoldenEye — it was disappointing to later learn that no, unlike tanks depicted in that 17th James Bond film, one can’t drive and shoot at the same time. Childhood dream, scattered and shattered.