Sleepless in Wittmann

I've had my share of sleepless nights of late, understandably enough, and one of the things I sometimes do when I can't sleep is wonder what might have happened if I'd signed on the dotted line back in 1978. Let me explain. Back in 1978, when I was a senior in high school, I had every intention of joining the US Army, with particular emphasis on armor - tanks, that is.

My family doesn't have a particularly rich military tradition. My dad was drafted into the US Army in World War Two and though he remained intensely proud of his service in what he called "The Big One", he was demobilized along with practically everyone else and was back in civilian life by the time of the Korean War. My grandfather served as a Seabee on Guadalcanal and throughout the South Pacific, but was never the most military of men - nor did he really want to be; I think he found the various challenges of building airstrips and bases on jungle islands fascinating, but the military life itself didn't mean much to him.

So I didn't have a long history of forebears pushing me to join the Army. Mostly I succumbed to an extremely slick recruiting film I saw at the US Army recruiter. My dad and grampa did a lot of work with bulldozers when I was a kid, so I was sort predisposed to have an appreciation for heavy tracked vehicles. But that recruiting film, oh my! The front line tank of the day was the M60A1, a vehicle that doesn't get nearly as much credit as it deserves, and the film was full of M60s in action - high speed turns, firing at target tanks at Fort Irwin, accelerating across the desert amid clouds of dust and diesel smoke...

So I had it all figured out. I'd join the US Army and serve in an armored division in Europe, preferably one equipped with M60A2s, a highly unconventional vehicle whose nickname "Starship" did a good job of reflecting the tank's high sophisticated technical nature. Unfortunately, the 152mm Shillelagh gun/missile system was not a spectacular success and once the Army figured out that a 105mm-armed M60A1 was as efficient in an anti-tank role as the M60A2, most M60A2s were converted to M60A3s or into engineering vehicles.

If I'd joined in 1978, I would have retired in 1998, just as the M60A3 was finally giving way to the M1 Abrams. The M60A3 TTS was an excellent tank - its thermal imaging system was better in 1990 than the most systems are even today. But the M60A3 didn't have Chobham and probably couldn't have accommodated a 120mm gun, so off it went, most of them ending up in Egypt.

Anyway, that was the plan. What would my life have been like if I had retired from the armor in 1998? There's no way of knowing, but I can't help but think that it would have been worse. Twenty years of dunderheaded second lieutenants and alcoholic NCOs would likely have driven me mad, or alcoholic, or both. I don't regret not having joined the Army. I probably wouldn't have made a very good soldier anyway and the Army might well have "accidentally" lost my re-enlistment papers in the event that I decided I could stand a second hitch.

I went through AFEES, but never signed the dotted line. It's probably a good thing. Who ever heard of a six-foot-four tanker? I probably couldn't have fit in an M60 even with no clothes and a thick layer of chicken grease on my person. I tried to climb into an ex-Soviet T55 in a park in Leningrad and found the experience laughable (and I could only conclude that the average Soviet tanker was short, wiry, and had a very high threshold of pain).

Anyway. Enough of the tanks.