The Burning Military Tank Story

                                                   The Burning Military Tank Story

                                                                       1961

                                                                 A true story

                                             Written 12/2010 Re-written 4/27/2016                                                       

                                                               Howard Yasgar

     This true story is all about one of the biggest coincidences that I have ever encountered in my entire life.

      In 1957, I was nineteen years old, and living in Westville Connecticut, at the time I was working part time as a mechanic.

       I was fortunate enough to work for a highly skilled local New Haven mechanic named Ray.

      I had met Ray while I was working for his cousin Tony who leased a  Gulf gas station near my home.

      It was Tony who first introduced me to his cousin Ray.

      Once I met Ray, and I saw how good mechanic he was, I knew I wanted to go to work for him.

      Ray looked typically Italian, he was average height, slender build, with wavy black hair

      Despite his looking Italian he never acted like he was Italian, and he always told everyone that he was Irish, why he did that I don’t know.

     I  knew that his stepfather, was a railroad cop and he was Irish, and I knew Ray’s girlfriend was Irish.

      I had met Ray’s stepfather, the railroad cop, once, and he actually fit the Irish Cop stereotype.

     He looked exactly like what an Irish cop looks like. I knew that because New Haven had lots if Irish cops on the police force.

      They all were all overweight, all spoke with a heavy Irish brogue and they all had red noses from excessive drinking.

      Ray once told me a story about his stepfather.

      He said his stepfather almost lost his job with the railroad because of it.

     It seems that one evening his stepfather was patrolling the railroad yard when he heard someone breaking into one of the box cars.

     He pulled his gun and scared the crooks off,  but when he saw that the box car was full of men’s shoes he climbed inside the box car and he was caught taking a few pair.

      It was around early in 1958 when I started to get nervous about getting drafted into the Army.

      I became so worried about it, that I was thinking about joining the Army Reserves.

     I thought joining the Army Reserves would be a lot better than waiting for the draft board to come and get me.

      I already knew that I wanted to be a mechanic in the Army, and if I got drafted, I might miss the opportunity to go to mechanics school and I might get forced into the infantry.

      So as time passed, I knew that I soon had to make a decision, as to what to do and eventually it got to the point where I thought about it every day.

      The only person I felt that I could discuss it with, was my boss Ra, I thought I had once heard him mention that he had been in the Army.

      So one cold winter day, Joe and I were sitting in his small office drinking coffee.

      I mentioned my upcoming dilemma to him, I was hoping he could give me some good advice as to what to do.

      As soon as I mentioned the word Army, Ray rolled his eyes, and he said “I don’t think you should join the Army”. That was exactly what he said to me.

      So, I asked Ray if he was ever was in the Army, and why he felt that way? “Yes Ray said, I was in the Army, but they let me out”.

      How the heck did they let you out, I asked?

      “Well, Ray said, that’s, a long story”.

      Then he was silent for several minutes, and finally he said, “Several years ago, I was drafted into the army and I was sent to school to be a tank mechanic”.

      “Then after tank mechanics school, the Army transferred me to Germany”.

    “In Germany, I was assigned as a mechanic to a unit training with M46 tanks in the German countryside, he said that at the time, the Army was using mostly all M46 tanks which had gasoline 12 cylinder in them”.

      He said , one day, his sergeant, instructed him to weld a bracket on the back of a tank.

      The tank was parked on the edge of a big field. So, Ray said, “I drove my jeep over to where the tank was. My  jeep my welding torch on it”.   

      Ray started to weld the bracket onto the back of the tank.

     He then said, “I didn’t see it, or smell it, but there was gasoline on the grass, I think it was because the tank must have had a gasoline leak somewhere, and it caught on fire. I grabbed the fire extinguisher from the tank, but it didn’t work, so I frantically drove everywhere with my Jeep looking for another fire extinguisher.

     But by time I got back the whole tank was on fire, and it was completely destroyed, ammunition was blowing up and everything”.

   Ray then said “The Army blamed him for everything that happened, and they wanted me to reimburse the government for the tank which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. He said, the whole thing was totally unfair, they wanted to court-marshal me, but then instead of making me pay for the tank, they gave me a dishonorable discharge, and that’s how I got out of the Army”.

     Ray’s face was now very serious and I could see he was getting mad, then he said, “The Army just needed someone to blame for the accident, and that was me, that’s why I think you shouldn’t join.”

    That was the exact story just as Ray told it to me, while we were sitting in his tiny office that winter day in 1958.

      I was 19 years old at the time and I had listened intently to every word Ray had said.

      But I finally decided to join the Army Reserves anyway.

      Once I joined the Army Reserves, my unit was all drivers of  heavy fuel tankers, so I trained as a heavy fuel tank truck driver.

      All along, I thought it was a pretty scary job, it was like driving a bomb around.

      But eventually I went off to complete my eight weeks of basic training, at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

     After eight weeks of basic training all my buddies were assigned to active duty assignments all over the United States, but for some reason I was assigned to come back and report to a motor pool at Fort Dix.

     At first I wasn’t particularly happy about being a truck driver at Fort Dix, but soon I learned that being a truck driver in the Army was the best thing, you were treated like a big shot, everyone wanted to know you, because riding in the back of a truck was better than marching.

     Now my job working as a driver meant I hung around the motor pool until someone on the base needed a truck and driver.

     That meant that every day I could  be assigned to a different place on the base.

    Now, Fort Dix was like a city, you never knew where you could be assigned next. There were hundreds of buildings and warehouses there.

     Each of the warehouses usually had a Staff Sergeant in charge of it, and each warehouse needed A truck and driver.

     Usually the Staff Sergeant was a non-commissioned officer who had come up through the ranks, he was usually a soldier that had already traveled all over the world with the military, and most of them have seen some military action somewhere.

     When a Staff Sergeant came close to their retirement, they were usually put in charge of one of the supply warehouses, it was sort of a final cushy job to repay them for their twenty years of good service.

     All of the Staff Sergeants I ever met were pretty serious and pretty tough, and most of them had seen combat usually in Korea.

     It was on a very cold winter day when I was assigned to report with my cargo truck to a supply warehouse at Fort Dix.

     They had requested a 2-1/2 ton truck and a driver.

     When I arrived, it was 9 in the morning and everyone was standing around the pot belly stove to keep warm.

     On this particularly cold morning the five or six soldiers that worked in the warehouse were all huddled around the pot belly stove talking about nothing important.

      So I walked over and stood by the stove warming myself with them.

     As I stood there I saw the Staff Sergeant come out of his freezing office to warm up next to the stove.

     The Sergeant  was a short muscular guy about 5 foot eight tall, he had dirty blond crew cut hair and a ruddy complexion.

     His Army fatigues were tailored to fit him perfectly, and I saw he had paratrooper wings, which meant he had been military airborne.

      This morning he wasn’t smiling, his face looked like it was chiseled out of stone, he looked very tough, not the  kind of guy you wanted to mess around with.

      As we stood by the stove the Sergeant rolled up his trouser leg, and put his foot up onto the stoves platform to warm it up. I could see that his leg was horribly scared.

      It was really bad, it looked like he had a lot of skin grafts.

      What the hell happened to you Sarge, I asked?

    He looked at me, and his facial expression changed. He said, “I was a tank commander in Germany, and we were out on maneuvers, when all of a sudden my tank caught on fire and burned up.”

      “Because I was the commander, it was my responsibility to let my crew escape before I got out, but by then it was too late, and my legs were burned pretty bad.” Jesus, I said, “how did the tank catch on fire?”

       The Sergeant replied, The fire was caused by some young little Italian asshole mechanic named Ray from New Haven, Connecticut.”  I could have swallowed my Adams apple.

       He said “Ray was the mechanic working on the tank’s engines, and he forgot to tighten up the fuel lines. The gas leaked into the tanks engine compartment and caught fire when we started it up.”

      “I was taken to a hospital in Germany, and I later heard the little shit of a mechanic had been court marshaled. He said, “I’ll never forget that little prick”

      “I had been talking to him when he was fixing the tank, he told me he had a stepfather in New Haven that was a railroad Dick.”  

      The Sergeant also said “I spent six months in the hospital recovering from the skin grafts, and after I got out of the hospital, I went to look for that little shit in Germany, I was going to beat the crap out of him, or kill him, but I heard that he had already been dishonorably discharged from the Army.”

     He went on to say that, “if I ever catch that little bastard, he made his hand into a fist, but he didn’t say what he would do.”

     After listening to the Sergeant’s story, and seeing his legs, I wondered if I should tell him that not only did I know the mechanic from New Haven, but that I worked for him.

     That story he told me was a bit more serious than the story that Ray had told me just a few years before.

     I knew the Sergeant had no reason to lie to me, and he had the scarred legs to prove his story.

     I thought, what a coincidence my meeting this Sergeant.

     Considering the Army is so big and he was just one guy out of hundreds of thousands of soldiers that were stationed everywhere.

     I decided it would be better if I opted to say nothing more about Ray, and that’s what I did, I said nothing.

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