Com-Central.net

I can remember a few incidents like this in the old days of BAOR back in the 1980s!

www.bbc.com/news/uk-31431596

Was it an accident ? or did the brittish tank just went for the old german couple

Walter

In the 1/10th Cavalry (Armored) in RVN in 1970, we had a driver of an ACAV who placed the wrong oil can in the holding bracket in the engine compartment. While driving down the switchbacks on the east side of the infamous Mang Yang Pass, the can vibrated out of the bracket (which was too large for the can he was using) and fell into the connection between the power pack and final drive on the right side.

The drive on the affected side locked up tight, throwing the vehicle (which had to be doing about twenty miles per hour - the ACAV crowd liked to race those things around as much as possible) into an immediate hard right turn, worse than the typical neutral steer. The track did a 270° turn, and ended up teetering over the edge of the road, just a few feet shy of tumbling down the slope to the next switchback.

I was having my tank lug down the slope, the next vehicle in the column. If it hadn't been such a scare for all concerned, it would have been hilarious. The driver ("12 Track" Jack Roth, the guy who sent a nude Polaroid of him standing next to his track) got a good dressing down from the troop XO, but it was still widely considered by one and all to be one of the high points of the month at the next cook out.

Folks who are interested in tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other military vehicles don't usually recognize the amount of time maintaining the damn'd things. I'd estimate that my drivers and I spent ten times as much time "firing" the grease gun as we did any of the weapons on the tank. Roth may have made a storage error (very little of the "official" maintenance equipment remained on the older vehicles), but his heart was in the right place. Too bad his head wasn't there as well.