The Burning Military Tank Story

The Burning Army Tank Story

1961

A true story

Written 12/2010* 1,845 Words*

By Howard Yasgar

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

In 1957, I was nineteen years old and living in Westville, a suburb of New Haven Connecticut.

I was fortunate to be able to work part time for a top-notch auto mechanic, his name was Joe Cousins.

I met Joe when I was working at his brothers-in-law Gulf gas station located near my home.

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

Joe, looked like he was Italian, he was average height, with a slender build, and he had wavy black hair

Despite his looking Italian he never said he was Italian, and he always told everyone that he was Irish, why he did that I will never know.

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

Joe once told me a story about his stepfather, who he said was a railroad cop.

He said his stepfather almost lost his job on the railroad because of what he did.

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

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

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

I became so worried about it that I was thinking about joining the Army Reserves and going to a mechanic’s school.

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

So as time passed, I knew that I had to decide what to do.

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

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

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

Then Joe 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 sent me to Germany”.

“In Germany, I was assigned as a mechanic to a tank training unit.

They were training in the German countryside using M46 tanks. They were tanks that had

12-cylinder gasoline engines in them.

Joe 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, Joe said, “I drove my jeep over to where the tank was. My jeep also had my welding gear on it so I started to weld the bracket onto the back of the tank.

Joe 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. Suddenly 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 destroyed, ammunition was blowing up and everything”.

Joe then said “The Army blamed him for everything that happened, and they wanted him to reimburse the government for the tank which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Joe 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”.

Joe’s face was now very serious, and I could see he was getting mad, then he said, “The Army just needed some fall guy 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 Joe told it to me.

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

Eventually I decided to join the Army Reserves anyway, and my New Haven unit trained me as a heavy fuel tank truck driver.

All along, I thought driving a fuel tanker in wartime was a scary job. I thought it was like driving a bomb around.

Eventually I was assigned to report to a motor pool at Fort Dix.in New Jersey.

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

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

Each of the warehouses usually had a Staff Sergeant in charge.

Usually, the Staff Sergeant /warehouse manager was a (NCO) noncommissioned officer who had come up through the ranks, they were usually seasoned soldiers that had already traveled all over the world with the military, and most of them have seen some tough military actions somewhere.

Thus, when a Staff Sergeant came close to their retirement time, 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 military service.

All the Staff Sergeants I ever met were serious and tough, and many of them had trained in Germany and seen combat in Korea.

It was on a very cold winter day when I was assigned to report with my M-35 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.

So, I walked over and stood by the stove warming myself along with the other guys.

As I stood there, I saw the Staff Sergeant come out of his freezing cold office to warm up next to me at the wood burning pot belly stove.

This Staff 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 perfectly, and I saw he had paratrooper wings, which meant he had been airborne.

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

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

It was 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, as he said, “I was a tank commander in Germany, and we were out on maneuvers, when 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 said the fire was caused by some wise ass young little Italian asshole mechanic named Joe Cousins, he was from New Haven, Connecticut.” When I heard that, I swallowed my Adams apple.

He said “Joe Cousins was his 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 Italian 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 then said, “I spent six months in the hospital recovering from the skin grafts, and after I got out of the hospital, I went back to look for that little shit in Germany, I was going to kill him, but I heard that he had already been dishonorably discharged from the Army.”

He went on to say, “if I ever catch that little bastard, he then 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 Italian mechanic from New Haven, but that I worked for him and I was

His friend.

The story the Staff Seargent told me was a bit more serious than the story that Joe 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 it was, my meeting this Staff 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 my boss Joe, and that’s what I did, I said nothing.

. What a coincidence.

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