My Army Daze
My first 4 years in the U.S. Army was spent on tanks. My first unit was the now de-activated 1/70th Combined Arms Task Force or CATF at Ft. Knox, KY where I was on M60A3's(105mm), M1's (105mm), M1A1's (120mm), and M1A2's (120mm). I was then transfered to Germany and stationed in Vilseck, about an hour from the Chek Republic. We were the most forward deployed combat unit in the European theatre. When I arrived we were aligned under the 3rd Infantry Division and my unit was designated 1/37 Armor Regiment, or AR for short. Halfway through my tour we were redesignated and became 1/63 AR, under the 1st Infantry Division. While in Germany I was on a M1A1 Heavy and also as a HMMWV (or Hummer) driver when my unit was deployed to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) to conduct United Nations border Patrols along the Serbian border. I re-enlisted to change my MOS (military ocupational specialty, or job) to 68X which is an Electrical/Armament Repairer on the AH-64 Apache. After school I was stationed at Ft. Campbell, KY and assigned to 1/101 AVN which is an attack battalion. We have ancient AH-64A's which are due to be rebuilt into D models next year (I'll be out of the Army by then!!!).
For those of you who have never been around tanks here's the basic rundown. The M60 series tanks use an Allison V12 turbo diesel for power and have been around since the Vietnam era. There are only still used by foreign countries and the National Guard. The M1 series tanks use a multifuel turbine engine and first came out around 1984. The engine is essentially the same as the turbine used in the Army's OH-58 Kiowa series helicopters and will run on anything from jet fuel to kerosene. They are governed down to only 1,500 hp but you make do with what you have :) The M1's had the same gun as the M60's but the M1A1's used the NATO 120mm smoothbore gun. The M1's use a special type of armor called Chobham which takes a ceramic honeycomb and sandwiches it between two armor plates. On the front of the take this is about 2 feet thick and accounts for the 60 ton weight on the M1. Each updated version of the M1 series uses more armor and is therefore heavier, with the newest version , the M1A2, having a combat weight around 80 tons. The main difference between the M1 and M1A1 is the gun and the NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) filtration system which overpressurizes the inside of the tank so that all openings to the outside have a steady stream of air coming out of them to keep contaminates from being able to come in. With the M1A2 there are a lot more changes. The M1A2 is a completely digital beast with an independent thermal sight for the tank commander. It has a central data bus which allows all the different systems on the tank to "talk" to each other and has touch screens instead of switches and gauges. When I was on them they were still in development so I got to help deal with all the teething problems :(
Enough babble here's the pics!
Tanks at the National Training Center