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Why you should drive a tank over a minivan at least once in your life

Closing the periscope hatch on a FV432 Armored Personnel Carrier is akin being sealed into a 30,000 lb. metal coffin. Fortunately, once inside, you have marginally better visibility than you would upon interment, looking out through a clear Plexiglas screen that is approximately the size and shape of the window on a business envelope.

“You can see, sort of, what is directly in front of you,” Tony Borglum — the 27-year-old owner of Kasota, Minn.’s Drive A Tank — tells me via our radio headset, over the din of the rumbling diesel engine. “But you lose your peripheral vision, your rearward vision, and your depth perception.”

The 30-acre property was an active quarry in the 1800s, but has since grown into a dense forest, and as I blast up and over mounds of local limestone, into gooey trenches, and across a mocha-colored mud lake, the combination of the landscape, the sightlines, the arcane controls, the treads’ massive articulation, and right-handed British driving position conspire to guarantee disorientation.

“When I first learned to drive on a racetrack,” I tell Tony, “my instructor told me, 'Look at where you want to go.' Not so easy in here.” As I crest one of the mile-long trail’s larger hills, I’m nearly blinded by the late afternoon sun, and as I break over and power downhill on the tank’s massive gravitational pull, I spot someone standing right on the trail’s edge. Tony’s voice crackles over the headset. “Don’t look at the photographer.”

The FV432 is the second of three tanks I try, having been offered a modified version of Drive a Tank’s $2,499 “5-Star General” package. Basic “3-Star Lt. General” packages start at just $399 but include seat time in only the FV433 Abbot SPG we drove first. So the majority of customers — 90% of whom hail from out of state — opt for the $599 “4-Star General” package, which adds a second tank. And more machine guns.

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I ask Borglum who the majority of his customers are, and though he rattles off a lengthy list — bachelor parties, bachelorette parties, corporate team builders, father’s day gift recipients — he says that many of them tend to fall into a familiar category. “You know how they say that Corvette drivers are a mainly grey haired guys in their 50s? Those are the same guys who tend to come here.”

The experience also includes instruction in tank ephemera, an area in which Borglum — despite never having served in the military — is fluent. Outstanding bits of information lodged in my mind, like the 38-liter size of the Russian T-55 engine, and the quick interchangeability of the American Abrams’ power pack—a five-ton, cubic engine/transmission module designed for ready removal and replacement.

But the most memorable revelation comes in Tony’s deflation of my assumptions around tanks’ durability and indestructibility. “Tanks are designed to be cheap and disposable,” he says. They’re good for supporting (and crushing) infantry. Other than that, they’re slow, unwieldy, and require a massive supply chain. The aforementioned Russian T-55 was designed to travel only a few hundred miles before breaking down or being abandoned. The all-metal treads on the British Chieftain MK10 Battle Tank are as fragile, vulnerable, and irreplaceable as the spine on your osteoporotic great aunt.

This last bit became evident during our penultimate activity: The Car Crush. For an up-sell of $599 (included in the 5-Star package), Borglum forklifts a fluid-drained car out of his onsite stockpile, lines it up in the path of the left tread of the Chieftian, ensconces you in the open air driver’s seat, and supplies eye protection. My crushable is a chrome-wheeled 1999 Cadillac Eldorado, and once I toe the motorcycle-like transmission up two clicks, decimation is no more difficult than flooring the gas pedal. Safety glass spatters, and the roof is flattened into the seat bottoms. It feels, coincidentally and meta-textually, like a vintage Caddy going over a speed bump.

“The weight ratio of the tank to the car—121,000 lbs. to about 4,000 lbs.—is similar to that of you to a pop can,” Borglum says. “But like a pop can can crush up around your foot when you stomp on it, the car can sometimes stick to the tank.”

A piece of window trim does just this in our path over the Eldorado, hanging between the treads like a piece of spinach in a smile, but Tony isn’t concerned. “Hoods and trunks, we have to worry about. They can snap the tracks.”

I ask him what the most popular vehicle is to crush. “Minivans,” he says without pause. “They have a nice low approach and a long roof and lots of glass, so the tanks like them. And the people who tend to come here — men, mostly — tend not to. We just had a group out here and they crushed eight minivans.”

We finish the day in the state of the art firing range, where I am handed, serially, a WWII-era STEN 9 mm machine gun, a fully automatic M4 assault rifle, and a Barrett M107 A1 .50 caliber anti-materiel gun. This is my first attempt with any firearm, so I am mostly terrorized by the noise and recoil of the STEN, and the spastic flaming bursts of the M4. But on my one attempt with the M107, the bullet for which is about the size of a newborn cat, I put a hole right through the red center of the target. “Often times the most inexperienced customers are our best customers,” Borglum says. “Because they follow instructions.”

Before we put the lights out, Borglum locks all of his firearms in safes, and locks the safes inside a vault. I ask him, living as he does above the shop in a rural area, if he ever worries about break-ins. His giant black dog, Sherman (named for the American WWII-era tank), barks as if in warning. Borglum smiles. “Who is going to rob the guy with all the tanks and machine guns?”

Photography: Ian Merritt