THE ARMY TANK ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER WRECKED, THEN BOUGHT BACK

These days, Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to climb into a 50-ton army tank and drive it straight over parked cars, folding them flat for laughs and for charity. The strange part is the tank itself. It is the very machine he was handed as an 18-year-old in the Austrian army, the same one he spent that year backing into walls and rolling into streams. To understand how the future Terminator ended up owning the tank of his teenage disasters, you have to go back to 1965.

Bigger Every Month

In 1965, every 18-year-old Austrian man owed a year of military service, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was no exception. He turned up already gripped by a single obsession, bodybuilding, and treated the army mostly as an inconvenient thing standing between him and the gym. The military assigned him to a tank unit and taught him to drive the M47 Patton, a 50-ton American machine rushed out during the Korean War and later passed to allies like Austria.

As it happened, the army was the best thing that could have happened to his physique. For the first time in his life he could eat meat every single day. He’d grown up poor in the Austrian countryside, where his mother stretched a vegetable garden to feed the family and meat was a rare treat. Now the food was endless, and he swelled with muscle, packing on around 25 pounds in that one year and outgrowing his uniform so fast the army kept having to issue him new ones.

But no training schedule was going to contain what he really wanted.

Over the Wall

A few weeks into basic training, an invitation reached him for a bodybuilding contest across the border in Stuttgart, Germany: the Junior Mr. Europe title. There was one problem. Recruits in basic training weren’t allowed to leave the base for any reason.

So Arnold went over the wall at night with the clothes on his back and barely enough money for a third-class train ticket. He arrived rattled, forgot his posing routine, and had to borrow a stranger’s trunks and tanning oil just to get on stage. None of it mattered. He won. First place, Junior Mr. Europe, the first real title of his life.

When he got back, the army locked him in a cell for about a week. Then something unexpected happened. Instead of burying him in punishment, his superiors decided to get behind him. Word of the win had spread, and they realized the strange kid was serious. They put together a makeshift gym for him and helped him get the extra food he needed. His bodybuilding suddenly had the army’s blessing.

His actual job was another story.

The Worst Tank Driver

Arnold’s assignment was driving that Patton, and he was, by any fair measure, terrible at it. One morning, warming up the engine inside the tank shed, he fumbled into the wrong gear and reversed the 50-ton machine clean through the wall, snapping a pipe and flooding the place. His commander, by Arnold’s own account, nearly had a heart attack. Another time he forgot to set the brake and let the whole tank roll backwards on its own into a stream, sinking it deep enough that a recovery vehicle had to be brought in to drag it out.

The best story came at night. Arnold lined his tank up against a friend’s newer one for a race down a hill in total darkness, no lights, both of them crashing blind through the trees far faster than those things were ever meant to go. He’d forgotten one detail: around 15 men were still riding on top of his tank. Every one of them was flung off into the dark on the way down. No one was badly hurt, and the two drivers paid for it with six hours crawling through a mud course.

For all the wreckage, Arnold would later insist he was a fantastic tank driver. The record suggests otherwise. Either way, he never forgot that machine.

Buried, Then Bought Back

Almost thirty years later, Arnold was rich, world-famous, and able to indulge just about any whim he pleased. What he wanted was his tank. Not the same model, the exact one, number 331, the Patton he had trained on and terrorized as a teenager.

When he went looking, he found the Austrian army had long since retired it and buried it in the ground as part of scrapping the old fleet. So they dug it back up, and Arnold paid around $20,000 to have the 50-ton relic shipped across the ocean to California.

He still has it, and he still isn’t gentle with it. He uses it to crush cars, flattening limousines for the cameras, once alongside talk-show host Jay Leno. Mostly, though, he points it at a better target. Through his after-school charity, kids who stay in school get invited out to climb on the tank, ride it, and roll it over a wreck or two with him.

The 18-year-old who couldn’t stop destroying that tank by accident grew into the one man allowed to destroy things with it on purpose. These days he does it to keep a few kids in school.