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2nd Armored Museum, Desert Storm captured vehicles


MattS
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I was at Fort Hood, TX when the 1st CAV and 2nd Armored were returning from DS. This was 1991 and Soviet equipment on US Army posts was not nearly as common then as it is now. I volunteered at the museum on the weekends and got to know the curator pretty well. Eventually, we had many of the vehicles in running condition and used them to make a threat-ID training video for AH-64 Apache pilots by driving them around Hood. All of the vehicles the 1st CAV captured were welded shut and put into place at their museum on the other side of Hood, these are 2nd Armored's spoils of war.

 

BMP-1, fully operational. I drove it several times and have photos of the interior. It was the sports car of Iraqi armor, small and quick.

 

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2nd Armored captured a NEW T-72, less than 400 KM on it, new inside and out. Here it is parked in a motor pool while we jump started it. Turns out there was a switch in the engine compartment we had to flip to get it fire but once the 35L V-12 came to life it was quite impressive. Primitive by modern standards, but still functional. The gentleman supervising in t-shirt and jeans is CPT Kent Goff.

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The 2S1, M1974 122mm SP was an interesting vehicle. There was a tunnel that ran alongside the engine that connected the driver's compartment to the crew stations in the rear. It had been damaged and was repainted once it arrived. The sandbag was for sandblasting the old paint off.

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Nice pics - I know that in Asadabad, A-Stan back in 2003, they got a T-55 up & in running order - what a piece of #$%^ of a tank though!

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That's an interesting array of former Soviet types. Crude with no frills by western standards, but nonetheless effective...just like the old T34!

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Even the old M-60 MBT seemed like a Cadillac after driving Soviet designs. They were tight and cramped with manual unsynchronized transmissions and 2 big handles for steering. At least the T-72 had what we called a "Hurst speed shifter", a lever that sat in a vertical notched chrome bracket on the driver's right with the gears increasing as you knocked it down. The engine in the 72 had so much torque, you could put it in neutral, step on the gas, and feel the 780 HP engine rock that 41 ton tank forward on its tracks.

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our state guard brought back a tank for the state museum. can't remember what model but what a POS. No wonder we kicked their a-- in the tank battles

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I learned early on why they wore padded tanker helmets (I still have mine), there's a lot of stuff to knock your head on in those tanks. The T-62 was the worst, there was this huge metal triangular spike that stuck down at an angle from the interior of the rear-center turret roof. Near as I could tell, if you released the main gun tube (say it was elevated) to immediately level it, the top of the breech would bang against the spike to keep it from bouncing, sort of a very low tech shock absorber. I banged my head against that thing so many times...

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Great photos. (Got some "flashbacks" from my days with the 2AD in the early 80's)

 

The post baseball field was up the hill from the theater and behind the museum. The post Sergeant Major was NOT happy that we were 'test driving' the T-62 around the outfield.

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The 1st Brigade of the 2nd Armored was known as "Tiger Brigade" and they marked the vehicles they captured with that name as seen on the rear of the MTLB.

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The T-72 was a low profile MBT. We were using compressed air to turn the engine over, but we ended up jumping it from the 2S1 using a modified slave cable.

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Me and my adopted 'baby', a Soviet T-62 that had appeared mysteriously in the US Army inventory (courtesy of Israel) after a short war in the Middle East in the 1970s. The original labels inside in Cyrillic had Hebrew (I think?) translations under them with English written under those. We used a modified starter out of a M-113 to get this tank running.

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Matt---I loved these pictures---I helped ship a lot of this iron out of Jubail and Dammam after ODS---There would have been one more BMP for the Lejeune museum but the Marines drove it off the pier...and nobody cared...there was plenty more where that came from...I'll see if I can dig out my pictures of the piers where we prepped these babies for shipment.....good times...
Al

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Thanks for the comments! I have had these photos in an album and never had a place to post them until "Spoils of War" came around. I also have a set of black and white photos taken by the Fort Hood Sentinel newspaper photographer the day we drove all the Iraqi vehicles around making the training video. The ones where CW2 Jay Blank decided to 'test' the smoke laying capabilities of the T-72 are impressive. Here's a sneak peek!

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