and tried to write stories about the soldiers who’ve fought in them. It’s not easy to write about a metal cocoon, the first thing you want to do when you get inside any tank is to get out of it, unless the bullets are flying. Under fire, you want to be inside the tank. That’s hard to imagine. In the tank, everything’s sharp and unfinished and it hurts when you crash around inside it. And you do. Your face is never far from the massive breech that fills the turret and the other crew and the metal walls. You keep turning, looking for space to push out a leg or rest your arm somewhere and you don’t find it. There’s nothing forgiving or soft in a fighting compartment. It’s a hard metal sleeping bag. The new tanks aren’t noisy, you wear headphones that cancel out the din. But they wrap you in a dead sound, some frequency of white noise to trick the brain, and when the corporal commander speaks you flick your head back in surprise at the clear voice in your head, “down right, down right, happy days”. If you can, you’ll stand up on your seat and lean on the edge of the hatch, head and shoulders out in the air. The tank’s suspension makes the ride weirdly soft, a trundle in a bus. But the helmet won’t fit and the headphones are clamping, the impact jacket around your chest is strapped so tight you can’t breathe right and you’re sweating, salt stinging your eyes. It’s hard to get any sense of how fast you’re moving and how far things are from you. Tanks mess up your senses. And there are other tanks and crews out there on the plain or in the wood, all of them trying to kill you.
It’s not easy to write about tanks or make films about them that ring true but I’ll try Fury. I worry it’ll start off real and then for the finale one lone Sherman will be wiping out hundreds of charging soldiers. I’ve tried to watch any films about tank crews, showing them inside their tanks. It’s a short list: Sahara, Lebanon, The Beast. And I still hope I can sell my book about a Sherman crew, fighting a duel with a Tiger. Like the forecastle mariners riding a storm, tankies invest all their trust and hopes in their machine, willing it to carry them back safe to the people and places they love. That would be a story worth telling, if I could tell it true and well.
