By Dr. Brian Regal
History is all around us if we only take the time to look and listen. Several years ago my partner Lisa and I were headed to Frenchtown for a bit of Sunday afternoon antiquing. As we headed down the highway that leads into town I was delighted to suddenly see an old friend parked along the roadside. It was a friend I hadn’t seen in years, decades in fact. I pulled over to say hello and introduce Lisa. My friend was an M60A3 battle tank. The same model I served on years before when I worked for Uncle Sam. It was now parked on the grass outside the local National Guard Armory.
Seeing this vehicle brought back many memories of friends and adventures I had around the world. I knew every nut and bolt, every inch, and every ounce of this fifty-five ton war machine that was once the scourge of the Russians and the Warsaw Pact, and which helped keep World War III from happening.
New Jersey has decommissioned military vehicles and equipment on display all over from Bergen to Burlington. Most people just drive right past them hardly noticing or realizing what they represent. These once fearsome weapons of war sit mute, their histories of heroic daring do and sacrifice long forgotten. They try to remind us, but they rarely do as we don’t listen. You can find such relics from all periods of American history from the Revolution to the Gulf conflicts scattered around.
Sometimes you find these relics in groups like at the New Jersey Militia Museum at Lawrenceville, or at Sea Girt, but mostly they exist as solitary, lonely old heroes like the M551 Sheridan at the American Legion hall in South Plainfield or the M60A3 (there are a lot of these around) in Burlington not far from where the Jersey Devil is buried. There are M3 Stuarts, M26 Pershings, and M42 Dusters standing silent guard. There are also artillery pieces such as the pair of 37mm anti-tank guns at the American Legion Post near Chester or the two captured German guns on Kearny Avenue brought back by WWI doughboys. There’s the enormous muzzle loading Dahlgren guntaken from the Civil War USS Richmond in Lambertville.
These machines have stories. The men and later women who served on them called them home. They lived on them, ate on them, communed with the universe in them, depended on them for their lives. They hung their personal gear on the outside, and pictures of loved ones inside, and dreamed of their futures while riding them. They thought of them as friends. They gave them names like Lucky Legs, China Girl, Mary Ann, Opps Upside Ya Head, The Beast, Joan J, and Candy-O (I named my M60 Dreamboat Annie for Ann Wilson of the band Heart). They held off the Japanese attack at Tenaru on Guadalcanal, hammered the Rebel works at Vicksburg, broke into the Rhineland and froze at the Bulge. They stood down the Commies on the Iron Curtain and liberated Kuwait. Today, few of us care or even remember.
If you see one of these vehicles along the roadside, go up to it and listen close. It’s like when you hold a seashell to your ear so you can hear the ocean. These are not statues which are designed to remind us of history. These old tanks and guns don’t represent history, they are history. They were there. They will tell you their stories if you let them. They want you to learn the important lessons they have to teach about honor, courage, history, and even friendship. Because history is all around us, if only we take the time to look and listen.
Brian Regal teaches the history of science, technology, and medicine at Kean University. He was a Tread Head in the 1970s and 80s. His latest book is The Battle Over America’s Origin Story (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022).