For Father’s Day, my dad and I drove a tank

ORLANDO — “Is it possible to drive a tank on mushrooms?” my father asked me by phone on a recent Sunday. “That’s going to make a great story.”

I was driving east across the state from St. Petersburg as he cruised south on Interstate 75 from our family home in Ocala. The plan was to meet at Tank America, Florida’s only attraction inviting visitors to drive a tank.

I doubt that Doug Spata, who like his only son worries about taking the exact safe amount of Tylenol, would consume psychedelics. (I have not asked.) I laughed at his joke, and reminded him we were on our way to drive a tank. It didn’t need to be weirder than that.

A news release landed in my inbox last month promoting Tank America’s Father’s Day special: Drive a tank over some cars in some smash smash, vroom vroom father-offspring bonding at a special rate of $450 instead of $600. I’d immediately asked if they’d let me bring my dad to test it out in the name of journalism. They said yes. My dad, who is 59 and semiretired, wholeheartedly agreed. And there we were. It would certainly be more novel than another fishing trip or outing to a driving range.

In an industrial corner of the city well beyond the theme parks and outlet malls, Tank America occupies 14 wooded acres between a sheet metal factory, a barbed-wired tow lot and an elementary school. The attraction moved to Orlando in late 2022 after a few years on the Space Coast.

On arrival, we entered the main building, labeled “forward operating base.” We signed waivers and browsed the military decor, which included a rack of extremely realistic replica assault rifles labeled “please touch.”

I took a seat behind a large (fake) machine gun mounted on a bipod with a long chain of (fake) ammunition and looked through the scope. I realized it was aimed directly at the woman working the front desk, which, frankly, felt rude, so I got up. My dad lifted an M-16 off the rack and handed me his phone to take a picture.

Was this all embarrassingly poser-ish? I got self-conscious. Why had I worn this army green shirt and these cargo pants? Was it even OK to play with instruments of war? But also, was it really different from going to the movies to see Brad Pitt play a battle-hardened tank commander in “Fury,” or logging on to Xbox for a “Call of Duty” shootout?

I squirmed at the thought of struggling to get the tank in gear, or plowing into a tree in front of my dad, a mechanically gifted guy for whom I spent countless hours holding the flashlight as he repaired various engines in my youth, and who used to drag-race. He asked questions about the tanks’ radiators and fuel and torque, and I could tell he was not at all concerned about the driving.

Tank America recently retrofitted all nine of its 58-year-old tanks with new Cummins engines to replace the aging originals made by Rolls-Royce, which, we were told, more than once, was a major feat of custom engineering, time and money. The originals ran on anything flammable in a war-zone pinch, even pure motor oil. The new ones take diesel.

The cannons, before they were disarmed, could fire more than 9 miles. “If Disney wants to take a fight with us, we can hit that mouse from here,” Brandon joked, which I chose to read not as animosity toward Disney World, but more of a real-world example to help visualize the range.

Brandon listed some available add-ons, such as the mud hole ($50), a custom video taken by cameras mounted on the tank ($75) and a car crush ($700). The Tampa Bay Times was allowed to try out the full package free of charge.

“What if someone decides to drive one through the fence?” my dad asked, and we learned that, thankfully, these 16-ton vehicles have a “kill switch” letting the on-board “tank commander” shut it all down if someone heads for the highway.

After the briefing, we chatted with John Kinney, who co-founded Tank America with his business school friend, Troy Lotane. He summed up their founders’ story as, “He called me one day and basically said, ‘Did you know that we can buy tanks?’ I said, ‘No, but you’ve got my attention.’”

Tank America’s tanks are, in fact, not American, but British FV-433 Abbots. Kinney said that’s because the U.S. government bans the direct sale of armored vehicles to civilians under any circumstances (though American-made tanks sold abroad have occasionally been later purchased by U.S. collectors). The completely demilitarized tanks at Tank America never saw combat, but we were told that one did appear in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy. Buying a tank costs in the range of $80,000, Kinney said, but the parts and upkeep are what’s truly expensive.

It was time to drive. We stepped out back and Dad was given a headset to communicate with Kinney, who would ride along and instruct him over the roar of the engine. Dad sat at the controls up front, with his head and shoulders outside (a $300 “combat lock-in” is available for those who want to operate the tank with the hatch closed and limited visibility, popular for team-building corporate events, but no, thanks). I climbed into a compartment that went up to my armpits.

Nothing on a tank is soft, not even the seats. It was loud, and the metal was hot from the sun and felt like it was burning my arm. I wondered, far too late, if riding in a tank was the best idea for two guys with prior surgeries to repair their genetically doomed lower backs.

Then the tank shot off with a surprisingly fast acceleration. First, we cruised through an open field where all grass was long ago trampled into tread-covered dirt, then into the heavily wooded trail course that accounts for much of Tank America’s acreage. The tree-heavy site was chosen, Kinney said, to ensure a sort of jungle feel. Twenty-five-ish mph felt faster, especially going over human-made hills and taking sharp turns.

I immediately started grinning, then laughing. We cruised past dummies in uniform pointing plastic rifles, past a pond labeled “bomb hole,” a crashed airplane fuselage and a skeleton in a parachute dangling from a tree.

We rolled across a shallow trench and over pre-crushed cars and through the giant puddle, throwing smelly, nearly black mud in the air. I could tell from the speed of the turns on the second go-around that my dad was getting more confident, maintaining speed into turns as he pulled the lever to apply the brake to one tread or the other. Our spines were fine.

“Yeah, that was awesome,” my dad said, pumping a fist as he climbed out after about 15 minutes. Driving the tank was easy, he said. (I wound up not driving at all.) The other group came inside after us, whooping with mud on their faces. They’d clearly hit the big puddle faster.

My energized father remarked on the fortitude of real soldiers who’d surely spent endless hours sealed inside such uncomfortable vehicles under constant threat of sudden attack, and added some unprintable speculation on the dimensions of their anatomy. I pondered how strange earlier generations might find it that we’d have the resources, leisure time and inclination to joyride on machines made for such arduous work.

It was late in the afternoon, and we sat at one of the tables in the room with all the replica guns, awaiting our turn to drive a different tank used specifically for crushing cars. A man and woman were checking in at the desk, and the guy told us he was just there to watch his friend as she crushed a car.

While the majority of Tank America’s customers are men, including a fair number of bachelor parties, Kinney said there are plenty of women who want to drive a tank.

What is it about high-powered vehicles that makes them a particularly masculine fascination? I wondered. I’d read about a Harvard scientist who theorized it relates to how humans, especially men, evolved to throw things. It’s possible we enjoy vehicles because, like a chucked rock, they’re propulsive.

Pondering this, I told Kinney I had a dumb question: “Why is this even fun?”

He talked about people’s craving for unique experiences and a good story but ultimately landed on something stunningly obvious: Tank driving makes for an excellent social media post.

Maybe there was something sociological at play with the way men seem to cement relationships shoulder to shoulder, absorbed in an activity.

It’s not that my dad and I don’t talk about feelings and such, but it’s just so much easier when we’ve come together ostensibly to watch football. Or to flatten a sedan in a dirt field.

And then it was our turn. We went back to the muddy field, where I watched from the sidelines as Dad boarded a different tank with a different instructor. (“The car crush is above my pay grade,” Kinney said.) The instructor guides drivers closely, because hitting the car off-center could apparently tip the tank. The goal was to drive the tank on top of the car at a T-bone angle, smashing it, but stopping just before driving off the other side, rolling back to avoid a steep drop and hairy landing.

My dad asked for clarification as to why he could not completely traverse the car, twice, which is when I knew that he was thinking about doing it anyway.

First my dad used a dirt ramp to hit the aughts-era Toyota Avalon head-on, exploding windows and flattening the roof.

He circled the tank around for the main event, the T-bone. The tank sped up and climbed over the car at a speed that made it seem like there was no way it could stop before it would careen over the other side. Yet it stopped at the last second.

About three-quarters of the tank seemed to be hanging over the edge of the Toyota.

“Whoa,” said another Tank America employee, who’d taken my phone to get video of the car crush as I scribbled notes. “That’s the closest I’ve ever seen anyone come to going all the way over.”

“I should have just done it,” my dad said later, when we were sitting at a pizza place down the road. We laughed, but I knew he meant it.

We pulled up the video the guy had taken. It was mostly of the ground. I think he’d mixed up the record and pause. We’d have to just remember it.