Today I took my youngest grandson to the American Military Museum in South El Monte, California, better known as Tankland. The nickname is appropriate—there are certainly plenty of tanks—but it doesn't begin to describe the place. Spread across roughly seven acres are about 100 pieces of military equipment spanning more than 80 years. There are World War II Sherman tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, anti-aircraft weapons, trucks, ambulances and equipment extending into the early part of the 21st century. There are aircraft as well, including a Huey helicopter gunship from the Vietnam era.
It was already hot when we arrived around 10 in the morning, and there wasn't much of a breeze. Most of the collection is outdoors, so this probably wasn't the ideal August morning for wandering around seven acres of old military equipment with a three-year-old. Still, we made our way through it, stopping whenever something caught our attention, and with that much machinery around you, something always does.
Oddly enough, one of the things that stayed with me most wasn't a tank at all. It was a Higgins boat. We've all seen them in the old films, landing craft racing toward a beach, the front ramp eventually dropping and the men pouring out. Standing beside one is different because what strikes you is just how insubstantial it seems. It was, after all, largely a plywood boat.
Then you try to imagine being one of the Marines or soldiers hunkered down inside it as that little boat bobbed and pitched in the open water, racing toward an enemy-held shore. Machine-gun fire was coming from ahead, artillery shells were exploding around them, other landing craft were moving alongside them, and men were being wounded and killed. Everyone inside knew that eventually the ramp in front of them was going to fall and they would have to go forward. Between them and everything happening outside was a relatively thin piece of plywood.
We tend to make the machinery of war enormous in our memories—battleships, bombers, tanks and artillery. Yet thousands of men went toward some of the most heavily defended beaches of World War II inside something that, standing beside it today, looks remarkably small and vulnerable. It was one of those moments when an old machine stops being an exhibit and you begin thinking about the people who were once inside it.
A little farther along, I found something else. Sitting among the tanks, artillery and military vehicles was an old LAPD truck: Rescue Vehicle No. 2. That one I didn't have to imagine. I remembered it.
The rather harmless words Rescue Vehicle painted on its side disguised what most people associated these vehicles with—the battering ram. I remember when they were introduced, and I even remember the newspaper coverage about them. More importantly, I remember seeing one work.
I remember watching that massive vehicle move up on a residential house with the long metal ram extended in front of it. I watched that ram drive through a door and rip the door away. There was nothing subtle about it. There was the tremendous crash of metal and wood giving way, the noise of the vehicle and officers moving in, shouting, "Police! Police!" It was noise, movement and adrenaline, and that is how the machine remains in my memory.
Rescue Vehicle No. 1 had the ram mounted on it the last time I saw it at the Los Angeles Police Museum, operated by the Los Angeles Police Historical Society in the old Northeast Station in Highland Park. I don't know whether it is still displayed there today. But here was Rescue Vehicle No. 2, parked among the tanks, quietly deteriorating in the hot Southern California sun.
That was the part that struck me. In my memory, the machine is moving toward a house. I can hear the crash when the ram hits. I can hear the officers shouting as they move inside. At Tankland, there are no officers, no doors being ripped from their frames, no urgency and no noise. There is just an old vehicle, its paint aging under the sun, parked among a collection of other machines whose working lives ended long ago.
A few minutes earlier, I had stood beside a Higgins boat and tried to imagine the Marines and soldiers hunkered down inside as that little plywood craft carried them toward an enemy shore. Now I was standing beside another silent machine, except this time I didn't have to imagine what it sounded like. The Higgins boat represented a history I could only try to understand. The rescue vehicle carried a memory I could still hear.
My three-year-old grandson, of course, understood none of that. To him, we were spending a hot morning with Grandpa looking at tanks, helicopters, trucks and other very large machines. Perhaps his presence made the experience a little more meaningful to me, though, because he was looking at old machines while I was beginning to think about the memories attached to them.
Somebody once rode in that Huey. Somebody once worked inside one of those tanks or drove one of those military ambulances. Frightened young men once hunkered down inside that plywood landing craft as it carried them toward a beach where other men were trying to kill them. Every one of those machines was once new, every one of them once made noise, and every one of them once had people around it who understood exactly what it was, what it did and why it mattered. Now they sit quietly in rows.
Maybe that's what eventually happens to all of our memories. The noise fades, the people disappear and the urgency is forgotten. What was once frightening, exciting, important—or simply part of an ordinary working day—eventually becomes a story, a photograph or an old machine slowly deteriorating in the sun. Another generation walks past it and wonders what it was used for, while someone from an earlier generation can still remember how it sounded.
Tankland is worth visiting simply for the collection. Admission is inexpensive—only a few dollars—and you can easily spend an hour or more wandering through it. You can't climb on the vehicles, for obvious reasons, but you can get close enough to appreciate their size, their construction and, in the case of that Higgins boat, their surprising vulnerability.
For me, though, the most interesting things weren't necessarily the biggest. One was a plywood boat that made me think about the extraordinary courage required to ride toward an enemy shore with almost nothing between you and the gunfire. The other was an old police vehicle that required no imagination at all. I remembered its noise and movement. I remembered when it was something new.
I went to Tankland to look at history. I hadn't expected to find one of my own memories slowly becoming part of it.
