Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 3 Confessions of a Tank Driver

THE MILITARY BASE NEAR Graz was headquarters of one of the tank divisions of the Austrian army. I learned this because all young men in Austria were required to serve, and I was looking for a way to fit the army into my life goals. I realized that the logical thing for the army to do with somebody my size would be to put me in the infantry and have me carry machine guns and ammunition up mountains. But the infantry was based in Salzburg, and this was not consistent with my plan. I wanted to stay in Graz and continue with my training. My mission was to become the world champion in bodybuilding, not to fight wars. That wasn’t really the mission of the Austrian army either. We had a military because we were allowed to have one. It was an expression of sovereignty. But it was a small military, and no one had any thought of engaging in real combat.

I was looking forward to joining the military and being away from home for the first time. I had just finished my education, and the sooner I completed my service, the sooner I could get a passport.

Being a tank driver sounded really good. Several friends who had joined the army were stationed in Graz, and I’d asked a thousand questions about jobs on the base. There were many positions for new recruits, including being in the administrative office or the kitchen, where you never touched a tank. My friends were in the armored infantry, which are troops trained to support tanks by riding on top of them into battle, jumping off, searching for antitank mines, and so on.

But it was the tanks themselves that fascinated me. I love big things, and the American-built M47 Patton, named after the World War II general, certainly fit that. It was twelve feet wide, weighed fifty tons, and had an 800-horsepower engine. It was so powerful that it could push through a brick wall and you’d hardly realize it if you were inside. It amazed me that someone would actually trust an eighteen-year-old with something this big and expensive. The other big attraction was that to qualify as a tank driver, you first had to be licensed in driving a motorcycle, a car, a truck, and a tractor-trailer. The army would supply the training for all that, which would have cost thousands and thousands of schillings in the civilian world. There were only nine hundred tanks in the whole Austrian army, and I wanted to stand out.

My father, who still had dreams of me becoming a policeman or military officer, was happy to put in a word with the base commander, a buddy of his from the war. He was a huge sports fan and was pleased to bring me into the fold. Once I’d completed basic training, he’d see to it that I could set up weight-lifting equipment on the base.

Everything would have worked out perfectly except for one miscalculation. I’d started winning trophies in weight lifting by now. I was the regional junior weight-lifting champ, and just that summer I’d won the Austrian power-lifting championship’s heavyweight division, beating much more experienced men. Even though you could tell at a glance that I was still just an oversize kid, I was starting to compete successfully in bodybuilding too. I won a regional championship and actually placed third in the competition for Mr. Austria—good enough to share the stage with Kurt Marnul, who was still the king. Just before enlisting, I’d signed up for my first international competition, the junior version of Mr. Europe—a crucial next step in my plan. I hadn’t realized that for the whole six weeks of basic training, there was no leaving Graz.

I didn’t mind basic training. It taught me that something that seems impossible at the start can be achieved. Did we ever believe that we could climb a cliff in full field gear? No. But when we were ordered to do it, we did. And along the way, we even stuffed our pockets with mushrooms, which we turned over to the cook that night to make soup.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to compete for Junior Mr. Europe. I stole every minute I could to hit my practice poses in the latrine. I begged the drill sergeant to treat this like he would a family emergency and to let me go to Stuttgart, Germany, to compete. No chance. The night before the event, I finally decided fuck it and walked out of the gate.

A seven-hour train ride later, I was in Stuttgart, hitting my poses in front of a few hundred fans and soaking up the cheers. I won the title 1965 Best Built Junior Athlete of Europe. It was the first time I’d ever been outside Austria and the biggest audience I’d ever had. I felt like King Kong.

Unfortunately, I was punished when I returned to training camp. I was put into detention and made to sit by myself in a cell for twenty-four hours. Then my superiors got word of my victory, and I was freed. I kept my head down for the rest of basic training, and soon I was able to report to the tank unit my father’s friend commanded. From then on, the army became a fantastic joyride. I set up a weight room in the barracks, where I was allowed to train four hours a day. Some of the officers and men also began training too. For the first time in my life, I could eat meat every day—real protein. I grew so fast that every three months I outgrew my uniform and had to be issued the next larger size.

Motorcycle training started right away, followed by cars the next month. We learned basic mechanics, because you always had to be able to fix your vehicle if something simple went wrong. Next was how to drive trucks, which turned out to be difficult because the military trucks had manual, unsynchronized transmissions. To shift up or down, you had to go into neutral and double clutch and rev the engine to the proper speed so that it could mesh with the next gear. This led to much gear grinding and big drama, because after only a little practice on the base, they took us out in real traffic. Until shifting became second nature, it was very hard to keep your eye on the road. I’d be distracted by the shift lever, and all of a sudden I’d see cars stopped in front of me and have to brake and downshift and do the thing with the clutch—all with the instructor yelling at me. By the time we came back to the base, I was always soaked with sweat; it was a great way to lose body fat.

The next stage, learning tractor-trailers, was hairy too, especially backing up using mirrors and opposite-direction steering. This took me a while to master and some crashing and banging into things. It really felt good when I finally graduated to tanks.

The M47 is built to be driven with one hand, using a joystick that controls the gears and the motion of the treads. You sit in the left front corner of the hull and have a brake and gas pedal for your feet. The metal seat can be raised and lowered; normally you drive with the hatch propped open and your head sticking out of the tank to see. But when you button up for battle, you drop the seat, close the hatch, and peer through a periscope. At night, there was a primitive form of infrared that let you just make out trees and bushes and other tanks. I could fit in the seat despite my size, but driving with the hatch shut could be very claustrophobic. I felt really proud to be learning this massive machine, something totally different than I had ever dealt with.

The nearest maneuver ground was a big tract of land along the ridge between Thal and Graz. To reach it, we had to leave the base and drive an hour and a half up a winding, gravel back road—a company of twenty tanks rumbling and clanking past houses and hamlets. Usually we drove at night, when civilian traffic was at a minimum.

I took pride in my driving ability, which meant being able to maneuver with accuracy and drive smoothly through holes and ditches so that my tank commander and crewmates didn’t get banged around. At the same time, I was somewhat catastrophe-prone.

When we camped in the field, we had a regular routine. First, we’d work out: I had my weight plates and bars and exercise bench all stowed in compartments on top of the tank, where tools were usually kept. Three, four, or five other guys from the platoon would join me, and we’d exercise for an hour and a half before getting something to eat. Some nights the drivers had to stay with their tanks while the other guys went to the sleeping tent. We’d bed down by digging a shallow hole, putting down a blanket, and parking the tank overhead. The idea was to protect ourselves from wild boars. We were not allowed to kill them, and they roamed freely in the training area because I think they knew that. We also posted sentries who would stand on top of the tanks so the boars couldn’t get at them.

One night we were camped near a stream, and I woke up with a start because I thought I heard the boars. Then I realized there was nothing on top of me. My tank was gone! I looked around and found it twenty or thirty feet away, sticking tail-up in the water. The nose was submerged, and the cannon was stuck down into the mud. I’d forgotten to apply the big brake, it turned out, and the ground was sloped just enough that the tank had slowly rolled away as we slept. I tried to get it out, but the treads just spun in the mud.

We had to bring in an eighty-ton towing unit, and it took hours to pull out my tank. Then we had to get it to the repair depot. The turret had to be taken off. The cannon had to be sent out to be specially cleaned. I had to sit in confinement for twenty-four hours for that one.

I could be a risk even in the tank garage. One morning I started my tank, adjusted my seat, and turned to check the gauges before pulling out. The readings were fine, but I felt the tank shaking a little, like the engine was running rough. I thought, “Maybe you should give it a little gas to smooth it out.” So I gave it gas, keeping an eye on the gauges, but the shaking only got worse. This was very odd. Then I noticed that dust was coming down. I looked up out of the hatch and realized that instead of just revving the engine, I’d set the tank in motion and was pushing it through the garage wall. That’s what was causing the shaking. Then a pipe burst, and water was spurting everywhere, and there was the smell of gas.

People were screaming “Stop! Stop!” so I shut off the tank. I got out and raced down the length of the garage to find the commanding officer, who knew my father. I figured he was my best hope. I’d seen him just that morning, and he’d said things like, “I ran into your dad the other day and told him how great you’re doing.”

I knocked on his door and said, “Sir, I think that I caused a little bit of a problem.”

He was still in a great mood. “Oh, don’t worry about it! What is it, Arnold?”

“Well, check it out; you’ve got to see.”

And he said, “Come on.” He patted me on the back as we walked outside, still in the spirit of the morning, as if to say, “You’re doing well.”

Then he saw the water spurting and guys milling around and the tank jutting through the wall.

He changed personality instantly: screaming, calling me every name he could think of, saying that he was going to call my father and tell him the opposite of what he’d said before. The veins on his neck were bulging. Then he went cold and snapped, “When I get back from lunch, I want everything to be fixed. That’s the only way to redeem yourself. Get the troops together and do it.”

The nice thing about the military is that it’s self-sufficient. The division had its own bricklayers and plumbers and building supplies. Luckily, the roof hadn’t fallen down or anything major, and my tank, of course, was made of steel, so it was fine. Guys thought my accident was so funny that they jumped right in to help, so I didn’t have to organize much. By afternoon, we had the pipes fixed and the wall repaired and just had to wait for it to dry so we could put on the stucco outside. I was feeling good because I’d had a chance to learn about mixing cement and laying cinderblock. Of course I had to put up with the whole base teasing me, “Oh, I heard about your tank.” And I had to spend a whole week on KP duty, peeling potatoes with all the other screwups right where everybody could see us when they came to get their food.

By spring 1966, I was starting to think the army wasn’t necessarily practical for me. My victory in Stuttgart the previous fall had attracted a lot of attention. Albert Busek, one of the organizers of the competition and the editor of Sportrevue magazine, wrote a commentary predicting that bodybuilding was about to enter the Schwarzenegger era. I got several offers to become a professional trainer, including one from Busek’s publisher, Rolf Putziger, who was Germany’s biggest bodybuilding promoter. He offered me a job managing his gym in Munich, Germany, the Universum Sport Studio. It was extremely tempting: there would be a wonderful opportunity for training, and I’d have a better chance to become known. In Austria, bodybuilding was still a sideshow to weight lifting, but in Germany, it was more established in its own right.

In the bodybuilding world, word had continued to spread about my victory in Stuttgart. I’d been on the cover of several magazines because I made a good story: this Austrian kid who had come out of nowhere and was eighteen years old with nineteen-inch biceps.

I decided that it made sense to request an early discharge from the army. Along with the request, I submitted a copy of Putziger’s job offer and some of the magazine stories about me. My commanding officers knew my ambition to become a bodybuilding champion, and I thought this would be a great step for me. But I wasn’t holding my breath. While the minimum term of enlistment in the Austrian army was only nine months, tank drivers were required to serve three years because of the cost of their training. I’d heard of drivers getting discharged early because of family illness or because they were needed back on the farm, but I’d never heard of anybody getting discharged to pursue a dream.

It wasn’t that I disliked the army. In fact, it was one of the best things that had ever happened to me. Being a soldier had done a lot for my self-confidence. Once I was living independently from my family, I found out I could depend on myself. I learned to make comrades of strangers and be a comrade in return. The structure and discipline seemed more natural than at home. If I carried out orders, I felt I’d accomplished something.

I’d learned a thousand little things in the course of nine months: from washing and mending shirts to frying eggs on the exhaust shield of a tank. I’d slept in the open, guarded barracks for nights on end, and found out that nights without sleep don’t mean that you can’t perform at a high level the next day and that days without food don’t mean you’ll starve. These were things I’d never even thought about before.

I aimed to be a leader someday, but I knew it was important to learn obedience as well. As Winston Churchill said, the Germans were the best at being at your throat or at your feet, and that same psychology prevailed in the Austrian army. If you let your ego show through, they’d put you in your place. Age eighteen or nineteen is when the mind is ready to absorb this lesson; if you wait till thirty, it’s too late. The more the army confronted us with hardship, the more I felt like “Okay, it’s not going to worry me; bring it on.” Above all, I was proud to be trusted at age eighteen with a fifty-ton machine, even if I didn’t always handle the responsibility as well as I might have.

My request for an early discharge sat around for months. Before it was acted on, there was one more blot on my military record. In the late spring, we were on a twelve-hour nighttime exercise from six o’clock at night till six in the morning. By two o’clock, the company had maneuvered into positions at the top of a ridge, and the order came down: “Okay, break for food. Tank commanders report for a briefing.”

I was on the radio joking with a friend who’d just been given a newer version of the Patton tank, the M60, which was powered by diesel. He made the mistake of bragging that his tank was faster than mine. Finally I challenged him to prove it, and we both took off down the ridge. I would have stopped—a voice of reason in my head told me to—but I was winning. The rest of the guys in my tank were going nuts. I heard someone shouting at me to stop, but I thought it was just the other tank driver trying to get the advantage. When I got to the bottom of the ridge, I stopped and looked back for the M60. That was when I noticed a soldier clinging to our turret as if his life depended on it. He and a couple of other infantry had been sitting on the tank when I took off.

The others had either jumped off or fallen; he was the only one who’d been able to hang on to the end. We turned on our lights and went back up the hill—slowly, so that we wouldn’t run over anybody—and collected the scattered troops. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. When we arrived at the top, three officers were waiting in a jeep. I drove past and parked my tank as if nothing had happened.

No sooner had I climbed out of the hatch than the three officers all started screaming at me, like a chorus. I stood at attention until they were finished. After the yelling stopped, one of the officers stepped forward, glared at me for a moment, and then started to laugh. “Tank Driver Schwarzenegger,” he ordered, “move your tank over there.”

“Yes sir!” I parked the tank where he had pointed. Climbing out, I noticed that I was standing in deep, thick mud.

“Now, Tank Driver Schwarzenegger, I want you to crawl down under the length of your tank. When you come out the back, climb up on top, down through the turret, down through the hull, and out of your emergency hatch below. Then do it again.” He ordered me to repeat that circuit fifty times.

By the time I had finished, four hours later, I was coated with twenty pounds of mud and could barely move. I must have smeared one hundred more pounds of mud inside the tank climbing through. Then I had to drive it back to base and clean it out. The guy could have thrown me in jail for a week, but I must admit that this was a more effective punishment.

I’ll never know for sure, but I think the tank drag race may have worked in favor of my early-discharge request. A few weeks after the incident, I was called to a hearing with my superiors. The commander had the bodybuilding magazines and my job offer letter on his desk. “Explain this to us,” he said. “You signed up to be a tank driver for three years, and then you requested a few months ago that you want to leave this summer, because you have this position in Munich.”

I liked the army, I told them, but the Munich job was a giant opportunity for my career.

“Well,” the officer said with a smile, “due to the fact that you are somewhat unsafe around here, we’ll approve your request and let you go early. We can’t have you crashing any more tanks.”