Tanks (Of Metal and Man ... and Children)

I am ... and always have been ... fascinated with tanks.

I mean the large, rumbly, dangerous kind, not the underground water storage units.  

I'd like to argue that tanks have a certain mechanical beauty if you can ignore their intended purpose for long enough, and these manufactured monsters intrigue me in the way that I guess one becomes fascinated and comes to study the malignant, ugly forces of nature - the disasters, the wars, and crimes of man.      

Movie Poster for White Tiger
courtesy of Letterboxd

There are particular reasons why I'm pondering metal war machines this weekend.  One was last night's viewing of "White Tiger," a Russian movie about a mystical German tank on the Eastern front (for the Russians, really, the Western front).  

"White Tiger" was at its heart, an engaging portrait of the ongoing quest of one Russian man vs. a rampaging metal German ghost (with shades of Moby Dick), with a third act that went completely off the charts into a metaphoric treatise on madness, European history, and the idea of war being an integral part of the human condition.  It was thought provoking at the very least, with a lot of attention to detail, a very European feel, and a seeming fearlessness for narrative choices.

The second reason I started thinking about tanks was this weekend's celebration of Children's Day in my adopted country of Thailand, something that I observed from two time zones away this year.

Children's Day is the annual excuse for Thais to celebrate the young of the country, and for all adults to celebrate their childhood anew.  On Facebook, profile pictures switch over from the day's selfies to grainy pictures from long ago, and everyone heads out hand in hand with their sons and daughters, or nephews and nieces, to attend festivals and fairs, and sometimes even to the locations where the Thai military has rolled out tanks and military equipment for people to admire.  

Children's Day tank clambering image
courtesy of Appon's Thai Life

Strange, but true.

I also can't help but remember a significant toy from my childhood, a wooden tank, which my father constructed for one of my birthdays.  There are no pictures or videos of this marvellous creation (this was long before our current film-everything, digitised age), but it stands large in my memory, a big, boxy, splintery plaything with wheels, complete with hatch holes and a cannon, that I clambered over again and again, acting out all manner of war scenarios.  

The wooden tank existed as its own entity, but one could even remove the wheels and slot it perfectly into a John Deere trailer that was often attached to the family mower, and ride it about the property, but I don't think this happened more than once or twice.  I'm sure I got too heavy for that, and the attachment bar between tractor and trailer was not, as I remember it, that strong.

This giant wooden tank was there for the longest time, it seemed, and then one day, perhaps when I wandered off to college (maybe before then), it was dismantled.  Or, like the White Tiger of the movie, it just rumbled off into the forest and disappeared.

Many years passed, and after years in Thailand, and time back in the United States, I returned earnestly to the subject of tanks in my graduate program at American University, when I dissected the mythos and history of the machine for a class entitled "Turn of the Century," studying the early days of its creation in World War I all the way to the legend of 1989's "Tankman," the Chinese activist from Tiananmen Square, who stood bravely in front of a line of army tanks, stopping them quite literally, for a time, in their tracks.

Image courtesy of Iconic Photos

In my analysis, I came to equate the tank as a union of man and the machine, building on the themes that were being explored in the literature of that time.  Stories of robots, futuristic landscapes, and even tanks (which H.G. Wells first imagined in his short story The Land Ironclads), were one of many artistic means used to explore the steady encroach of machinery into people's lives, and these visions would later see their dystopic fruition in the mechanistic slaughter of the First World War.

Wanting to share something positive during my final presentation on this subject, I offered the idea that no matter how big the machine became, there was always the human inside to consider.  After all, "Tankman" could not have left such a lasting imprint on the human imagination without the assistance of the tank driver, within the machine, who refused to drive over him.

Not much, maybe, if and when one thinks about tanks ... but still the seed of a rather hopeful note to carry forward into the New Year from this most recent Thai Children's Day.