In the military, you often have to work with the same group of people for an extended period of time.

What would you do if one of those people was not just a jerk, but also made your job harder and potentially more dangerous?

That is what happened to the soldier in this story, so whether guy told him he wouldn’t help with maintenance, he accepted that and made it so the jerk missed a day of leave.

Check it out.

Tank driver tells me he doesn’t want to see or hear from me, so he doesn’t.

Back when I was in the army, my tank driver was someone who you’d really not want to spend time with unless you absolutely had to (like, for instance, if you were in a tank crew with him and needed the tank to actually get from point A to point B).

This is very interesting.

When it comes to crew breakdown in a tank, it goes like this:

• Tank gunner (my position) – coolest job in the tank, you get to shoot the big gun. You also have to do the least amount of maintenance work on the tank.
• Loader – does most of the grunt work in the tank. Has to carry and load multiple heavy tank shells (~45-50kg each). Not much maintenance work, but spends like 2-3 hours cleaning the 3 machine guns.
• Driver – drives the tank. Pretty simple, but a good driver will give you a smooth ride, a bad driver will make you feel every dip and bump in the terrain. Does the most maintenance work since they are in charge of the tank tracks and bogies (steel wheels in the tracks)
• Tank commander – knows how to do all the positions, doesn’t do any maintenance since they are usually in briefings on maintenance day.

A good crew knows how to begin to think alike, doing things together without asking.

It helps that you sleep together in the tank, so you all get to know each other pretty intimately (nothing like urinating in a water bottle to remove any shyness between crew members).

Splitting up the work seems to be a smart way to do it.

When it comes to maintenance, you can either have all the gunners from the platoon get together and work on all the platoon’s tanks together, same with drivers/gunners, or each crew can do their own tank.

Usually we prefer the first option because it goes quicker.

In this case, my crew was sent to support an infantry exercise on a different base in the middle of the desert on our own – we were simulating a whole tank company, but budget cuts means only one tank was sent.

Sunday we got to base and deployed with our tank down into the exercise area.

Monday-Wednesday night we exercised.

Thursday morning the drill ended, and it was maintenance day.

Crucial element here is that you don’t get to go home for the weekend until your maintenance is complete, the flip side being that you could leave as soon as maintenance was completed and signed off on.

Everyone has a bad day sometimes.

The entire exercise, the driver was being a complete jerk.

I don’t know if his girlfriend broke up with him or whatever, but he was even more annoying than usual.

Aside from his attitude, his driving was so bad the TC almost broke a rib one time, and I nearly got a black eye when shooting in motion and he (unintentionally, I’m sure) aimed straight for a small ditch.

By the time Thursday came around, the loader and I couldn’t get rid of him for the weekend quickly enough.

But alas – first, maintenance beckoned.

One of the tasks the gunner has to do is clean the cannon with a oiled cleaning rod – this is a three man job, loader in the tank and two people clean it from the outside.

It can’t be done by one person no matter how strong they are.

I asked the driver to help me since the loader was inside the tank.

The driver angrily told me he didn’t want to hear from me or speak to me.

No worries.

I found somebody to give me a hand for a few minutes and we got the job done.

At least he got it done.

I completed the rest of my maintenance work pretty quickly (like I said, not much, actually) with the help of the loader, and then I gave him a hand cleaning the machine guns.

The two of us were done before lunchtime, just waiting for the TC to sign off on our work so we could start our weekend early.

Driver, on the other hand, realized that he didn’t have any other drivers to help him maintain the tracks (tension, tightening bolts, greasing ports, etc.), and he had told us to he didn’t want to hear from us.

He was still working on the tank when it got dark and was told to stop for safety reasons.

He had to continue the job on Friday morning and missed out on a day of leave.

Some people just have bad attitudes.

I wanna say that his attitude changed on Sunday when we got back to base, but you know it didn’t.

Thankfully after about 2 more months of his nonsense he was transferred out. I have no idea where he is today.

I’m still good friends with the loader and TC, the driver can get bent.

Having one bad day is understandable, but it sounds like this driver was just an awful person all the time.

It’s a good thing they got away from him.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

He certainly did.

It was a fun story.

I had no idea.

Wow, how could you sleep like that?

Sadly, people often don’t learn that lesson.

If you won’t help others, they won’t help you.

Sadly, this tank driver didn’t learn that valuable lesson.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.