Consider the mechanics of the event. The tank was an M60A3 Patton, a decommissioned veteran of the Cold War. It was stored, with others, at the California Army National Guard Armory on Market Street in San Diego. Its engine worked. Its tracks turned. Shawn Nelson, a troubled plumber who had recently lost his job and believed the government had stolen his patented plumbing designs, knew the armory’s layout from his own prior service. He climbed a fence, entered an unlocked hatch, and started the engine.
For twenty-three minutes, he piloted the steel behemoth. It moved not with Hollywood speed, but with a dreadful, tectonic inevitability. It rolled down residential streets, shearing off fire hydrants that geysered into the dark. It crushed parked cars, compressing them into metallic folds. It snapped concrete light poles and dragged their wires. The police had no weapon on hand that could stop it. They fired pistols at the vision blocks, creating starred cracks but no halt. The tank achieved a top speed of perhaps thirty-five miles per hour on the freeway before its tracks caught a concrete median divider and it ground, sparking, to a standstill. A police officer climbed onto the hull, opened the hatch, and shot Nelson once. The event was a bizarre, localized war game, a symbol of immense destructive power unleashed on a landscape of sprinklers and sedans, ending not with an explosion, but with the slow hiss of a broken hydrant.