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.