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
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
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.”
CHAPTER 4
Mr. Universe
