Picture of modern day tank division in iraq11/14/2023 Todd Hibbs, now a good friend of Gilkey's, pointed him back toward the fighting. Gilkey ran out with the rest of the troops and, in the dark, made a wrong turn.įirst Sgt. Upon crossing into Iraq, he says, he could hear bombs and gunfire, then suddenly everything went quiet and the driver of his vehicle opened the rear hatch. "I don't do a lot of praying, and, in this particular case, I think I did." The rugged track design gives it both speed and mobility over any terrain it may encounter. T-80’s six-gear transmission generates 1000 horsepower. First appearing in 1976, it was also the first tank equipped with a gas propulsion engine as its main source of power. "To be honest, I don't think there was anyone who wasn't scared - maybe borderline terrified," Gilkey recalls. The T-80 is a third-generation main battle tank. troops were making what seemed to be final preparations to invade Iraq.įinally, after months of waiting, Gilkey and the soldiers he was embedded with from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division loaded into their vehicles and headed into Iraq in the early morning hours on March 20, 2003. The night vision optics came just in time: U.S. Gilkey made a request for night vision optics from his employer at the time, The Detroit Free Press, which made a Fed-Ex shipment to him in Kuwait. "I don't remember who it was," Gilkey recalls, "but one of the soldiers pulled me aside and said, 'You know, if you want to have pictures, if and when this happens, you should have night vision.' "
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