It's a frosty, bright November morning in rural Minnesota, and the 60-ton battle tank is rumbling heartily, like a big metal cat ready for the hunt. My head is poking out of the driver's hatch, beneath the 22-foot-long cannon barrel. This beast, an '80s British Chieftain, was designed to tear up the toughest, most advanced armor the Soviet Union could throw into battle. Opposing me, 30 feet away, sits a 15-year-old Ford Probe.

I toggle the gearshift with my left foot, push the release button atop a pair of levers used for steering, and press the gas pedal. The behemoth eases forward like a land-bound battleship, the treads clanking with a near-musical chime. Fifteen feet to go. Ten. Five. A part of my brain, conditioned by years of careful driving, starts screaming, Warning! Collision imminent! And then I'm lurching upward to the sound of crunching and shattering. As I settle back toward level again, I set the brakes, climb out of the hatch, and clamber down to assess the damage.

Opposing me, 30 feet away, sits a 15-year-old Ford Probe.

This moment of mechanical omnipotence has come courtesy of Drive A Tank, an internal-combustion fantasy camp founded five years ago by a heavy-equipment contractor named Tony Borglum. I arrived yesterday in the small town of Kasota and met with the 26-year-old at his garage, a hangar-like space crammed with military vehicles: two enormous tanks, a couple of self-propelled guns, an assortment of armored personnel carriers, and a vintage Jeep mounted with a .50-caliber machine gun. Some countries may be less heavily armed.

Borglum's father has a concrete-recycling business, and the family is used to running large equipment and machining parts. This expertise came in handy when, in 2006, Borglum and his father decided it would be fun to start collecting British army vehicles. There's a small community of collectors in the United States, so the men didn't have a hard time tracking down machines from around the globe, each one costing somewhere between $30,000 and $100,000. "I'm used to running excavators that can grab a 40,000-pound rock and drag it out of a hole," Borglum says. "So driving a tank is light work. It's just an armored box on tracks—no different than a dozer."

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It's not the size and power of military vehicles that appeals to Borglum as much as their sheer orneriness. "With a Caterpillar or a John Deere, they try to build things in a way that makes sense," he says. "With the military stuff, it's like if they can stick something on somewhere and it fits, that's where they stick it on. It's like they go out of their way to make it a pain in the ass."

Drive A Tank's daylong sessions—which are priced starting at $400—begin with a classroom discussion on vehicle operations. After class the 20 to 30 students in attendance start out in machines such as a 33,000-pound vehicle called the FV433 Abbot. It's tanklike, with half-inch-thick armor and a 14-foot-long cannon barrel, but Borglum explains almost apologetically that it's technically not a tank but a self-propelled artillery piece. (However, I bet if you drove it up the White House driveway, your obituary would refer to the vehicle as a tank.)

"Driving a tank is light work. It's just an armored box on tracks—no different than a dozer."

I climb into the driver's hatch of the FV433, and Borglum sits atop the armor just behind me. Instead of a steering wheel, you hold two levers. Pulling on one side slows the tread, so that the vehicle skews in that direction. Tenderly I nurse the gas pedal and creep forward, acutely aware of the vast bulk I'm now directing. I make a few turns and carefully accelerate to walking speed. This doesn't feel like rumbling along in a car—it's more like grinding through a thick plank with a circular saw.

We head out to play on the Borglums' 24 acres of woodland. The principles of driving the tank couldn't be simpler, but getting a feel for it takes a while. Visibility is severely limited. Where exactly the sides of the vehicle are is a matter of pure speculation. From the condition of the bark on most of the trees, I can tell I'm not the first one to encounter this issue.

I trundle along a maze of dirt roads, gaining confidence and speed until I'm approaching this vehicle's max speed of 18 mph. Launching up a small hill, I come over the crest and find myself heading onto an iced-over pond. After decades of driving in the Northeast, I know how this is going to play out: the skid, the spin, the sideways crash. But now the tank comes down, smashes through the ice, water goes flying, and we go rolling along, right on course.

There's a life lesson in this: When you're in a tank, things don't happen to you. You happen to them.

In combat, real tank drivers wouldn't be rolling around with their heads sticking out. They'd be buttoned up behind thick metal hatches. To give me a sense of this, Borglum introduces me to the FV432 armored personnel carrier. He lets me drive it around a bit with the front hatch open to get a feel for the steering, then closes the hatch. Now I'm peering at the world through a narrow opening, similar to the mail slot in a door. I find it incredibly hard to gauge where the edges of the vehicle are, but fortunately Borglum has a second set of controls. He's watching from the rear hatch and takes over from time to time to save his trees. It takes a lot of muscle power to haul back on the brake levers as I make tight turns on the winding, hilly track, and the exhaust-perfumed air and enclosed space soon make me queasy.

When you're in a tank, things don't happen to you. You happen to them.

After hours of practice, I've earned the main course: my moment of glory in the Chieftain. This is undeniably a real tank, a mountain of metal whose scale is hard to get your head around. Based on the initial cost and the amount of gas it guzzles, Borglum says it costs him $1000 an hour to run. Worse, if it suffers a major breakdown, he may never be able to get it back into working operation. So he's as cautious with the tank as a teenager coddling his first ponycar. All he'll ever let a customer do with the Chieftain is drive it forward a few dozen yards, which wouldn't be very interesting unless you were doing something novel, like flattening a car.

After my own head-to-head with the Probe, I climb down and find the old Ford is now about a foot high and lodged under the tank's right rear tread. Carefully, so as not to catch debris under the tank's mudguard, Borglum backs the Chieftain off the car and returns it to the garage. An employee drives up in a forklift to haul the carcass away. Nothing remains but an oil stain, a scattering of glass and plastic, and the surge of raw power still tingling in my hands.

Jeff Wise is a contributing editor for Popular Mechanics and the author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. For a daily dose of extreme fear, check out his blog.

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