Some vehicles scare me. Even a picture gives me a chill.

They are military vehicles, of course. But not all military vehicles are created equal.

I can imagine a situation in which I’d be happy, even thrilled, to see an M1 tank trundling toward me. (There are thousands of American soldiers, not to mention Kuwaitis, Bosnians, and others for whom this tank is a symbol of strength and safety.)

But other vehicles radiate malevolence. If one is heading in my direction, I am surely suffering, and about to suffer more. And if I am driving one, it is because I am going to do something bad. Not necessarily painful, but morally wrong.

Look at this one. I don’t know what it’s called, so “pusher” will have to do. It’s a normal military truck—this one is an East German troop carrier—with a red and white fence attached to the front. The pusher is used to control large crowds, particularly protestors.

The pusher drives into the crowd and shoves them back. Imagine what kind of government needs such a thing so frequently that it’s part of the military fleet: a government which is hated by its people and must use force to stay in power.




If a government is using a pusher, that means it’s afraid to kill protestors. It could be worse: sometimes a government is not afraid to kill its people.



Cast your eye on a Humvee, and you might sense evil there, too. But its glowering grill and muscle-bound stance will deceive you: my cat is a greater threat. This galumphing, overgrown jeep has tin-can doors and floors, and sometimes even a cloth roof. A Humvee is so weak that anyone can overpower it, even a bunch of ratty rebels who never learned about toilet paper. It’s not a tool of oppression or evil: it’s just a military verison of, well, an SUV: good for toting around a few people and their stuff, but basically a station wagon with ‘roid rage.







Compare the Humvee to the Casspir—Satan’s own limousine. A couple decades ago, South Africa combined the worst features of antebellum Virginia and Charleton Heston’s gun-soaked wet dreams. The white government had a serious problem with land mines: planted by black rebels, they ripped apart convoys of government troops. (They also shredded many black civilians, but that’s another story.) Faced with a determined rebellion, the government ensconced its soldiers in these mine-proof vaults. Every design element of the Casspir protects soldiers as they scurry across roads that have slipped beyond their control: The V-shaped hull deflects blasts, the exposed mechanicals are easy to fix, and the narrow windows are explosion-resistant. The pathologies of the Casspir's creators led to this frightening vehicle. It is the car of choice for hated occupiers.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I consider it a sign of trouble that Casspirs would be tremendously useful in Iraq. Onward....

I want to add one one more mug-shot to the gallery: the Pookie. It’s actually a cousin of the Casspir, another member of a family where all the kids torture dogs and torch the yard. Rhodesians created it. If South Africa harkened back to Virginia, Rhodesia was an dank corner of Mississippi. Like South Africa, Rhodesia faced a mine-wielding black insurgency. But Rhodesia’s whites didn’t have access to gold and diamond mines like the South Africans. So when the world told them to go to hell and embargoed their country, they had to cobble together a mine-detecting vehicle with whatever they had around.

A mine-proof troop carrier like the Casspir wasn’t needed: the black insurgency in Rhodesia penetrated every part of the country. Ordinary white farmers needed something to let them get to the market without being blown up. The lightweight Pookie, with its soft tires, would travel at the front of a civilian convoy and beep if it detected a mine. The cars would stop, the mine would be defused, and then the convoy would proceed.

The immoral battle fought by the Rhodesian army dictated the Pookie’s design. It was jerry-rigged because the world wanted no part of the Rhodesian’s crusade. And it was a mine-detector because mines are used by insurgencies—the kind of war that gets fought when people oppose a powerful government.

Now don’t take all this the wrong way. It’s unfortunate that our problems in Iraq have parallels to the lost battles fought by evil, racist governments. Our situation is much more complicated than theirs.... but this blog is about cars, and about cars it shall remain.