"The kids always love to try to get a t-shirt, but the parents are the ones that come down and are like 'shoot me in the stomach!'"
At this year's Army-Navy football game at Northwest Stadium in Maryland on Saturday, a crew of West Point cadets will man a tank on the field. But it's not just any tank.
This one isn't in the vanguard of a major land invasion or providing mobile fire support for advancing infantry. Instead, with the help of a scuba air tank, it launches t-shirts into roaring crowds at the service academy's annual football game.
But there's a catch: The tank only fires when the Army football team, the Black Knights, score a touchdown.
After being shipped roughly 300 miles by trailer from the academy in West Point, New York to Landover, Maryland, Army-Navy audiences may get a chance to catch a t-shirt soaring into the bleachers. After the touchdown, cadets and Army leaders will come onto the field and do push-ups based on the total number of game points, said Raquel Zitta, a fourth-year cadet. During that pause, the tank crew will get into position and begin lobbing its cotton-grade ordnance.
Marshall Krebs, a third-year West Point cadet said the tank, which is actually a golf cart built with a 900-or-so-pound exterior, was designed by a West Point senior for an engineering class a little more than a decade ago. And when the tank needs upgrades, the team calls in the academy mechanical engineers.
The t-shirt tank crew is made up of 12 cadets who fulfill their dreams of being a tanker at all academy football games. As part of their duties, the cadets shoot t-shirts into the crowds, show off the tank that's not technically a tank - yes, we know, spare us your angry emails about what is and isn't a tank. The cadets also find themselves giving the occasional safety brief.
"The kids always love to try to get a t-shirt, but the parents are the ones that come down and are like 'shoot me in the stomach!'" Krebs laughed. "I'm not trying to lose my job."