 In October of 1963, the largest trans-oceanic Army Air Force deployment ever made was translated from a Pentagon-drawn blueprint into an actual fact. This was exercise Big Lift, a maneuver whose scope and breadth of conception challenged military minds and fired the imagination of the entire country. Big Lift was designed to prove and demonstrate in realistic terms the U.S. military capability of dispatching joint Army and Air Force strike forces anywhere in the world in a short space of time. It involved the unprecedented transportation of a full armored division of approximately 15,000 combat-ready men to pre-positioned equipment areas in Germany from which points they were to push out and engage in simulated battle. In this real-life drama, the Second Armored Division, the famed Hell on Wheels outfit based in Fort Hood, Texas, was selected to play a starring role. Major roles were also to be played by the combat units furnished by the U.S. Strike Command, as well as the Seventh Army Support Command in Germany. Altogether, approximately 16,000 soldiers and airmen, 116 combat aircraft from the Tactical Air Command, and over 200 Matt's troop carriers were to be committed to the most daring peacetime maneuver in military history. As if this mission were not staggering enough in its complexity and size, the Joint Chiefs of Staff laid down the dictum that the entire airlift had to be accomplished in the almost unbelievable time of 72 hours. Could it be done? In one of these tanks, four men asked themselves this same question. They are a tank crew in Company B, 1st Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment. They are a part of big...