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The Private Garage Sale Where You Can Buy a Scud Missile

And hundreds of other historic weaponry from one of the largest personal collections in existence.
Images by the author

It’s not every day you get to straddle a Scud missile, Dr. Strangelove-style. But that's exactly what I did recently, when I browsed, climbed on, and sat inside hundreds of historic military vehicles that make up one of the largest private collections in existence.

The collector, Jacques Littlefield, was born into wealth—his father, Edmund, owned a construction company that helped build the Hoover dam, among other projects—and began acquiring vehicles in 1975, and continued right up until his death in 2009, at age 59. Nestled in the picturesque California town of Portola Valley, Littlefield's sprawling ranch, which houses these far-flung weapons of war, overlooks the San Francisco Bay Area. Quite the juxtaposition.

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Littlefield's collection is just over 200 vehicles—an array of tanks, armored personnel carriers, rocket launchers, amphibious machinery, armored bulldozers, and more. Unlike any museum I've ever been to, I got to hop inside of and play around with anything I was able to get my hands on, including a World War II era machine gun. In light of both ongoing tensions in Isreal-Palestine and the investigation into the downing of MH17, the experience was particularly sobering.

Here's just some of what I saw.

M48A2 BRIDGE

Since Jacques Littlefield's death, his estate decided to gift some of the vehicles to the Collins Foundation, a non-profit organization that’s going to create a museum to house some of the historic vehicles. The rest, like this M48A5 bridge transport—a portable, self-deploying 18.2-meter bridge capable of supporting up to 66 metric tons of deadweight—were auctioned off to raise some of the funds needed to build the museum and transport the pieces to the museum site in Massachusetts.

PANZER 4

The thing about the tanks, is that many of them are still operational. This is especially true of the engines, meaning the war machines be driven around with the original controls. (No, I was not allowed to drive any of them.) That’s actually what many of the collectors I spoke with at the auction were after: tanks that drive.

M5A2 SHERMAN TIGER

"We have four, and we’re buying," a collector from Wisconsin told me. Aside from an interest in history, the father-son team loved to participate in holiday parades, driving their tanks on the Fourth of July, and other patriotic holidays. They told me they prefer the American armor like the M4A2 Sherman.

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SCUD

Not all the vehicles functioned, however. Take the surface-to-surface missile and launcher system, Scud-A. Clocking at 41.9-metric tons—this includes both the transporter-erector-launcher, and the 4.5-ton missile—the Soviets built the Scud-A to shoot 50-kiloton nuclear warheads about 150 kilometers.

The Scud-A was made famous during the Gulf War, although the technology has always been inaccurate, as well as painful to deploy. But, the Soviets recognized its utility and continued to improve the weapon system over the years. The first unit went into service in 1956, and Scud-As were subsequently exported to Warsaw Pact nations.

RADAR TRUCK

This unassuming vehicle, the 1S12/1RK1238 radar truck, was one of the first mobile high-powered radar trucks to enter Soviet military service. Its onboard systems could detect aircraft flying at 1,200 meters up to 180 kilometers away, and low flying planes at about 70 kilometers, once the radar array was extended. One of the veterans I spoke with explained that the Soviets used this, in part, to establish mobile airfields.

INT RADAR TRUCK (INTERIOR)

Introduced in 1963 by the Russians, this radar system has become obsolete—one reason for this, a veteran American soldier told me, was that the radar emitted an enormous amount of radiation, eventually killing the operators. "We couldn’t find anyone left who’s actually used one," he told me.

M1A1 TRAINING TURRET

One of the most modern pieces of equipment I came across was the M1A1 Abrams training turret. It's supposed to replicate the experience of actually operating one of the main battle tanks.

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INSIDE THE M1A1

Nothing was active when I dropped down into the gunner's seat and fiddled with the controls. The interior was uncomfortable. The seats were tiny, and in a space that I imagine would comfortablly fit one person was actually meant for three soldiers—gunner, driver, and commander.

In fact, that experience was pretty well uniform in any of the tanks that I toures: the cockpits were all incredibly cramped, claustrophobic even. It was hard to think of operating any of the machines under perfect conditions, let alone while ordinance is blowing up everywhere, including from the main gun.

GRANT M3A5

What struck me too about many of the vehicles—tanks and otherwise—was just how difficult and unintuitive moving around was. Unlike, say, a modern car, the vast majority of the military vehicles were clearly designed with function before ease of use in mind.

Even something as simple as getting into a tank was a pain in the ass. The older models were the absolute worst. Without a ladder, I had to clammer up the tank tracks, and heave myself onto the metal deck. The tiny hatches were barely large enough to squeeze into, and everything on the inside was cramped.

"DESTRUCTIVE DEVICES"

A number of the tanks in the collection are classified by the US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearm and Explosives as "Destructive Devices," meaning, in essence, that some of the weapon systems on the tanks still function.

Take the Israeli Sherman M50 (above), which is based on the American M4A4 tank hull. The Israelis acquired a number of hulls from European scrapyards in the 1950s and, recognizing that main artillery piece was under-gunned, they replaced it with longer, 75-mm cannons purchased from the French. Then it was put into service, just in time for the Six-Day War in 1967.

I bumped into one of Littlefield’s neighbors, who explained that the family’s political connections, and long ties with the US government—they helped build the Hoover Dam, after all—paved the way for the large, battalion-sized collection of armor. Special permits, permissions, and so on, allowed Littlefield to accumulate this sort of stuff. Few others, in short, would be able to procure so much weaponry, outdated or not.

After spending a few hours in a jungle gym of historic military equipment—talking to the veterans, some of whom manned these vehicles—one thought emerged: Where else in the world would a private collector be able to stretch the meaning of the Second Amendment to include a veritable tank battalion?