Born in Germany and commissioned into the service of that nation’s army in 1983, a Fox chemical weapons vehicle now on display near Fort Leonard Wood’s main gate was transferred to the U.S. Chemical Corps during Operation Desert Storm as part of that country’s 1991 contribution to the war effort to liberate Kuwait. Transferred to the U.S. Army afterwards, it effectively ended its useful operational life on May 29, 2004, when it was hit by an improvised explosive device in Iraq.
Most badly damaged American equipment — even very expensive items like the Fox vehicle, which carries heavy armor and uses special sensors to “sniff” for chemicals in the environment — ends up in the scrap heap for spare parts or metal recycling. That didn’t happen with the vehicle now on display, mostly because Brig. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, head of the Army Chemical Corps and head of the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear School at Fort Leonard Wood, wasn’t happy with an old tank on display at the main gate.
“We started to search for a Fox vehicle about years ago,” Spoehr said during a Thursday afternoon dedication ceremony. “What was on this pad here was an old World War II flamethrower tank. And I never even knew that until someone told me; I thought the Chemical Corps had just been disrespected.”
That flamethrower tank sat next to a military police vehicle representing the MP School and a bridging vehicle representing the Engineer School, and Spoehr wasn’t happy when people asked him why the Chemical Corps didn’t have a better piece of equipment.
“It was unsatisfactory to say the least; we needed to get a much more recognizable emblem of our Corps out here for this great installation to display the fact that we represent three great regiments,” Spoehr said.
Getting a Fox vehicle for the display wasn’t easy, even though there are 112 worldwide in the American inventory.
“Unfortunately none of them ever broke, none of them ever took any real damage,” Spoehr said.
That changed in 2004 after it was sent to a Stryker brigade in Iraq.
“They were approaching a T-intersection  when a white van came up to the rear and the last thing (the driver) knew was the back of the vehicle was lifted up about five feet, and to put it kindly, his bell was really well-rung,” Spoehr said.
Several soldiers in the vehicle received light injuries; a gunner in the turret “lost pretty much all of his face and his eyesight, but he lived,” Spoehr said.
The heavy armor on the vehicle saved the life of the chemical soldiers inside as well as the gunner on top, Spoehr said, and is a good example of how the Army tries to protect its personnel.
“(The driver) told me that wasn’t the only IED; we had three or four others before that; they just blew tires out,” Spoehr said. “He said bullets were always pinging off the sides of these things. He thinks because it was so big and so ostentatious, that everybody liked to shoot at it.”