Army vet with cancer fulfills bucket-list goal: Firing a tank gun one more time

Jay Tenison’s grim diagnosis came in early 2022. The abdominal pains he had experienced over the previous year were signs of terminal stomach cancer. When the shock subsided, the 40-year-old Army veteran planned out a bucket list. It covered some conventional thrills and experiences: skydiving, vacations to the beach and trips to Disney World. But there was something else Tenison decided he wanted to do. Something only a fellow tanker would understand.

“My weight is slowly dropping, my hair is slowly falling out, and my strength is leaving me,” Tenison wrote in a Reddit forum for Army soldiers in October 2022. “Before I depart this land of the living, I’d love to feel the thunder of doom inside an Abrams [main battle tank].”

Tenison knew his request - to relive his days as an M1 armor crewman once more and feel the bone-rattling shake inside an Abrams tank as it fired - was a long shot. But it was a memory he keenly wanted to recapture. In Germany in 2005, Tenison’s tightknit crew aced its tank qualification exercises, posting one of the highest scores in the brigade, he said. He wanted to experience it one more time.

After a year of waiting, Tenison got his wish. Last week, he clambered into an Abrams for the first time in nearly two decades at Fort Moore in Georgia. Alongside a crew of Army instructors, Tenison blasted his way through a training exercise. Like in Germany, he aced the test.

“It was incredible,” Tenison told The Washington Post. “I enjoyed it. It was everything that I had ever hoped for.”

Tenison, whose story was first reported by the Army Times, enlisted on a whim in 2004 after dropping out of college, he said. A recruiter showed him a list of jobs with the highest enlistment bonuses. “19-Kilo” - the Army’s code for an M1 armor crewman - was one of them.

That August, Tenison was assigned to Ray Barracks in Germany with the 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment. There, Tenison recalled how excitement built as the division’s crews prepared for gunnery: live-fire exercises that tank crews complete at the end of their training. Naturally, crews competed for the highest score.

“It’s like the Super Bowl for tankers,” Tenison said.

Tenison scored 965 out of 1,000, he said, one of the top scores in the battalion. It was a thrilling memory. Tenison, the tank’s driver, was positioned closest to the gun tube every time it fired. He said he was struck by the way the tank rocked with each shot - what tankers call the “thunder of doom.”

“You still feel the shock wave go all throughout you,” Tenison said. ” … It’s extremely exciting.”

Tenison said his experience as a tanker was abbreviated when he was deployed to Iraq in 2006. There was less demand for tank combat, so Tenison worked instead as a radio telephone operator and took part in supply convoy missions during a 14-month deployment. After leaving the Army in 2008, he studied electrical engineering at Arizona State University - finally accomplishing another goal, to finish his college studies - and worked as an electrical engineer on various renewable energy projects.

Tenison’s second act was upended in February 2022 when he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. It floored him, he said, and he spent a month struggling to come to terms with his grief.

“There’s nothing I can do about that, except just try to fight and beat it,” Tenison said. “I picked up the pieces and kept on with life as best I could.”

As Tenison battled his illness and a host of complications - subsequent checkups identified an additional tumor in his brain, which he had surgery to remove - he drew up a bucket list. Early on, the thought of reliving his days as a tanker came to mind.

“I really wanted to do gunnery one last time,” Tenison said.

Commenters offered to help after Tenison made his emotional request on Reddit in 2022, but Tenison said his leads quickly dried up over months of sporadic communication with a few Army bases. He pressed on with several other goals, taking trips to beaches in San Diego and Pensacola, Fla., with his family and taking his 7- and 8-year-old daughters to Disney World.

One year after Tenison first broached the issue online, he returned to Reddit to ask again, adding that his oncologist in September had given him between three and six months to live. This time, someone connected him to leaders at Fort Moore, which houses the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence, a military training center. As luck would have it, Fort Moore’s tankers were going through their own gunnery exercises at the end of the year.

“This is the first time in my career that I’ve seen this,” Lt. Col. Courtney Dean, who leads 1st Squadron, 16th Cavalry Regiment in the 316th Cavalry Brigade at Fort Moore, said of Tenison’s request. ” … I think everybody [was] onboard with doing what they can to make this happen.”

Tenison traveled to Fort Moore with his family at the beginning of December, and for two days, he was a tanker once more. He spent Dec. 4 knocking off the rust in a simulator. Then, on Dec. 5, Tenison joined an Abrams crew and took part in an abbreviated gunnery exercise. This time, he took on the gunner role.

Just like in Germany, Tenison’s tank commander called out plywood targets of “enemy vehicles” in the distance. Tenison, despite not having been in a tank for almost 20 years, calmly took aim.

“He hit ‘em all,” Dean said. “Every single one.”

After the exercise, Tenison was given the Black Medallion of the Order of St. George, an award issued by the U.S. Cavalry and Armor Association. But most importantly, he had felt the unmistakable shock wave of a tank firing again. And he improved his numbers. Tenison was put through a shorter, more simplified exercise than the one he had completed in 2005, but his sharp shooting meant he had scored full marks.

Tenison has no plans of slowing down, he said. He is now planning trips to go skydiving and hang gliding. But they might not compare with the experience of firing a tank gun.

“I feel satisfied,” Tenison said. “I felt like I actually, legitimately checked off a major bucket-list item for my lifetime. And so I just feel great about it.”