This Guy Purchased A Tank On Ebay, But Didn’t Know It Contained A Fortune

Back-History of the Russian Tank

It’s not always easy to track the history of military vehicles, though it may be easier to track down the personnel who manned the tank, with the advent of social media. Although many military campaigns have some element of secrecy associated with them, soldiers do tell tales, and that storytelling can sometimes be tied into the full resource management dimension.

The back story is sketchy. From the mileage indicator, it’s clear that the Russian T-54 tank put on a relatively sparse 1,500 miles on its odometer. The vehicle was deployed in Iraq, which inspires a vision of the treasure-troves that Saddam Hussein left behind when he was summarily removed from power.

What about the Treasure Troves?

You may remember the photos that emerged from Iraq around the time when the coalition invaded Iraq in 2003 and removed Saddam Hussein from power. He famously had gold-plated guns, rolls of “money” toilet paper, and bunkers (and palaces) full of gold and riches. He’d formally seized power, as a dictator, in 1979. The intervening years are rife with reports and rumors, both verified and more elusively unverifiable.

Still, the rampant stories include violent mass-murder and rape, horrible acts of inhumanity and torture, and wholesale thievery. It’s probably not a surprise, then, that so much gold was unearthed after the dictatorship was finally brought to an end, and you similarly wouldn’t be shocked that gold is still being unearthed in the strangest of places. Would you really expect to find bars of gold in a tank?