I grew up on an army diet. No, not hard-tack and corned beef, but films, TV and toys. Mine was an odd childhood in Irish terms as my parents, although domiciled in West Cork, were and are resolutely British. So while other boys grew up with GAA and Glenroe, I was gorging on The Dam Busters, A Bridge Too Far and the inevitable Great Escape.
It's an obsession I carry with me to this day. I've just put down Anthony Beevor's masterful account of the Ardennes campaign of the winter of 1944-45. Yes, it could double as a doorstop, but I ripped through it in a matter of days, as enthralled by the narrative as I was all those year ago watching Steve McQueen vault the barbed wire.
So needless to say, I've seriously thought about buying an ex-army vehicle. There are simple ways of doing this, of course. Trawl through any second hand ads mag and you'll probably find a Jeep Wrangler or Land Rover from the sixties or seventies for sale. These are, if you will, the gateway drug to military vehicle ownership - they have a tangential relationship with the armed forces; they are based on vehicles that were originally designed to be painted matte green and nothing else. They're OK if you're only looking for a taste.
A harder hit is provided by actual ex-service vehicles. Every year, the British Ministry of Defence gets rid of hundreds of old Land Rovers and you can buy them from a website (mod-sales.com). As long as the car isn't armoured or weaponised, you can just log on and buy one, and they're usually in perfect running order and cheaper than what you'd get elsewhere. Well, it's no worse than wearing camo combats, now is it?
That website is a dangerous place though. You go on looking for a simple Defender and then you start clicking and surfing and all sorts of things start coming up. Who could resist the charms of the Tempest 4x4 Mine Protection Vehicle? "The vehicle boasts an outstanding occupant survival rate. It is built to the similar exacting specifications as the MRAP Cat 1 Cougar." Beats the heck out of a five-year warranty doesn't it?
Or what about the Springer All-Terrain Vehicle for just £7,500 (or €10,513 at today's exchange rates)? Go-anywhere ability and a self-recovery electric winch should you get properly stuck. Makes more sense than a quad-bike, surely?
You can dig yourself in waaaay deeper than that. A Land Rover Ambulance? An Alvis Stormer tracked reconnaissance vehicle ("developed to provide a mobile platform for the Starstreak High Velocity Missile (HVM) system for detachment level protection and excellent mobility with eight ready to fire missiles and a further nine stowed inside")? Or just an armour-plated, bullet-proof Defender?
OK, so this is getting silly, now but there are realistic benefits to owning and driving an ex-army vehicle. You'll get a full service history for one (one-owner, genuine mileage, never raced, rallied or used in combat operations against a Soviet Shock Army...) and you'll have something near enough to unique. Plus no-one will argue with you in cases of road rage.
It's true that you have to be officially vetted and approved to buy a used armoured car, and Irish regulations may possibly prevent you from actually driving and using it (the authorities get a bit understandably nervy when Joe Soap starts rolling up to work in a bullet-proof car). But then you can just go a bit older, a bit more Cold-War-Retro. I found a 1963, road-registered Daimler Ferret armoured scout car (complete with two thankfully decommissioned machine guns) for the same price as a Ford Focus diesel. Plus, being ex-NATO, it'll be fully hardened against Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) attack. Useful if Putin starts really throwing his weight around. Useful too if you just want to pull the hatch shut and keep the kids at bay for a while.
There's more too. You can get those big, gorgeous (well, I think they're gorgeous) American White M3 half-tracks that saw service in WWII. They're not cheap but can you really put a price on being able to re-enact key scenes from Kelly's Heroes on your driveway? Can you?
But wait. There's something better waiting at the end of this green-and-khaki rainbow. We found a Czech website selling, entirely legitimately, an ex-Czech army T-55 Main Battle Tank. Yes, a tank, and not just any tank - a 42-tonne behemoth that was for decades the mainstay of the Red Army, the tank that would have rolled in thousands across Germany and France in the eighties had Ronald Regan or Mikhail Gorbachev ever lost the plot and gone to war. A tank that still sports a massive, city-block-levelling 125mm cannon, which, in the somewhat euphemistic language of the site, "CAN BE DISARMED IN ACCORDANCE WITH CURRENT LEGISLATION IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE REGULATIONS OF EACH STATE."
Oh sure, darling, it's disarmed. Don't worry, I'm just popping out for milk. I'm not going to invade Leitrim. Again.