They’re planning on recovering the vehicle eventually, anyway, right? I’d think that they’d do that, and then search its interior.
From the article aceplace57 cited:
The M88 Hercules armored recovery vehicle the soldiers were in when they went missing was removed from a swamp early Monday morning after six days of work to retrieve it, the Army said.
The M88 has a hefty winch, so I wonder if they got stuck and made some bad decisions in trying to winch out of it. Perhaps leading to a rollover, which would be pretty much guaranteed fatal in a swampy/boggy situation.
Jophiel wrote:
The Wiki for the M88 Hercules (which is a heavy recovery vehicle, not a classic tank) says that it has a fording depth of 2.3 meters.
So that’s 7 and a half feet. I think the driver or commander guessed that the water depth was less than that–but turned out to be very wrong as it was 16 feet or so. And forward momentum carried them deeper and deeper.
Fording is not something you routinely do unless it’s something very specifically called for as part of training. And they certainly wouldn’t be alone when they did it.
Which raises the question of what sort of training mission they were on? AIUI, tank recovery vehicles tend to operate solo, unlike tanks that work in platoons.
Were they just out driving around in boggy conditions to practice driving around n boggy conditions? Where they going to a location to perform a simulated vehicle extraction? What other vehicles were out and about that day?
Very likely they were out on a real world mission to recover a vehicle in the field. Tanks break down. Tanks get stuck. In the dark or bad lighting conditions the bog may have looked like solid ground or a shallow puddle. There must have been a rapid fall off. They would not have tried to ford a body of water when they didn’t know the depth.