“I should have gone into the military rather than prison,” Tim Allen told Jimmy Kimmel this week. “I had a choice, and prison is the way I went.”
There’s not much difference, in Allen’s opinion. “It is the same sort of thing — food is kind of weird, and you have to wear a uniform and all that.”
It’s unclear what Allen meant when he said he had a choice. Did a judge offer him military duty instead of jail time? Or was Allen implying that if he’d signed up for an Army stint as a young man, he’d never have ended up doing time in the first place?
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I can’t find any record of Allen being offered that kind of deal, although he did strike a different bargain after his 1978 arrest for possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine. Allen pleaded guilty to felony drug trafficking charges and ratted out other dealers in exchange for a shorter sentence (he was facing life). The comedian was paroled after two and a half years.
The former felon loves the military now, so maybe it’s just wishful thinking. “I love Wounded Warriors. I love helping our vets. I love anything I can do,” he told Kimmel.
But what he loves even more is playing with the military’s toys. “The Marines down in Palmdale let me drive an Abrams tank, which was the best part of my life,” he gushed. “I drove that, an F18 Hornet; they let me do airliner rolls. And a sub. They let me take a sub down.”
Not bad for a convicted drug dealer!
Allen was a menace behind the wheel of the tank, refusing to listen to the military captain. “I’m a movie man. I do whatever I want,” the comedian boasted. “I just tore off through the desert. And it’s bouncing around. You’re doing about 48,50 miles an hour, bouncing. It’s so badass.”
The captain, however, wasn’t loving the joy ride. “Can you see where you’re going, Mr. Allen?”
“Hell, I don’t care,” replied the comic.
“If you can’t see the prisms line up, that means there’s a hole further than you can see that’s more than 16 feet,” warned the frustrated captain. “The tanks, they don’t fly. It will go over, the barrel will stick. It’ll flip over and everybody dies but you.”
Ha ha ha! Another day in the life of a movie man.
Allen loved his tank experience so much that he wants one of his own. “I’ve tried to get a tank. I’ve tried,” Allen lamented. “Arnold (Schwarzenegger)’s got a Sherman tank. (Jay) Leno, of course, he’s got everything.”
But when Allen tried to buy one for himself, his shop foreman put up the caution flags. The tank would show up on a train, and they’d need permits to get it off. Allen would have to get sign-off from the Burbank police, who already had it in for the comedian “for driving weird things.” He’d need a license, and the city didn’t like to issue them to civilians, much less civilians with drug convictions and DUIs on their record. Allen would need to replace the tank’s metal tracks with rubber ones. On top of all of those problems, Allen’s wife said buying a tank would be a “divorce purchase.”
So no tank for Allen. Too bad he didn’t opt for the military when he was a young guy — he could have fought in some wars and gotten his tank experience the old-fashioned way.
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