Cinthia Ramírez, a sergeant in the United States Army of Mexican origin, has become the first woman in the country to specialize in a powerful war tank, which she considers an “empowering” task and great responsibility, according to EFE.
This 23-year-old “tanker” is the first woman on active duty in the US Army to graduate as a master gunner of the Abrams M1A2, an armored vehicle eight meters long, 3.5 meters wide, and 2.45 meters high, weighing about 67 tons and has a cost of about nine million US dollars.
Born in Plainview (Texas), the Latino gunner says she graduated a month ago from a “very intensive course with a 33 percent graduation rate” and with at least “one week of instruction in the field.”
Getting to make history in the United States Army was not an easy task for the Hispanic woman with a Mexican mother, in whose family there are no other soldiers. “My family didn’t want me to be in the infantry,” she says.
She remembers that she entered the Army when she was 18 years old “because she could not afford to go to the university, and she did not know exactly what he wanted to do.”
But there she found her vocation, her own way. “The recruiting officer suggested that I could be a ‘tank operator’”, and I said “yes”.
Now her job is also to assemble the team that will handle the M1A2 Abrams tank assigned to her.
This task is made up of the unit commander, located in the revolving tower where the central cabin is; the driver, who is located in a compartment in the front part of the tank; the loader, who places the shells in the barrel, and the gunner, or in this case the gunner, who is the non-commissioned officer who is a technical and tactical expert in weaponry.
As an artilleryman, Ramírez is responsible for the use of the 120-millimeter smoothbore cannon that fires howitzers with a range of up to 3.2 kilometers, and the 7.62-caliber M240 coaxial machine gun with a firing range of about 1,300 meters.
Source: Agencia EFE