With 30 Tanks And Military Vehicles, Dubois 4th Of July Is An American Classic

DUBOIS — Not everyone can drive their vintage military tank to their town’s Fourth of July parade.

Unless you’re Dan Starks, who doesn’t bring just one tank, though.

He brings 30 military vehicles from his National Museum of Military Vehicles for the Dubois Fourth of July parade. It’s an impressive patriotic display that is the only one of its kind in Wyoming, and one of very few like it in America.

“What we can do with 30 vehicles is, it lets us span different wars,” Starks said. “So, we have the World War II vehicles, the Korean War vehicles, Gulf War vehicles, Vietnam War vehicles, Global War on Terror — and that way we can connect with a lot of different generations of veterans, with something that was part of their military service.”

The military tanks and vehicles are all staged at his restoration shop behind the Dollar Store in Dubois ahead of the parade, with the public invited to come check them out.

The kids can even climb up on the tanks to look inside if they want and get their pictures taken.

Many adults appreciate the little placards that are attached to the tanks explaining their history and giving a few details about which campaign the vehicle was used in.

Goats And Tigers

There’s the Gama Goat, for example, a six-wheel-drive, semi-amphibious, off-road vehicle developed for use during the Vietnam War.

They were developed after reports that U.S. Army trucks were “woefully inadequate” for the terrain.

If that doesn’t grab your attention, how about the striking yellow tank painted as if it is some sort of fearsome tiger?

That paint job on the M46 Patton Tank wasn’t just for fun, Starks told Cowboy State Daily.

Yellow tiger tanks were used during the Korean War, and the paint job was chosen to play into superstitions that the Korean people had about such symbols.

In addition to all the eye-catching tanks, there are also lots of different kinds of military vehicles of all shapes and sizes.

One looked like an everyday off-road, all-terrain vehicle but for the weaponry attached to its roof.

Another was clearly an ambulance — with a fun sign attached, just for the parade. It suggested that the dummy soldier lying on the stretcher was sick from eating too much candy.

An Impressive Display

The military vehicles have become quite a draw for the Dubois parade.

“The first year I put a tank in the parade was in 2014,” Starks said. “It was a surprise. No one knew we were putting anything in the parade.”

That year, only about half the parade route had spectators, Starks said.

Things have changed quite a bit since then.

These days, the crowd stretches from the very beginning of the parade route at Town Park all the way through the end of the parade at Provisions, with few empty spots in between.

Starks has been told the Chamber of Commerce gets all kinds of calls about the military vehicles and tanks. People want to make sure the tanks will be in the parade before deciding if they’ll come.

Starks is heartened by that, and said he plans to continue the tradition of bringing hardware from his National Museum of Military Vehicles located just outside of Dubois to celebrate Independence Day.

The 160,000-square-foot museum was founded by Starks and his wife Cynthia in 2017, and it is stuffed full of military vehicles and exhibits that tell the story of America and the efforts it has made to preserve freedom for one and all.

Starks has added more tanks to the parade lineup every year, but said he probably will stop at 30 going forward.

“The Wyoming Department of Transportation only wants to have the traffic blocked for so long,” Starks said. “And I think we’ve made our point with 30 vehicles.”

A Star Sings 'The Star Spangled Banner'

Starks’ military vehicles aren’t the only thing that makes the Dubois Fourth of July Parade one of a kind.

The town has a fan in award-winning singer-songwriter Skip Ewing, who moved to Wyoming sometime in the early 2000s.

Ewing often helps set a patriotic tone for the parade by singing the national anthem once the first float in the parade arrives at the announcers’ booth.

Everyone is led in the Pledge of Allegiance first, and all the cowboy hats and ballcaps come off for just a little bit. After that, Ewing does “The Star Spangled Banner” his way, and its beautiful.

Ewing used to live in Nashville, where he wrote all kinds of popular songs that were recorded by great artists like Keith Urban, Willie Nelson, Kenny Chesney, Clint Black, Diamond Rio and others.

When he came to Wyoming, though, he wasn’t sure he’d write music anymore. In interviews with other media at the time, he said he wasn’t sure he could make a living writing the kind of music that felt fulfilling to him.

Instead, he devoted himself to horses for a time.

But music came back to visit him before too long, and the result was a new album titled “Wyoming.”

The album features original songs sung by Ewing himself.

No more writing for the voice of others. Ewing is writing for his own voice now, and he credits the friendliness and the heart of people in Wyoming with helping him find that voice.

Letting Freedom Ring

Fun is the theme that ties all of the disparate elements of the Dubois Fourth of July Parade together.

Everyone from Starks, to Ewing, to the people who gather for the occasion do their best to bring the smiles and the patriotism out for the special day.

Some, like Dre Sanderson, bring water guns to go with their patriotic capes.

“Every year I try to fight the fire trucks with a water gun,” he said. “It’s become a tradition.”

“This time,” he added as he pulled his mask down over his face and held up his plexiglass shield, “I am prepared.”

The firefighters at the end of the parade spray the crowds pretty liberally with water, but none quite as liberally as Sanderson and his small army of water gun fighters.

“Everyone gets a laugh out of it,” Sanderson said. “I do it for the job of other people having a laugh. I think it helps to let loose and enjoy life. That’s what freedom is all about.”

Martha Mitchell, sitting alongside the road with an American flag to wave, told Cowboy State Daily she loved the patriotism of Dubois’ parade so much, she and her husband decided to there in October 2022.

She’s glad they did. It’s been great so far.

“This is a fun time,” she said. “Dubois has great people, and this is a patriotic town. That’s what we love about it.”

The Parade Is A Unifier

Those are the kinds of things Starks sees as great unifiers in what has become a time of division in America.

“I see our museum as a unifier,” he said. “Everything we have in the museum revolves around diversity and inclusion.”

Starks has made it a point to recognize every gender and every ethnicity in his museum, highlighting Pascal Poolaw, for example. He is the United States’ most-decorated Native American with 42 medals and citations, including the Distinguished Service Cross and three Purple Hearts, one each for World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

“Native Americans serve in the military at a higher per capita rate than any other population group here in the United States,” Starks said. “And we do the same thing with women in the military, and we have a room that’s named after Roy Benavidez, who was a Hispanic-Native American Medal of Honor winner in special forces during the Vietnam War.”

The United States has liberated more than 475 million non-American people from foreign occupation, Starks said.

“And nobody knows that, but we all did that together,” he said. “We delivered freedom to that many people, and then we preserve freedom for a lot more people than that.”

That’s one of the reasons why there are so many quotes in Starks’ military museum about the value of freedom.

“We have quotes from Ronald Reagan, Eleanor Roosevelt, Khalil Gibran, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King — everybody from all these different backgrounds and times in American history, all expressing their conviction about the value of freedom that all of us have in common,” he said.

Those are things Starks hopes can be great unifiers across America not just on the Fourth of July, but every day.

“If we’re a country and we’re a people who did that, there’s something good about us,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t things that are bad about us, but there’s something good about us.”

That’s a thought Starks hopes can run a chill down everyone’s spine if they stop a moment to think about it.

“We’re all part of the conversation here about divisiveness,” he said. “And our part of the conversation is an optimistic, unifying perspective. To counter a little bit, or at least, to be taken into account when people are thinking about what differences they have.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.