Can someone please explain this to me?

I don’t get this. What I hope is that this is a great set up for a sequel, but I don’t know that for sure so as it is it is just an enigma. Halfway through the latest book I’m reading, The OdessaFile, Forsyth describes a tank and tank commander crossing a road in the middle of West Germany. The snippet has nothing to do with the story, the tank is not a part of the plot, and then Forsyth drops that angle and dives back into the meat of the story.

Then, at the end of the story, the last passage, he hits the reader with this:

And last, Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank, the tank commander who crossed Miller’s path on the road to Vienna. He was wrong about the fate of his tank, the Dragon Rock. It did not go to the scrap heap. It was taken away on a low-loader, and he never saw it again. Forty months later he would not have recognized it anyway.

The steel-gray of its body had been painted out and covered with paint the color of dust-brown to merge with the landscape of the desert. The black cross of the German Army was gone from the turret and replaced by the pale blue six-pointed Star of David. The name he had given it was gone too, and it had been renamed The Spirit of Masada.

It was still commanded by a top sergeant, a hawk-nosed, black-bearded man called Nathan Levy. On June 5, 1967, the M-48 began its first and only week of combat since it had rolled from the workshops of Detroit, Michigan, ten years before. It was one of those tanks that General Israel Tal hurled into the battle for the Mitla Pass two days later, and at noon on Saturday, June 10, caked with dust and oil, scored by bullets, its tracks worn to wafers by the rocks of Sinai, the old Patton rolled to a stop on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal.

Forsyth, Frederick - The Odessa File

Again, if this is a set up for a sequel, then great. If this is a reference to a historical moment, then I’m a bit lost. If it’s an analogy than I am way out of my depth cause I don’t get it. 

All in all it was a great book and like his others, The Dogs of War notably, it reads like a treatise on how to manage a project. Fun to read these older thrillers to see where the foundations for today's were made. I can't wait to read more.