Chased by the White Mice

During my first tour in Vietnam I traveled outside of base camp by ground transportation only one time. That one time was enough for me. When I arrived “in country” (Vietnam) I was transported to Cu Chi, my new duty station, by helicopter. I always traveled outside of base camp by helicopter as a pilot after that.

After about six months in country the scout platoon leader was about to go home. He was well liked and so a party was planned in his honor. The five or six other pilots in the platoon planned the party and were assigned to buy whatever supplies were needed. We soon discovered that Cu Chi did not offer the supplies we were looking for. So a trip to Saigon was planned.

One bright sunny morning three warrant officers, one of them being myself, started out for Saigon in the troop commander’s jeep with the commander’s driver at the wheel. We were off to the Commissary for chips, burgers and paper products. I was in charge of getting the food and supplies. The other two warrants were responsible to buy the booze they wanted for the party at the PX (Post Exchange). This mission should have gone pretty well with everyone assigned a task to complete.

The trip to Saigon went smoothly and soon I was dropped off at the commissary to do my shopping. The others went with the driver to the PX. Shortly I had finished my shopping and was waiting to be picked up. The wait was a good hour longer than I had expected.

Eventually the other three arrived in the jeep. When the jeep pulled up and stopped, I asked if there had been a problem. Stevie, the ranking warrant officer who was riding in the front right seat, was not a happy camper. He told me that the driver had taken off while they were in the PX. He had gone down to “Tudo Street” which was where all of the bars and girls were. He had come back about an hour later.

It was obvious that the driver had partaken of a few drinks. This put us in a bit of a problem. In Vietnam our unit would not allow pilots to have driver licenses. If pilots were involved in a vehicle accident by regulation they had to be “grounded” and would not be able to fly until it was cleared up. So to ensure that pilots were not grounded they were not allowed to drive vehicles.

We talked about our situation and decided that the driver was not drunk – he was stupid and had a couple of drinks but he wasn’t drunk so we decided to let him keep driving. So with four of us and two huge boxes in the jeep we headed out for home. It was about four in the afternoon and the streets of Saigon were full.

The streets of Saigon kept getting filled with more and more traffic. Saigon was supposedly built for about one million people but there were three million living there. Our driver was what could be described as an “aggressive driver”. He was weaving in and out around cars, motor scooters and three wheeled vehicles. In the back of the jeep we were holding tightly to our boxes, which were up on the fenders of the jeep. It was a wild ride. As the passengers, our not being able to see real well was both an advantage and a disadvantage.

This weaving and dodging through traffic was going fairly well until we came to some cars that were sitting still and we were still flying along. The driver plowed right into two parked cars and blasted them right out of the way. There had been about four feet between them and he tried to put the six-foot wide jeep through that hole. It hadn’t worked but it did blast the cars out of the way. From there the driver made a cut around some more parked cars and went up on the sidewalk. Vietnamese people were running and jumping to keep from being hit by our jeep. In the back seat it had turned into a frightening ride!

After about two hundred feet of sidewalk dodging we got back onto the street. The bad news was that when we went back on the street we really blasted a guy on a motorcycle. I saw the motorcycle and rider fly through the air and out of sight. All three warrant officers were yelling for the driver to stop, but he didn’t.

About two blocks later a Saigon police car jumped in behind us. The Saigon police wore white shirts and dark pants. They were not known to be too tough a force (okay they were normally pretty timid and shy) and thus had been nicknamed “White Mice”. On this occasion they looked serious to me. Their siren was wailing and there were two officers riding on the running boards holding on to the doors of the car with one hand. In each of their other hands they held an M-1 rifle and they waved that in the air. Now we were in a real fix. We had just smashed two cars and a motorcycle and now the White Mice, who had machine guns, were likely to use them in pursuing us. There was more yelling for the driver to stop!

At this point Stevie pulled out his forty-five-caliber pistol and shoved it into the ribs of the driver and said, “Stop or I’ll kill you!” It was a cold “matter of fact” statement. Just about everyone in the unit knew that Stevie was a cold-blooded killer! He never had a problem shooting anyone.

Stevie’s parents were killed in a boating accident while he was in Vietnam and Stevie said that the thirty days free leave and the things he inherited were the “only good things his old man ever did for him”. His father had been an Army officer and Stevie had been in military schools since he was ten years old. There wasn’t anything “warm and fuzzy” about Stevie and we all knew he would kill the driver if he didn’t stop. The driver must have known too because he stopped! He had made his first good decision!

The White Mice caught up with us and started talking a mile a minute in Vietnamese. All four of them were talking or yelling at once waving their machine guns in the air and pointing back down the street. We didn’t understand the words they were saying but we had a pretty good idea what they were talking about.

After a few minutes of the jabber from the White Mice, a Vietnamese warrant officer who spoke English, walked onto the scene. He came up and said in pretty good English, “They are saying you were in an accident and you have to go back to the scene of the accident’. The driver quickly responded with, “We weren’t in any accident”. The warrant officer stepped to the front of the jeep and looked at the two smashed headlights, the bent up hood and the bumper that curled back on each end and said, “What happened to your jeep?” It was pretty obvious to anyone that this jeep had hit something and it was real recent!

After a couple of minutes we agreed to return to the scene of the accident. To make sure that we went, a White Mouse got on each one of three corners of the jeep with their machine guns. The South Vietnamese warrant officer got on the fourth corner because we asked him to go with us and interpret. The last White Mouse drove the police car behind us.

As we arrived back at the scene of the accident there was a sigh of relief when we didn’t see the two cars. They had left the scene and were nowhere to be seen. The guy on the motorcycle was a different story. He was lying on the ground near his crumpled motorcycle. He was obviously in pain and there was some blood on him.

When our driver was coming up on the scene of the man laying on the ground and the trashed motorcycle he forgot what he should have been doing. Rather than looking where he was driving he was looking at the man on the ground. While looking to the left he started drifting to the right and was headed right for a parked green Volkswagen bug. Just before hitting the VW the White Mouse on the right front corner of the jeep jumped off so as not to be crushed between the jeep and VW. When we impacted the VW the others went tumbling off the jeep. The surprising thing was that they all got up laughing. They couldn’t believe we just ran into the parked car.

The owner of the VW didn’t seem to be around so the White Mice didn’t even seem to care about that accident. We all got out of the jeep and went over to the motorcycle driver lying on the ground. He was scraped, scratched, bruised and seemed to have had his “bell rung” but he wasn’t dead or dying and there weren’t any bones sticking out that we could see. Unlike most motorcycles where there is normally a foot or two between the front and back wheels, his had the wheels right together. It was now a very compact motorcycle. There wasn’t going to be any riding or fixing that baby!

After a few minutes of working through our translator, a deal was struck with the motorcycle rider; if we would pay for the motorcycle he would be happy. Between us we only had a few dollars worth of Vietnamese money and so that didn’t go far. In Vietnam the US military used “Military Pay currency” (MPC). It looked like Monopoly money and every few months they would change the money to try to keep down counterfeiting. The military people were not supposed to give the MPC to the Vietnamese but this situation called for a solution. Between the four of us we came up with about two hundred and fifty dollars worth of MPC. The motorcycle driver was satisfied with that amount. The White Mice were satisfied that we had taken care of things and they just let us go. There were no tickets, no records; just a wrecked jeep.

Again we started for Cu Chi. This time our driver was much more subdued in his driving. Traffic had thinned out quite a bit and so we were able to move down the streets without running into any more cars or motorcycles.

The streets in Saigon were not familiar to scout pilots that had never been there before but after a mile or so we noticed that things around us did not look like the area where we had traveled into the city. We asked the driver about these streets and asked if this was the way home. He assured us that it was the right way and a better way out of Saigon so we waited and watched.

After we got outside of Saigon we started traveling roads that looked familiar. As scout pilots we flew up and down these roads looking for ambushes and land mines. We soon knew that this was not the road to Cu Chi and that we were headed in the wrong direction. There were roads that went over to connect with the road to Cu Chi and that seemed better than returning to Saigon. So we turned on a road and headed over to intersect with the road home.

It was at this point dusk and not long before dark. In Vietnam single American military vehicles or just a couple of vehicles often disappear when they are out late in the day. Everyone knows that it is crazy to start out late in the day. We knew that it would be totally dark long before we got home.

As we drove along the roads the South Vietnamese local people started really looking at us strangely. They were not used to seeing single military vehicles traveling alone at this time of day. They and we knew this was now a high-risk operation. The great question was which of these folks were “good guys” and which ones were “bad guys”.

At this point Stevie turned around to me and said, “Give me your machine gun”. All four of us in the jeep had our forty-five caliber pistols but I was the only one with a machine gun. All of the scout pilots were issued a “CAR-15” to carry. (A CAR-15 is a short version of a M-16 machine gun. The barrel is shorter and the stock is metal and telescopes.) In a “fire fight” a machine gun out-guns any pistol. He who has the machine gun rules and I was not about to give up my machine gun.

Stevie had asked for my machine gun and I looked at him and said, “No”. Our eyes met and both of us gave the other a cold stare. Then I said, “If you wanted a machine gun you should have brought yours!” I think a firm smile came across my lips and Stevie looked down at my finger on the trigger. The look and where my hand was told him that the gun was not coming out of my hand without it discharging. And if it discharged I was going to be on the “good end” and someone was going to be on the “bad end”. Stevie then knew I was serious and the matter was not open for discussion. He turned around and again watched the road and folks looking at us. Stevie did turn around and look at me a couple of more times but each time he got the same determined look.

About thirty minutes after it became really dark we approached the gates of Cu Chi. As we pulled within about a quarter of a mile of the main gate we told the driver to slow to about five miles an hour. We started yelling that we were Americans and telling the guards not to shoot us. Slowly we continued to move forward. When we were about two hundred feet of the gate we were told to halt. Immediately we stopped. From a guard tower a bright light was shined on us and we knew that many machine guns were aimed at us. Then we were told to move forward slowly and we followed orders exactly. After asking us why we were out there at night and carefully checking us over at the gate we were released to go to the troop area.

Once at the troop area we had a brief one-way conversation with the commander. We stood at attention while he yelled at us about wrecking his jeep, which only had about five hundred miles on it. Of course we tried to interject that it was his driver’s fault but he insisted it was our fault because we were the ranking individuals. After a little bit he got tired of yelling and told us to get out of his office. He told us we would never be allowed to use his jeep for a trip to Saigon. We took that punishment well and agreed to no more trips like that one. We were happy to go and call it a day! We had escaped death again! It had been one of those days when you don’t know whether to laugh because you had cheated death or to shake from fear because of how close it had been.

There are some situations that you end up in that are just not of your making. But like it or not, sometimes the solutions must come from you. The three warrant officers had not been drinking and driving wildly. It was not our driving that hit the cars and the motorcycle but without us there wasn’t a solution. It is best to be careful whom you throw your lot in with. In some situations you don’t have a choice in which boat you sail but when you have a choice, make a wise choice! The more important or critical the mission, the more selective you must be on the crew and your preparation. Some things in life have life threatening or eternal consequences! ‘Choose well this day!!