"The Hoc Mon 500" - John G. Jerdon
A Troop 1967/1968

      “You know what the difference is between a fairy tale and a war story,” asked Gauis Phillipideas, the second centurion of the XII Legion.  Several of the newer men leaned closer to the old veteran.  A lot of those boys were from the far edges of the Empire and were still in their early years of fighting.  “A fairy tale starts out ‘Once upon a time’, and a war story starts out ‘This is no shit’.”

     In the bad old days after Tet, probably at the end of February or the beginning of March, “A” Troop, 3rd Squadron 4th US Cavalry was in the middle of what would become the first of two 65 day long missions.  The story that had become known as the Hoc Mon 500 was racing through the Squadron from man to man like wildfire.  It seems that Johnny Johnson, a man of no small appetites, had cranked up a new tank in the motor pool back at Cu Chi and tried to bring it out to where we were loggered south of Tan Son Nhut.  It was around eleven;  I routinely pulled the Two A.M. to Four A.M. watch so I was just falling asleep when I heard Johnny’s voice cackling over the radio, so I got the story second and even third hand.

     The thing that started everything off was another long fight through Saberville.  That's the name we started using for Than Thoi Nhut, the village just northeast of Tan Son Nhut.  Johnny’s tank, Saber Alpha 27 had been hit hard, probably by an RPG-7.  All the men got out and the tank burned.  Johnny and the others were peppered with shrapnel, lots of small cuts but nothing life threatening.  Johnny and his crew were taken back to base camp to recover and draw out a new 27 and fit it out for the field.

     What struck me the night that Johnny’s voice was coming over the radio, was him calling himself ‘Saber Alpha 27' instead of ‘27 Yankee’.  It was our common practice then to identify ourselves as a ‘Yankee’ whenever the vehicle wasn't with us.  I thought about it for about two or three seconds before rolling over and getting some sack time.  Nobody ever really gave a damn about that radio stuff anyway.

     It wasn't till my last week in country that I got the whole story.  I was getting ready to rotate home and Johnny was in Cu Chi resting up after another losing battle with shrapnel.  He'd be going back out to the Troop in three or four days and was spending his time getting drunk with me each night.  On the last of our evenings,  well really it was morning  afternoon and evening; I asked Johnny about the Hoc Mon 500.  Here's his story.

     Johnny and his crew had signed for the new replacement 27 the day before and had spent the rest of that day and all of the next working on it.  New radios had to be installed, a new fifty caliber machine gun, a new co-axial machine gun; the main gun had to be bore sighted, ammo loaded, the whole nine yards.  Johnny and the boys got a few cases of beer from the officer's club on the morning of the second day, just a little something to slake a powerful thirst.  They got as far as breaking out a full ammo load before the unjustness of their condition overcame them. Around two in the afternoon, Johnny told the boys to take the rest of the day off and he headed for the NCO club.  Johnny knew the guy who ran it, an old Spec 5 lifer that had more wounds than anyone in the troop.

     Sometime after dark that night, the Charge of Quarters “A” Troops orderly room heard a Tank starting out in the motor pool.  He ducked through the door and was just in time to see the brand new Saber Alpha 27 ripping down the road toward Main Gate.  He ran back to the orderly room and got on the horn to the MPs at main gate and told them someone was out joy riding in a tank.    Being MPs, they told the CQ not to sweat it, they'd haul the guys in shortly.

     They never again found a piece of Cu Chi Main Gate that was reusable.

     The CQ called it up to Squadron, the MPs reported up their chain to Division Headquarters.

     In later years I often wondered who had the dirtier job, the one waking up F. K. Mearns, Commanding General 25th Infantry Division, or Lt. Colonel Glen Otis, boss of the 3/4 Cav.  No real choice, both of the poor bastards had the dirty end of the stick that night.  Later everyone agreed  that both the General and the Colonel were in choppers looking for our boy Johnny.  

     Johnny had blown through Main Gate, hung a right, and motored into Cu Chi town.

     Without a care in the world, he turned south on Route 1 and settled down for some serious hot rodding.  What boy from North Carolina wouldn't be in heaven?  Johnny rolled through the town of Ap Cho and started down toward the Hoc Mon bridge.  In the old days, we used to post a track and a tank there overnight.  It was great duty then, a good safe location, plenty of boom boom girls, and all the beer you could bring with you.  There was a Popular Forces post there, kinda like our National Guard but way more informal.  They used about thirty rolls of concertina wire there on each side of the bridge every night.  You would have thought the wire could stop bullets they used so much of it.

     Since Tet, a US infantry platoon and a Company of ARVN regulars held the bridge. Johnny roared through the wire and over the bridge gaily waving from the driver's hatch of 27.  Why they didn't open fire or why none of them were run over has to be put down as one of the mysteries of war.  Johnny just popped the top on another can and kept on driving.  Somewhere south of Hoc Mon, he ran into some enemy patrols.  He shrugged them off when later telling me the story, just a bunch of AK fire, no RPGs.  He did make a stop to take a leak though, he somehow tripped a flare by the side of the road and he thought the light would keep him from falling off the tank.

     Johnny started calling for directions around midnight.  He wanted Lt. Nishimura to guide him from the highway to where the Troop was loggered that night.  Both Lt. Nishimura and Cpt. Coomer persuaded him that the safest thing to do would be for Johnny to go back to the Hoc Mon bridge for the night.  After lots of talking, Johnny reluctantly agreed, ending the first, last, and only Hoc Mon 500.

     That last night we were together, I asked Johnny about some of the details of his adventure that were bothering me.  First I wanted to know how he could have gone through so much concertina wire and not thrown a track.  He grinned and said, “At fifty miles an hour, you don't pick up no damned wire.”  Next I wanted to know if the grunts at Hoc Mon were pissed about his scaring the shit out of them.  “Naw, they just kept waking me up and making sure I wasn't leaving again,” he replied.  Finally, I asked him the question that had been bugging me since March.  I asked him if he'd been put in for some sort of medal.  “Hell no,” Johnny yelled.  “The Colonel gave me an Article 15 and fined my sorry ass 25 bucks to pay for a new Main Gate.”   “Damn”,  I said. “They didn't give you anything?”  “Well”,  Johnny admitted , “Captain Coomer made me ‘Driver of the Month and gave me a cash prize of 35 bucks’.  

     I found these new details worthy of sleeping on, especially the mysterious ‘Driver of the Month Prize’.  First I’d ever heard of it.  Johnny and I were staggering back to our hooches as drunk as we could get and decided to stop off in the orderly room and see where the Troop was on the big map.  The pins for the platoons were all together in a night time laager way up in what we called the ‘trapezoid’.  Bad, bad injun country!  Johnny looked at me out of the corner of his eye and said, “Wanna go for a ride?”

     I never saw Johnny again.  I looked for him at the reunion in Indianapolis, one of the guys said he'd been in poor heath.  I found that difficult to believe.  As much beer as Johnny drank, he should have been dead years and years ago.

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