TINS! Taxi Driver...

I sometimes play hooky over at Cassie’s place (now, don’t get snippy -- a lot of *you* do it, too) and the following exchange took place in the comments on this post:

BillT: I knew a couple of reporters in RVN who wrote accurately and *favorably* about what we were doing in the Delta -- and I'd read what they filed, because they liked to hang around with us whenever they were in the neighborhood.

What was published often had nothing in common with what was filed, except the location of the action, the units involved, and the reporter's by-line.

Cricket: BillT, a question here: In RVN, those reporters prolly had experience covering wars but things were changing at home. Do you think the editors of their stories changed them to reflect it?

BillT: I know they did on at least one occasion...

We flew an RF/PF platoon into an area on a recon patrol, and they bumped into an NVA recon element.

Bear that in mind. We were deep in the Mekong Delta and ran into an element of *North* Vietnamese regulars at a time when the MSM meme was that there were no North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam.

Long story short, we eventually inserted a full battalion of 9th ARVN Division troops to counter what turned into a meeting engagement with at least that number of NVA. The ARVNs kicked the NVA's butts. We had a few aircraft take hits, the ARVN and Ruff-Puffs took some casualties, but the NVA lost at least 50 KIA, by actual count, and about fifteen prisoners. The reporter who wrote the story interviewed several of the US advisors with the RF/PF and the 9th ARVN, and questioned two pilots from my platoon. He wrote the story on *my* typewriter, with me looking over his shoulder to answer questions.

He filed what he wrote -- no changes.

Two days later, a story appeared under his byline about a resounding *defeat* a local Viet Cong unit had inflicted on the 9th ARVN, and that three US helicopters had been shot down by hostile fire.

No mention of North Vietnamese troops (there weren't more than a squad of VC involved -- as scouts), none of our helicopters were shot down, and the fight was a *win* for the good guys.

The reporter was livid, and we didn't blame him -- his *editor* had flushed his good-standing with his friends and sources in the field.

Someone sniffed a TINS!, said so in an e-gram, and so here’s the *short* story made *long*...

One of the self-deprecating terms we Combat Assault pilots had for ourselves was “Taxi Driver” – as in, “I drive an olive drab taxicab.” It gave outsiders the comforting illusion we were actually humble souls (rather than suicidal maniacs), just doing whatever quotidian job came up, and kept us from getting swelled heads (do you have any idea how *hard* it was to get an X-L flight helmet when the size you usually wore was L?).

Besides, it was true. All we did was ferry people from point A to point B – the only difference between dropping them off at Hotel Three VIP pad in Ton Son Nhut and dropping them off next to a treeline in the middle of a firefight was that you *knew* you were gonna get out of Ton Son Nhut alive.

Really. Honest. The only difference whatsoever.

*koff*

Now, we didn’t normally fly reporters around when we were going into that *second* type of point B because normally, the passengers going into the second type of point B didn’t want anyone along armed solely with cameras and notepads – that’s one less actual shooter you have on your side, even though he is, technically, shooting. However, we didn’t fly into the lead hailstorm *every* time we flew, because not every flight into a rice paddy was a real, live, combat assault. In the Delta, the RF/PF (Regional Forces/Popular Forces – aka, Ruff Puffs, aka local militia) usually patrolled on foot, close to their home villages, keeping the local VC at arm’s length so the farmers could work without worrying about being killed or having their children kidnapped.

When Vietnamization became the policy in IV Corps, that changed. The Ruff Puffs were expected to augment one of the three ARVN Divisions in the Delta, either as recon elements, or security forces, and in order to do that, they needed training on airmobile assaults. And in order to do *that*, they needed a ride.

For “ride” read “olive drab taxicabs.”

We flew into the PZ (pickup zone) in trail formation, and saw the Puffs were lined up and broken down by squads, separated by about fifty feet. This was a *good* sign, because it meant the advisors had stressed the importance of rapid movement getting to the aircraft, and trying to sort everyone out from a single mass of troops was *not* conducive to rapid movement. Any of you who ever sat in a pickup zone while mortars fell around you may now nod sagely in agreement, and the rest of you will just have to take our word for it, okay?

Each one of us landed opposite our passengers, and they hustled aboard. Now, bear in mind that RF/PF were usually recruited from the ranks of VC and NVA who had decided they didn’t want to be bombed, strafed, rocketed, whacked with artillery, ambushed with claymore mines, or get into firefights with people who were bigger than they were for the remainder of their lives (which promised to be *short*, at that rate), so they “rallied” to the South Vietnamese government, which gave them a plot of land to farm with the sole condition that they’d defend their new homes against their former buddies.

Which meant, since they weren’t issued *green* uniforms and M-16s, that they usually wore black PJs, and most of them carried AKs.

You get kind of an eerie feeling seeing people who look like the ones who keep trying to kill you trotting up to you to go for a helicopter ride. I can only imagine what *they* were thinking.

The advisor had briefed me on the mission the previous day, and the Puffs had taken advantage of our shut-down Hubert to practice entry, positioning, and exiting the aircraft under the watchful eyes of the crew chief and gunner, so I wasn’t worried about anybody tossing a loaded AK on “auto” into the ship and *then* entering. We *did* have an extra passenger on the trip, though – a correspondent who had been living with the advisors in their team house, and watching them train the Puffs in marksmanship and patrolling – most of which, they already *knew* from their previous lives. The LZ was in an unsecure area east of the U Minh Forest and wasn’t known to be a hotbed of enemy activity, but there was always the possibility the Puffs would bump into a local VC squad and get some live fire training against live targets. With a full platoon in the LZ and mortar support from the village, they would be able to handle light contact with a minimum of fuss. After inserting the Puffs, we were to pick up a battalion of 9th ARVN and insert them into multiple LZs to the north of the PZ, where they were going to sweep a suspected NVA rest area.
Departure, enroute, and final approach into the LZ (a decidedly *wet* rice paddy) were uneventful. A pair of Copperhead Charlie-models had picked us up to escort us in, and broke off to provide security for the troops as they moved on line toward a grove of trees midway between the LZ and the closest part of the U Minh.

The fun began as we were exiting the area.

I heard one or two pops from AKs, then continuous automatic fire. Copperhead lead had swung north and said, “One-Five, your boys are gonna be in deep trouble in about two minutes – they’re chasing a couple of blue uniforms into the grove, and there’s a whole bunch of people in blue uniforms coming out of the woods and ducking into the weeds on the other side.”

“Got a count on the blue uniforms?”

“A whole sh*tload – the whole area’s full of ‘em, and they’re trying to decide who to kill first – me or the ground guys. Rolling in hot.”

Blue uniforms meant NVA. Sometimes we'd see them wearing khaki, sometimes forest green -- we figured the blue was originally green that had been washed too often, but we never found out for sure..

I got busy. I told my Peter Pilot to raise the advisors on FM and let them know the score, and to tell them the gunships would remain on station until they ran out of ammo. Then I called the 9th ARVN senior advisor, told him we had a sizeable contact, and requested a change of mission to reinforce the Puffs.

He was ecstatic, and wanted to know how fast I could get there.

We made ten or more trips into the original LZ to reinforce the Puffs and at least three into another, a hasty LZ, just to the north of the grove. I have no idea how many times the Copperheads left to re-arm, or how many times each of us slick-drivers went in to refuel (we rotated in-and-out to keep a constant stream of troops going in) but somewhere about mid-morning, two more showed up to play, and by about 1300, the NVA decided they’d had enough fun for the day and broke contact. They retreated in good order back into the U Minh, taking a lot of their wounded and dead with them, but the ground troops counted fifty KIA and policed up fifteen prisoners, mostly wounded so badly the NVA figured them for dead.

Hah. All fifteen lived through the helicopter trip to the evac hospital at Binh Thuy. I sent them on the three ships that had collected bullet holes, figuring the sheet-metal benders could get an early start on the repairs.

After the recall and regroup, and the return of the Ruff Puffs to their PZ and the return of the 9th ARVN to their bailiwick, we went home, with a side trip so the reporter could secure his gear and write and file his story – we had a MARS station *and* a teletype at Can Tho. The reporter wasn’t a stranger to us, since he’d visited us before, and he’d hitched a ride with us to visit the Puffs in the first place. His typewriter was a bit worse for wear, so I let him use mine, and as we yakked about the action, I filled him in on the details he couldn’t have seen from eyeball-above-the-weeds level. I was a sorta embarrassed reading over his shoulder, because the story made us sound a bit more fearless than we actually were.

Geez, we were only a bunch of taxi drivers, doin’ our jobs, yanno?