This story is hard to believe, but as they say —truth is stranger than fiction, sometimes. During my tour in Vietnam, I was assigned a jeep and I owned a motorcycle. So you’d think I didn’t lack for transportation. But — on one occasion I had left the jeep to be serviced at the motor pool at Tan Son Nhat (the motor pool was located on the airport grounds.) So I rode my motorcycle for a few days, but one morning the battery on my motorcycle just died, and as luck would have it, I got a call on my radio that I needed to be in Biên Hòa (nearby city to Saigon) as soon as possible. I weighed my options and decided, given all the circumstances, my best bet would be to take a taxi. You’ve probably seen pictures of Saigon during the war and the streets were jammed with taxicabs and they were all little Renault vehicles. I might add that most polluted the air big time and probably contributed to global warming. They all seemed to be held together with rusty bolts and duct tape. And needless to say, they were small.
Anyhow, I swallowed my pride and called one. It came to the curb belching soot-black exhaust, and I climbed in the back seat. I told the driver where I wanted to go and we were off — all taxi drivers drove like they were race car drivers and my driver made one fine Le Mans start. The taxi was so small my knees were up around my chin and it was hard to breath with all the soot coming from the engine.
And true to form, the driver seemed to have the gas pedal all the way to the floor — we were really zooming through traffic. Then all of a sudden, there was an enormous scraping and a thunderous crash — even louder than the engine, which was loud enough. I looked up and the driver’s head, which seemed like it was only a few inches from my nose, disappeared. Actually, not only the driver’s head, but the entire front end of the car disappeared.Suddenly I was the front end — zipping down the street in my back seat, with no steering wheel or a windshield. It didn’t take long for the back seat and rear of the taxi to come to a stop. I stepped out, through the front, where the driver’s seat had been — there was no reason to open the side door. Just about then, the driver appeared, out of breath. The car had hit a large bump and had broken into two pieces. The rusted body and, probably rusty, drive shaft had separated precisely at the back of the driver’s seat, leaving each half to go it’s own way. My half (the back seat and rear wheels) ended up near the curb. The driver and the rest of the car had come to a stop further down the street.
I would love to have had a video of that incident — it would have been a big hit on U-Tube today.
It was fortunate that no one was hurt. The taxi driver hailed me another cab and I was off to Biên Hòa.
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