Eagle Days: A Marine Legal/Infantry Officer in Vietnam

5. The Chief of Staff Loses His Jeep

5 / The Chief of Staff Loses His Jeep Shortly after becoming a trial/defense counsel at FLC, I was handed a hot potato in the form of a young corporal accused of stealing the chief of staff’s jeep. Although the MPs caught the suspect off base after curfew and in an off-limits area, this was a case that appealed to me. It looked to me like a rush job by higher-ups to hang the corporal as an example. When I met Corporal Mike Slaughter, I found him to be clean cut, decent , intelligent, and a pleasure to work with. He was an Eagle Scout. Although General Harry Olson, the commanding officer at FLC, appeared to be upset that his chief’s jeep was found parked outside a skivy house and tended to believe that the command driver (Corporal Slaughter) was the culprit , I believed Slaughter. In fact, I felt good about defending the corporal instead of the typical “pot” hound. Slaughter’s sincerity, his prior clean record, and his appearance all led me to believe that the command was trying to push through a plea bargain that would be a huge injustice. In the process of seeking justice, I talked to Colonel Koehnline, the commanding officer of Headquarters and Services Battalion, about dropping the charges. Corporal Slaughter was a member of the Headquarters and Services Battalion. Colonel Koehnline’s office was also next door to General Olson’s office. I was given a polite cold shoulder when I attempted to explain the facts of the case. I was undeterred. I wrote letters to Corporal Slaughter’s former teachers, his minister, his parents, and his scout master to get affidavits attesting to his character. I also studied the lack of a simple, clear-cut operating procedure involving the use 38 Chapter 5 and maintenance of vehicles at FLC headquarters. In fact, in contrast to the rest of the motor pools on base, headquarters assumed an air of disdainful separation and followed its own methods any way that it pleased. According to Corporal Slaughter, he admittedly presumed on his position when he took the chief of staff’s vehicle without getting permission. He went out after hours on Highway 1. He claimed that he went on a preventive maintenance run, whereas the government alleged that he went out to drop a friend at a skivy house and to make a visit himself. There was evidence, however , that the former chief of staff of Brigadier General Olson had formulated an unofficial policy requiring the drivers to go out and test-drive repaired vehicles on Highway 1 as a part of vehicle maintenance. Before Slaughter had been handpicked as the general’s driver, he was a mechanic and served as an unofficial mechanic for the drivers at headquarters. Knowing this, the chief of staff’s driver had approached him earlier in the week and asked him to take his vehicle out on the road sometime when he had an opportunity to check the front end and transmission. The corporal agreed to do so at the first opportunity. This turned out to be the evening of 2 June, when he was stopped. The fly in the soup came when Slaughter was supposed to have stated to the road master when he was pulled over that, indeed, he was not out alone on the highway but that he was picking up a friend at a local hospitality house. This statement seemed to be corroborated by the fact that a Sergeant Leasher was also picked up in the village by the road master after he apprehended Slaughter. Sergeant Leasher had been going with a Vietnamese girl who worked on the base, and her mother was visiting from Hue that night. The amorous sergeant wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to talk to his future mother-in-law about a marriage contract. Before leaving the base, Sergeant Leasher approached Slaughter, who worked nearby at headquarters. Knowing something about the procedures for after-hours maintenance runs, Leasher asked whether Slaughter was going to make a run that night, and, if so, would he mind picking him up on the way back to the base. Slaughter said he was not sure that he would be going out that night, and nothing further was said between them. Later, Slaughter drove out on the highway and was stopped, alone, going in the opposite direction on the highway for a maintenance run...