If you have a line in memory and you know you want to get the 1st, 4th and 5th terms, why not just grab those terms?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $ham = "spam\tspam\tspam\t\tyam\tclam";
my @jam;
for my $i (0, 3, 4) {
    push @jam, $ham =~ /(?:[^\t]*\t){$i}([^\t]*)/;
}

print join("\n", '**', @jam, '**', '');
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You could even code that into a single expression if you only wanted to run it once.