Bicycle Convoy - Memoirs of CPT Ron Radcliffe
by Ron Radcliffe - CE was Ronald Terry, - Date unknown (Late 1971?),
Transcribed by Ghost Writer. maybe Darrell Scott a friend - July 2021
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I flew out of Tay Ninh to a fire base on the border of Cambodia. They had a runway, refueling point, and armpit, where you could rearm. I know it sounds funny, but armpit is what we called them. We flew into Cambodia to do a bomb damage assessment after a B-52 strike. I flew into this place eight minutes after the last bomb had fallen. The dust had just settled, there was a film of dust on everything. There were some big bunkers that wouldn’t be destroyed unless they took a direct hit from a 750 or 1000 pound bomb. Some were dead but the rest were still intact. We found cart tracks on the dust. And we found blood trails. The bad guys had run out of the bunkers, grabbed the dead bodies, and pulled them into the bunkers. They don’t want us to see the dead. They think it drives us crazy if we don’t see any dead bodies after dropping all those bombs.
I see a green poncho, which is clean. It doesn’t have any dust on it, it is in a square and has a rock on each corner. Since it has no dust, it was put there within the last few minutes. I told my crew chief to get a fragmentation grenade hot. That is done by holding the grenade in the right hand, puting the ring on a finger of the left hand, pulling the grenade off the pin and holding it outside the door. The reason is if you are clumsy or get shot or something, the grenade will fall outside. I flew over to the poncho, right above it, about six feet. We dropped the grenade and moved off. The grenade exploded and we went back to see what was under the poncho. There was a torso with a head and one arm. There was a leg and head next to it. The bad guys didn’t have time to pull those in the bunker.
I reported what I found there and said the place could use another B-52 strike because the big bunkers were not injured. I moved on and came to this really big open area with one road through the middle of it. Along the road was an occasional hut the Cambodians lived in, and an occasional palm tree. They had long trunks with a little ball of leaves at the top. I saw a line of Vietnamese wearing khaki uniforms on bicycles. I think they heard me before they saw me. A little south of them was a house with some Cambodian women and children. I think the Vietnamese left all their weapons and maybe a guy in that house. They made two Cambodians get on their bikes and ride with them.
The Cambodians were wearing ragged clothes and didn’t look like the Vietnamese. There were maybe twelve people in all. The bicycles were loaded with supplies. They weren’t war materials, but bolts of material, reams of bicycle tires, and that kind of stuff. I didn’t see any weapons, so they didn’t meet the rules of engagement, even though they were bad guys since they were Vietnamese and in Cambodia. I wouldn’t shoot them unless something weird happened. I wanted them to stop. My crew chief signalled them to stop. The lead guy keep his head down and kept on riding like I wasn’t there. I flew right in front of him and put my skid within a couple of inches of his nose. He just kept riding and wouldn’t look up. I pulled around and told my crew chief, Sgt. Ronald Terry, to shoot the front wheel off his bike. So Terry shot the wheel, the spokes broke, the bike went down on the fork, and this guy flew over the handle bar. He jumped up, was all smiles, and waved as if to say, “Oh, you wanted me to stop?” I signalled for all of them to stop which they did. I flew along the line, pointed at the Cambodians, and told them to go with hand and arm signals. They were pulling rags out of their little bags to show me they didn’t have anything and didn’t want to get shot. The two Cambodians left.
I signalled for the Vietnamese to put all the bikes together. They would act like they didn’t know what I wanted until I had Terry fire a burst next to them. They put the bikes together and I signalled for them to get off the road. They hem and hawed for a second until Terry fired a burst next to them and they jumped up and ran off the road. While this is going on, the Cobra pilots are asking, “Can we shoot them? Can we shoot them? Put some smoke on them. We’ll shoot them.” They really wanted to shoot these guys. Bad guys in the open. That is a Cobra pilot’s dream. I said, “We are not shooting them because they don’t have any weapons.” From the Cobra pilots, I heard, “Oh shit.”
I had Terry shoot up all the supplies and bikes. He just ate them up with machine gun bullets. Then Terry noticed a bunch of foliage at the bottom of a couple of the palm trees. That’s not right because the foliage is at the top of the tree. He said, “I think there are motorcycles in that foliage.” I said, “Well, shoot them.” So he shot the motorcycles and they exploded and burned. So all we killed were supplies, bicycles, and two motorcycles. The Cobra pilot wasn’t happy but I didn’t violate the rules of engagement and I stopped a lot of supplies.
On the way back, I passed a lake on the east side of the Mekong River. The lake was about a mile in diameter and there had been a B-52 strike right through the middle of the lake. I decided to give the Air Force a hard time and said, “I have a bomb damage assessment of an Arc Light.” Operation Arc Light was the code name for B-52 strikes. They said, “OK, what is it?” I said, “You killed two submarines and four frogmen.” Then I went home.
It was a nice mission and I didn’t have to kill anybody.