Shotdown at Quang Tri - 1 May1972
Ron Radcliffe Story,
Transcribed by Darrell Scott a friend - July 2021
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Shot Down May 1, 1972 Quang Tri City had been cut off from the east. A bunch of friendlies were trapped in a citadel in the center of the city. Among them was Captain Riddle (Bruce C.), one of our operations officers. We decided to go rescue him early in the morning.
We had two Loaches (scout helicopters), two Cobras and a Huey. The Huey and the Cobras were going to wait at Evans Army Airfield (Camp Evans), south of the front line. The two Loaches would fly in there in the dark. We’re flying about six inches above the rice paddy or marshland in the dark. We flew there everyday so we were familiar with the area and knew we could fly there without hitting anything. When I say we, I mean my crew chief Crank Labore and I, and my wingman, Fred Ledfors and another pilot named Clark (Harvey E.?) was flying as his observer (Clark was probably SP5 Harvey E. Clark).
We only took ammunition for the machine gun, no grenades or anything else. We’re trying to sneak into Quang Tri, into the Citadel, and get Riddle, take as many as we could, and get out of there. We didn’t know there were 80 friendlies in there. We would fly over bad guys in the dark. I saw a couple wake up and try to point their weapons at us. We would disappear into the dark. It started getting brighter as the sun started coming up. We started seeing more and they would try to shoot us but we would be gone before they could get a good shot at us. They were trying but couldn’t hit us. We were at echelon left, meaning I was in the lead and Ledfors was at my left and at 45 degrees behind me. We started hitting tree lines, south and east of Quang Tri. We had to go over the trees, so we would pop up over them and dip down under them. Right after hitting a tree line, Labore fired a long burst, maybe a hundred rounds. He told me, on the intercom, he shot at least ten of them. A few seconds later, we came over another tree line and there were a hundred bad guys, standing there, aiming up in the air looking for us.
As soon as I saw them I tried to make a left climbing turn so I could go over Ledfors and get on the other side of him. But the nose of my aircraft went down instead of up. They had opened fire at the same time. All my windows were blown out and I didn’t know it but my tail boom was blown off where it attaches to the fuselage of the helicopter. That’s why my nose went down even though I had full aft cyclic stick in. Instead of going over Ledfors, I actually hit him. We had a midair collision. I was completely out of control because I lost one main rotor blade and the right skid on my aircraft. Ledfors lost about three feet of one main rotor blade and he lost the blades on his tail rotor. Not the gear box, just the blades. If you lose the gear box you are out of center of gravity. We were both spinning around. The best way I could describe it is I was doing an elliptical spin. I also had a lateral one-to-one vibration. Which means, for every rotation of the rotor, I had a left and right vibration. It was very hard, slamming left and right. We crossed a river which saved us. The river was a barrier between them shooting at us and getting us. I guess I went about 80 meters past the river bank. Then I hit the ground really hard on the right side of the aircraft. My head whipped really hard and then my first thought was, “Holy shit, I’m still alive.” My next thought was, “Get out of the aircraft.” I tried to get out and my seat belt was on and locked.
Seat belt locks on cars come from seat belt locks on military aircraft. It’s the same kind of lock. My right shoulder was in the dirt. I unhooked my seat belt and climbed out the front window, because it was gone. My next thought was, “Where is Labore? Did he get thrown out? Did he get shot? Did the aircraft land on top of him?” I didn’t know what had happened to him. I got out and stood up. I walked around the nose of the aircraft and Labore was standing right there which scared the Holy Hell out of me. He said, “What do you want to do, sir?” I said, “Get the machine gun out.” In more of a squeaky voice than I wanted it to be. He got the gun out but it was no good because the cover of the gun was broken off. He had about 1800 rounds left but the gun didn’t work. I had 240 rounds for my CAR-15 which is now known as a M-4. My rifle went out the front window when they shot the windows out. Or maybe when we had the midair. I don’t know which.
I had a .38 with about 90 bullets and three grenades. Two were what we call mini-grenades, about as big as a silver dollar, but would kill you if close to you. The other was a standard, baseball shaped, M-26 fragmentation grenade. I gave it to Labore and told him to get down in the grass, a little to the north of where I was.
I heard an engine running, I looked over and saw Ledfors helicopter. It was sitting right side up and looked OK. My first thought was that they had been shot or else they would have turned the aircraft off. Just as I thought that, I heard the engine start winding down, they turned it off. They were next to a village with cinder block houses. I got my survival radio out and called the Cobras out of Camp Evans. The Cobras cranked up and headed our way.
Ledfors helicopter had been spinning and he cut the throttle. It stopped spinning and made a hovering auto-rotation descent from about three feet. It was sitting there with the rotor turning and Clark (Harvey E.?) Clark was probably SP5 Harvey E. Clark) said, “Why don’t you turn this thing off?” Ledfors said, “OK” and pushed the slide fitting forward to turn the throttle off. He said, “It won’t go off.” Clark said, “Pull the fuel valve.” It’s a little wire handle, wrapped in plastic, in the top of the helicopter. Ledfors pulled that and the engine went off. They got out of the aircraft and were talking to each other and hear some talking. Ledfors goes over to one of these cinder block houses and peeks around the corner.
There is a large number of North Vietnamese soldiers getting called into formation in the street. Their eyes got real big and they dived on the ground and started low-crawling away. When they got far enough away, Ledfors turned on his survival radio. My radio was on beeper, which is a setting called beeper that makes a loud noise on any radio turned on. That’s to alert them that somebody is down. Then you can turn it to voice and talk. So he turned his radio off real quick, and they kept low-crawling. In the meantime, I turned mine to voice and called the Cobras. I told them, “If you make a rocket run right now, you’ll be pointed right at us.” OConnell, the Cobra pilot, said “OK, I gotcha” and then turned around and headed south. I asked, “Where are you going?” He said, “We are going to get the Huey.” I said, “OK, tell the Huey to come right up the highway.” They hadn’t been able to do that before because the bad guys owned the highway. I said, “They have closed the corridor we have been using. They won’t be expecting you to come up the highway because we haven’t been doing it. We can get away with it once.” He said, “Roger” and went to get the Huey.
I decided to find my rifle. I walked over to the river, and somebody took a shot at me from the other side, north side, of the river. I said, “You can have the rifle.” and returned to where I was. I was on the ground with Labore and there was a rise a little over. There was a cemetery with Catholic and Buddhist monuments around the graves. The Buddhist monuments are circular, made out of concrete, and the Catholic graves have rectangular monuments around them. Suddenly a guy appeared, looking around, with his back to one of those monuments. I pointed my .38 at him before I realized it was Ledfors. He didn’t see me so I whispered “Ledfors”. He looked at me and I said “Get over there.” So I told him and and Clark (Harvey E.?) where to hide. I said, “I’ll talk to the Slick.” I told OConnell to let me know when they were 1000 meters out. I had three smoke grenades. One regular smoke grenade, the size of a soda can, and two mini-smokes, the size of film cans. 
The color of the can is the color of the smoke. You unscrew the top, turn it over, there is a scratch pad like a matchbox, you strike it and toss it on the ground. They will burn for about a minute or so. I said, “When they are 1000 meters out, I’ll pop one, when 500 meters out I’ll pop the other. Then I’ll put the big one on.” I could hear them coming. The Cobras came over us and the Huey came up the road. I popped one mini-smoke, then the other one, and then the big one. But right before that, the Cobras were right overhead and took a tremendous amount of fire from across the river. I got on the radio and told OConnell, “You guys are taking heavy fire from the north side of the river.” He said, “Roger” and the Cobras went into a rocket run. He started firing 17 pound high explosive fragmentation rockets. And he started firing nails. The official name is flechette. They look like darts about an inch long. One rocket has 2300 of them in it. You can tell when they are firing nails. The rocket goes a certain distance and arms. Then there is a puff of orange smoke and it has opened up into a cone of nails. He punched off about six nail rockets plus the high fragmentation rockets. When he made that first rocket run, the shooting went down to almost nothing. When OConnell pulled off, the wing Cobra did it again, firing the rockets plus the mini-guns and 40mm grenades.Who was the wing Cobra? In the meantime, the Huey was coming up to us and I put the smoke out.
When they came up to us, they did not land. I called Labore, Ledfors, and Clark over and told them to get in. Then I got in. The Huey was about three foot skid height and both machine guns were firing. They were not firing bursts, they were holding the triggers down. I didn’t know why, until they told me later, the bad guys were low-crawling up on us. They told me they shot four on one side and six on the other side, who were trying to sneak up on us. Those were the guys in the village who were getting into formation. It took them about 20 minutes to get their act together, get some coffee, come out and get us.
There were two pilots in the Huey, Captain Pete Barber and Captain Frank Hock. After they picked us up, they made a pedal turn, meaning you just push on the pedals, and headed back in the opposite direction they had come. We climbed out of there, it was an overcast day so heat seeking rockets were not getting a good lock on a Huey taking off. When a helicopter takes off, the tail is up in the air, unlike an airplane where the nose is pointed up. We got the hell out of there, in a hail of gunfire.
We got back to Phu Bai and I had to talk to a colonel, whose name I can’t remember. He was the 11th aviation group commander. He wanted me to brief him and hear his plan to get the people out. That’s when I found out there were more than eighty people in there. He said, “We’ll take 30 Hueys and 30 Cobras and go up and get them.” I said, “I don’t think you should do that because they would all have to be orbiting around Quang Tri waiting to land and pick people up. They will be taking heavy fire and you will lose a lot of aircraft and people.” He said, “OK, we’ll have to think of something else.” It was still only seven o’clock in the morning. All that had happened from just before sunrise and seven o’clock. A couple of days later, a South Vietnamese ranger unit went through the area on the north side of the river and found about a hundred dead bad guys, killed by the Cobra attack. That was a really good Cobra attack. To get the people out, the Air Force used Super Jolly Green Giant helicopters (CH-53) and 30 fighter bombers, jets and Skyraiders. Skyraiders are propeller driven airplanes. It can carry a lot of bombs and has four 20mm cannons They sent in one helicopter at a time with the airplanes on each side, shooting and bombing all the way. The helicopter would land, pick up as many as they could, and leave. Then another would come in. They had five available but only used three to get everybody out. Ledfors and I went down to Da Nang, to the 95th Evac Hospital, on China Beach. We got checked out by the doctors. I think Labore also went down to get checked out. He didn’t go with us, he went with somebody else. I got checked for shrapnel in my leg, and neck injury for hitting the ground like I did.