I ran across this nice website for B Troop 3/17th Air Cav tonight. I was trying to figure out just what these “Pink Teams” were that you all were referencing, and this site came up through Google. (Though I did not find the answer on this particular site, I was happy I stumbled across it. There are a lot of great photos and a lot of great history here.)
For those like me who are still interested in finding out about these “Pink Teams,” here is a good reference page for you that should answer all your questions:
this site is the best I’ve found so far in researching army aviation in vietnam…follow the links on the left column, and follow them as far as they take you because many of the links lead to other links and so on and you will find yourselve on individual unit websites that are packed full of info…for instance, if you want to research pink teams, click on the cavalry link and follow it from there…
" Pink teams" got their name from a combination of the internal designations used by air cav troops to identify the variuos cav functions. Scouts were white, guns were red, lift element was yellow, ground element (QRF) was blue. When the scout and gun section was combined in the armed recon team the color would be pink.
In RVN, I flew snakes with “Blue Max”. We would often team up with a loach from E/82 Arty whose callsign was “Woodpecker”. The resulting mission designator was “Bluepecker”. Somehow neither designation adequately conveys the seriousness or lethal nature of the mission.
I’ve often wondered why the cav gun platoons standardized on only 9 cobras. Seems like they’d be consistently short handed? My father has told me that the 4/77th ARA normally flew the gun portion of pink teams at first and last light (I think that’s what he said) teamed with the 2/17th cav scouts…and perhaps 101st ABD artillery loaches as well? I presume the reason was because each battalion of ARA had 12 cobras and therefore was needed to cover a shortage of cobras?
also, during Lam Son 719, he has told me, and I have read, that the loaches were very quickly taken out of the battle because a) they were too vulnurable to that kind of AAA environment and b) nobody needed to do much “scouting” (i.e. use the loach as bait to try and draw the enemy into action) because everything from 0-10,000ft got shot at from the border all the way to tchepone and back…thus target spotting was not required.
