When I first got in country which was just before Tet of 68 the only change we did to the color scheme of the ship was to paint two foot squares on the tops of the main rotor blades saw you could see the ship from above if it was at tree top level. The first change I can remember was about April when we started to paint the horizontal stablizers orange and painted the numbers 119 in white on one and 52 on the other. The about July they had us add the red white and blue stripes to the tail boom and paint the tail numbers either yellow or white. If you go to the album and see one of the pictures Bob Kilpatrick sent in from Dak To there are two of our slicks at the Hot Spot. One has the yellow tail cover and the other has the white. Captain Pearson who was the flight leader when I got to the platoon call sign was "Yellow One" and Lt. Shelton who was 2nd Flight's leader was "Lite Blue".

When we got to An Khe I was in the Crocs but I do remember the second flight started to paint the tail covers blue on the new ship which had started to come to the company. We would go to great lengths to get spray paint in order to paint the ships because the paint the army would give us was that heavy lead base paint which was like painting with tar. No matter how hard you tried it looked like you had used a putty knife to paint with and not a brush. Of course PaPa Gator and the II Corp got the good stuff because those ships had to look good. When I got Gator 371 in July of 68 I had to do all the painting on it. Then In Dec I got Gator 488 and again went through the same thing. In March of 69 again with Gator 270. It seems like I spent about the same amount of time flying in them as I did painting them.