Colorado IV

288 Forward Air Controllers are honored at this site.

American planes were so fast that the pilots had trouble pinpointing, or even seeing, the enemy on the ground. So, smaller, slower aircraft were used to track enemy movement and positions. As time went on and the ground fire power increased, faster planes were eventually called upon for this critical mission. These pilots, who were all experienced fighter/bomber pilots, became experts in noting changes to landscape, number of people, etc in a given area and would send this info back to the folks who made attack decisions. Often these smaller planes were relatively safe as the enemy would not want to expose their position by firing upon them, however, many were shot down or crashed on were in some way destroyed and this led to the 288 honored here.

You can read much more about the role these heroic pilots played in the greatest FAC system in history, here;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_air_controllers_in_the_Vietnam_War

or here;

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~tpilsch/AirOps/facs.html