Comments on the Ravens:

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The Ravens were a group of elite pilots who flew the Cessna O-1 Bird Dogs
in Laos during the Southeast Asian
Conflict. In slow, low flying aircraft the Ravens' job was to find the
target, order up fighter-bombers, mark the target
accurately with smoke rockets, control the operation and stay over the
target to make a bomb damage assessment. The
name Ravens became a symbol of intelligence gathering and aerial control
of ground combat. (Half-time announcement
Raven presentation at USAF Academy, Nov. 4, 1989)
They went to war in blue jeans, T-shirts, and sometimes cowboy hats. It
was a symbol of their disdain for the
conventional, "bureaucratic" military. They were the Ravens, fighting a
secret air war in the jungles of Laos, almost
forgotten by everyone... (San Antonio Light, Oct., 1987)
The pilots, known as Ravens, are unique because they were among some 130
Air Force pilots who volunteered to risk
their lives to fly highly dangerous covert missions in unarmed single
engine Cessna O-1s. They were part of what was
known as the Steve Canyon program, which was created in 1966... Their job
as FACs was to locate and call in
airstrikes against the North Vietnamese during its occupation of Laos...
They (the enemy) knew that if they shot down a
fighter there would be more fighters coming. So, they shot down the air
controllers. It was dangerous because you were
flying a prop airplane, low over the jungle, looking for the enemy. And if
you found him and they didn't shoot you down,
then they were going to get blown away. Christopher Robbins said some 30%
of the unit died from combat injuries.
(San Antonio Express-News, Oct. 26, 1987)
Locked away in classified archives until now... They...suffered the
highest casualty rate in the Indochina war. Their deeds
were the stuff of whispered legends. The pilots who flew the
fighter-bombers to enemy targets knew them as the Ravens.
(Crown Publishers, press release)
On occasion they went trolling; skimming the treetops above enemy
positions in the hopes of drawing fire... The elite
group of men, part adventurers/ part patriots, who flew some of the most
bizarre missions of the Viet Nam war. They
were a small group (their ranks were never more than 22 at any one time)
performing a hazardous mission. (Military
Book Club review, Jan., 1988)
The best and the brightest, the craziest and the bravest Americans served
in Laos, none braver than the men who flew in
Combat as FACs known as Ravens...braving bad weather, tricky terrain,
combat fatigue, poor maintenance, and
occasional assassination teams to get the job done... To give you some
sense of the size of the war in Laos, the United
States dropped 1.6 million tons of bombs there- more than the 1.36 million
tons it dropped on Germany during World
War II. (Book review, Asa Baber, Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 22, 1987)