The Vietnam War was a wild time and the last war in which American citizens were drafted into service. Young men were pulled from school, jobs, or straight from their high school graduations to go tp Vietnam. With them, they brought their love for beer — some of whom remembered home by painting their helicopter rocket pods to resemble the beers they’d left behind.
“We were young guys,” said Jim Koch, a former pilot in a battalion whose UH-1s took to the skies of Vietnam oversized Coors and Budweiser cans on their sides. “At 21 years old, I was one of the older pilots. Most of our crew chiefs and door gunners were 18 or 19 years old. So, we hadn’t really grown up. In fact, most of us haven’t grown up even now.”
Koch, whose call sign was Stallion 505, was assigned to the 92nd Assault Helicopter Company during the Vietnam War. The 92nd was formed at Fort Carson, Colorado, where pilots and crews were fans of Coors beer, then a favorite in-state brewery based in Golden, which was not widely available around the country.
For missions, 92nd crews flew two versions of the Huey — unarmed, or ‘slick’ ships that flew under the call sign ‘Stallion,’ and the heavily armed gunship versions, which flew as ‘Sidekicks’. One of the armaments on the Sidekicks were either the M159 or M200 rocket pods, each carrying 19 2.75-inch rockets.
The launchers were also, the crews quickly realized, notably beer-can shaped, and what better way to you Colorado-based helicopters than to paint your rocket pods to look like the golden elixir from Golden? Or put more simply by Koch: “Well, we were young and wild guys, and it was our favorite beer.”
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One of the 92nd’s crew chiefs, Tom Tucker, had an artistic bent. In the air, Tucker would eventually receive the Distinguished Flying Cross for a mission where his crew provided close air support for a long-range reconnaissance patrol ambushed by a much larger enemy force near An Khe, Vietnam. During the mission, Tucker marked an enemy position with smoke, fired on multiple strafing runs, and directed rocket hits on a bunker he spotted.
However, as the crew chief of Sidekick 113, he decided to paint a precise depiction of his favorite beer on the rocket pods.
Tucker died in 2016, but Koch interviewed Tucker before he passed away. He said Tucker had sent word to his dad back home to find out the exact colors of paint he’d need to complete his masterpiece.
“His dad contacted the Coors company, and they provided him that information, and he sent the paint to Vietnam, and Tom painted his pods,” Koch said.
Seeing the Coors cans on missions became a source of comfort for the 92nd’s pilots. Koch was a Stallion pilot flying with no guns and needed gunship escorts for most of his missions.
Depending on operational needs, Koch didn’t always have his Sidekicks, and helicopters from other units would assist with escorting them. But it was always a good feeling, Koch said, to see the Coors rocket pods because he’d immediately know it was his guys.
“We knew each other. We knew how our guys would operate because we had trained together,” Koch said. “Sometimes, when you were working with other units, maybe they did things slightly differently than we did. So yeah, it’s always nice to have your own guys.”
However, not long after Koch returned to the U.S., he heard word from the unit that the pilots of the Sidekicks had run into a problem with their helicopter and had to jettison the rocket pods to make it back to base.
“The Coors cans were lost on a mission. They had to punch them off because they were having some power difficulties with the aircraft,” Koch said. “That’s the main thing you have to do. You have to jettison anything hanging on the side so the Coors were lost in the jungle somewhere over Vietnam.”
But that wasn’t the end of beer can themed rocket pods. Denny Turner, a Stallion pilot, arrived in Vietnam around the end of 1968, after Koch returned to the States. He saw that a pair of new rocket pods had arrived and after talking to his gun crews, offered to paint them. However, some of the gun crew were Budweiser fans, and that’s the theme he chose.
And he knew his paints.
“I bought paint and brushes at the Cam Ranh Bay Base AFEX and Hobby Shop,” Turner told Koch during a previous interview. “The white 1-part epoxy background was painted with aerosol spray cans, and the red and blue lettering and graphics were hand painted with oil-based hobby enamels over the white. A few careful top coats of clear satin acrylic aerosol spray sealed it all.”
In 2005, over 30 years after the 92nd Attack Helicopter Company returned home, the 92nd held a reunion in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Peter ‘Pete’ Coors, the great-grandson of Coors-founder Adolph Coors, donated enough beer for the reunion to keep the Vietnam vets fueled up.
Coors even had a special surprise for Tucker, the artist behind the Coors-y-themed rocket pods.
“During the reunion, Tom Tucker was still alive, and one of our guys worked for Coors, and he took him up to Golden to meet Pete Coors, who was the head honcho of the Coors company,” Koch said. “Pete had a beautiful black leather jacket with the Coors emblems on it, and he gave it to Tom Tucker. That was just a cool thing to happen.”