The opening chapters of “Who Shot the Water Buffalo?” have the vibe of anacid test (in which Babbs famously participated). It’s 1961, and 2nd Lts. Tom Huckelbee and Mike Cochran, single and barely 21, are training to be Marine helicopter pilots in Florida. Their days are spent flying and goofing off, and nights are spent drinking and causing mischief. When a superior informs Huckelbee and Cochran that “a friendly nation is under attack by the Red Horde. They have asked for our help and President Kennedy has responded. Pack your gear. We’re going to Vietnam,” it has all the menace and weight of an announcement that they’re being dispatched to Disneyland.
It’s that sense of innocence and, for the reader, foreboding that makes this a unique and historically intriguing story. In the summer of ’62, Doris Day is a sex symbol. When the Cuban Missile Crisis begins half a world away, a Marine quips that he’s glad to be in the relative safety of Vietnam. And when Huckelbee and Cochran roam the streets of a South Vietnamese village, the children swarm around and ogle them with reverence.
Cochran and Huckelbee seem better suited for Magic Bus trips than flying “advisory missions.” They’re reckless, nonconformist pranksters dropped at the edge of a war about to break wide open. They buck authority and seek adventure everywhere from the Florida Panhandle to Tokyo to the bullet-riddled skies above the Mekong Delta. Babbs writes with authority about helicopters and the men who fly them. He takes risks with his prose; occasionally, it becomes frustratingly scatological. At times, he appears to be sampling everything from the impressionistic realism of Stephen Crane to Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H.” This eclecticism can be confounding, but then again, so is war, and perhaps that is Babbs’s point.
Many powerful and important novels have been written about Vietnam, including, most recently, Karl Marlantes’s “Matterhorn,” (also by a Marine and published more than 30 years later), but none capture the seemingly slapdash planting of the seeds of American involvement like Babbs’s. “Matterhorn” is one grueling, irrational battle after another. By comparison, the playful innocence of “Who Shot the Water Buffalo?” foreshadows the grueling, irrational battles yet to come.
When the real combat begins on Page 245, the book starts to shed its playful skin. The missions become more dangerous, Huckelbee and Cochran become more unhinged, and Babbs’s whimsical turns of phrase give way to a taut, staccato narrative that chronicles the young pilots’ loss of innocence — and a loss on a much larger scale. Doris Day gives way to Hanoi Hannah, and the pranksters have their smirks wiped away. At least for a while.
Othmer is the author of the novels “Holy Water” and “The Futurist.”
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