Ken Babbs, famously a Merry Prankster and the best friend and working partner of Ken Kesey, has at last finished his first novel - and the wait was worth it. Lieutenant Tom Huckelbee, leathery as any Texican come crawling out of the sage, and Lieutenant Mike Cochran, loquacious son of an Ohio gangster, make an unlikely pair training to be Marine chopper pilots on their way to Vietnam. The dynamic takes the reader from a couple of know-nothing young men straight out of flight school, to Marine aviators caught in the middle of a disorienting war. Tough and comical, quiet and boisterous, and always vivid and poetic, Babbs is a writer at the top of his craft. Who Shot the Water Buffalo? manages to capture the world in all its guts and glory through the eyes of a young man discovering what it means to be beholden to another. A book not to be missed.