The Buffie Brigade

The Buffie Brigade is a story chock-full of humor about a group that isn’t known for being jocose - the United States Marines. The plot takes place during the wind-down of the Vietnam War when a handful of senior officers on a Marine Corps seagoing staff scheme to buy and extract a herd of ceramic elephants (called “big, ugly, fragile elephants” - thus “buffies”) from Vietnam. The story takes the reader from Okinawa to Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan. And it does the same for the buffies.