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B*U*F*F (Big Ugly Fat F*****)

by Lothar Maier

402 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0761; ISBN 1-55395-049-6; US$27.99, C$32.25, EUR22.99, £16.09

B*U*F*F is a Vietnam era novel written in the vernacular of the B-52 combat crewmembers participating in the Arc Light bombing operations in Southeast Asia. It is the story of one Strategic Air Command B-52 crew that allows the reader to experience the intimate details of modern day conventional weapon bombing.

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About the Book      About the Author      Sample Excerpts      Catalogue Info

About the Book B*U*F*F (Big Ugly Fat F*****) is the Strategic Air Command air crew and jungle grunt's popular nickname for the B-52. It is the story of Major Rudi Mauser, a United States Air Force bomber pilot, and the interplay of events leading to his becoming the commander of a B-52 combat crew. He discovers that he had avoided participation in the Korean Conflict by a quirk of fate, only to be thrust into an active combat role in America's controversial war in Vietnam. Rudi and his crew follow in the footsteps of their World War II predecessors, maintaining their sanity by resorting to outrageous attempts at humor. Throughout his career Rudi has confrontations with GK Harden, who had harassed Rudi as an Aviation Cadet. Rudi's frequently erotic love life also ends when he is smitten by Sabrina, a school teacher he meets on the island of Okinawa, who has a very unusual background. B*U*F*F is written in the vernacular of the B-52 combat crewmember participants, and contains an explicit adult love story. The primary objective is a novel that allows the reader to experience the unrestrained details of Arc Light bombing operations in Southeast Asia. The intimate horrors of modern day conventional weapon bombing contained in B*U*F*F have never been published before. For more information, please email the author at B52BUFF2002@cs.com This book is also available in hardcover format from Amazon.com

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About the Author Major Lothar "Nick" Maier is a native of Buffalo, NY. He entered pilot training with Aviation Cadet Class 55-M, January 1954, and was commissioned at Williams AFB, Arizona, in April 1955. Immediately after graduation, he was the first Second Lieutenant to enter SAC's Pilot AOB (Aircraft-Observer-Bombardier) course at James Connal-ly AFB, Texas, and received a Navigator rating. Assigned to B-47s at Smoky Hill AFB, Kansas, where in 1956 his crew was the first from the 40th Bomb Wing to be selected for B-52 upgrade training at Castle AFB, California, and subsequently remained there in the 93rd Bomb Wing instructor cadre. Nick was a B-52 aircraft commander for twenty years, flying the B through G model aircraft. He completed one B-52 Arc Light tour in 1969 with 70 combat missions, and was 8AF Command Post Senior Controller at Andersen AFB, Guam, during Linebacker II in 1972. Retiring as a Major in 1977, he worked 16 years in Travel Industry Management. His writings have been published in several military and travel related periodicals.

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Sample Excerpts

From the Prologue

It has been thirty years, a full generation, since the end of the Strategic Air Command's Arc Light bombing operations in Southeast Asia. B*U*F*F is the story of one B-52 combat crew and their participation. There were hundreds of Stratofor-tress aircrews involved in thousands of strike missions. Two million Vietnam veterans were directly affected by the earth shuddering impact of the B-52 missions. The imagery of shark-tailed black aircraft, disgorging sinister looking strings of bombs over the war torn jungles of Vietnam has been televised to every corner of the globe.
The B-52 will forever symbolize America's reluctant participation in a war that dragged on for ten thousand days. It was the predominant military weapon to be utilized as an instrument of American political policy, during the Vietnamese civil struggle that all mankind feared would escalate to Armageddon. The deployment of the world's largest turbojet bomber, to deliver conventional iron bombs against a guerrilla insurgency, was beyond the imagination of the aircraft's original designers.

From Chapter 1 - Upstate New York 1950

Rudi Mauser descended from an unbroken line of military warriors, dating back to pre-history. From his earliest childhood memories, Rudi was constantly reminded that he was a first generation German. His father had emigrated from Bavaria in the late 1920s, and was immensely proud of his heritage. Rudi's father followed the Cold War events with a familiar sense of foreboding. He experienced a revelation one evening, trying to cope with his wayward son's nonchalant attitude about the future. He clicked off the radio, which had been blaring out the doomsday predictions that helped to sell cigarettes and soap products.
"If you're as smart as you think you are, you will get off your ass and join the National Guard like I did when I came to this country, Rudi. A little taste of Army discipline will show you the way out of your downfall, believe you me!" That was the only piece of advice from his father that Rudi ever took seriously. For three long, hot summers of the Korean Police Action Rudi played GI Joe, dragging a 75mm recoilless rifle through the dust and muck of Camp Drum, New York.

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There are turning points in every person's life that are permanently etched into their memory. It was a beautiful autumn day when Rudi sauntered into the house. His mother was waiting. She had a glum expression with which only a mom can convey doom.
"Greetings, from the U.S. government, Rudi," she barely whispered as she gave him an envelope with her shaking hand.
He stood dumbfounded in the family living room, staring at the unopened official letter that he knew would seal his fate.

From Chapter 4 - B-52 Stratofortress 1956

Within a month after Rudi's hairy flight incident with the wing commander, the base lost two B-47 aircraft and their crews. Life went on for the fatalistic aircrews and their families. It was an accepted part of Air Force existence to attend funerals at the Base Chapel, and support grieving survivors. It was equally important to continue living, with the rationale that these disasters always happened to some other poor soul.

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By a quirk of SAC paperwork, Rudi would enter the B-52 transition training program as a member of Bobby Thompson's combat ready crew. It was incredible to Rudi that he had barely finished unpacking his personal belongings at Smoky Hill, and now found himself driving west to sunny California. The recent calamitous B-52 accidents at Castle were suppressed in Rudi's thoughts, as he drove westward non-stop to his transition training assignment. He pressed his flashy tail-finned convertible to the ninety mile per hour limit of its design. His red convertible kicked up a vortex of road dust and debris for the remainder of the six hundred-mile journey to California's San Joaquin Valley.

From Chapter 14 - Oil Burner

SAC bomber crews normally flew a minimum of three Combat Crew Training Missions each month, all of which simulated an Emergency War Order strike profile. Each man accepted his awesome responsibilities, and approached every flight with professional pride. Except for the timing, routing, and targeting, the CCTMs rarely varied in content. The max heavyweight takeoff, air refueling, and two hour high level navigation runs would be the precursor to the grand finale, an Oil Burner challenge. Rudi thought that the Oil Burner designator for low-level training routes was appropriate, considering how the B-52's smoky engine exhausts were a well-known signature. He also anticipated each contour-following flight mission, for its uncompromising demands on his experience.

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"Pilot, start your descent to twenty-five hundred feet and take up a heading of three two zero. This'll put us at a five- hundred feet terrain clearance setting, and on course to the Hodge turning point, estimating Hodge at seventeen twenty zulu."
"Roger nav, descending to two five hundred, three two zero, and seventeen twenty. We're going to scare the hell out of lot of jackrabbits today."
The noise level in the crew compartment increased geometrically to the reduction in altitude and acceleration of the aircraft. Naturally, so did the level of turbulence.
He was mentally muttering out loud as he wrestled with the flight controls, "It won't be long before the stadium wide wings of this beast I'm flying will be flapping over Mother Nature's vertical speed bumps."

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Buddha retched one final time, before the seriousness of his predicament on this bomb run calmed his heaving guts.
"As I was saying pilot, let me know if you ever get visual upstairs. These radar offset aiming points aren't checking out too purely."
The navigator saw it first. "Hey, there's the aiming point, it's finally showing! See it radar?
"Center the PDI, pilot!" the radar ordered. "That's the black and white steering gauge on your left there, the one with the little white needle!"
"You gotta be kidding me radar?" Rudi yelled over the din of radio and interphone chatter. "The PDI indicates 30 degrees to the left!"
"I didn't ask you how much turn was required to center it, pilot. Just CENTER THE PDI!"
Rudi was now faced with an enormous technical problem, that an army of aerodynamic engineers could not solve. How could he turn an aircraft the size of half a football field, flying over 500 feet per second, through thirty degrees of arc in less than twenty seconds? Frantically attempting to do the impossible, with his panicky radar's bellowed order still echoing in his headset, Rudi yanked the control wheel hard left.

From Chapter 27 - Kadena
Rudi finally forced himself up out of his weary sack, and arrived at the Officer's Club about ten thirty. He entered the darkened barroom, which was strangely quiet with murmuring voices, and stood momentarily inside the entrance, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
"Rudi, over here!" a voice yelled through the sudden din of a small Okinawan combo, who were singing and sounding exactly like the Beach Boys. When Rudi finally locked on to the source of his caller's muffled scream, he saw that it was one of the crew commanders from a bomb wing in Florida that he had flown cell with a few times. Rudi normally wouldn't have said hello to this character tonight, except that he was sitting with three woman, two of which were questionably attractive, about the norm for tonight's crowd.

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"Sabrina is an Israeli, can you beat that?" Harpo continued, almost at a loss for words over his good fortune tonight.
"Shalom. You're probably from a kibbutz in the Sinai and can field strip an AK-47 rifle in the dark, while penetrating an Arab mine field wearing a camouflaged jump suit with knee high red Gucci combat boots, I presume?" Rudi spoke in his suavest, ever so guttural voice. He would use his long practiced Berliner accent.
"Shalom to you too, Rudi. I already know all about you. The charming captain here has told us everything regarding your difficult and exciting job. Tell me Rudi, how does your wife and children compensate for what you are engaged in?" she asked quietly in an unexpected lull of background noise.
"They have compensated, as you put it, by never marrying me in the first place. Now I know why I am having such a difficult time attracting a woman as beautiful as you are Sabrina. It's obviously my line of work that turns you all off?" Rudi replied in the interrogative.
"No, no, Rudi dear, on the contrary. I am in complete sympathy with you; it must be terrible thinking about your bomb-ing missions. Why don't you ask me to dance, perhaps I can take your mind off things such as this for awhile?"

From Chapter 28 - EBL

"Green One, Cinnamon One, I've got you, one mile twelve o'clock! Cinnamon Cell is in A/R formation." Buddha continued the electronic rendezvous with the tanker cell lead. It would have been impossible to complete a visual join-up in the turbid weather engulfing the entire two formations of bombers and tankers.
"Roger, Cinnamon One, this is Green One boomer, I'm picking up the glow from your anti-collision lights."
"Madrone, this is grim!" Rudi thought to himself. Just at that moment, he spotted the lights of his tanker directly in front, as Buddha announced on interphone, "He's at one thousand feet, you see him yet pilot?"
Rudi chose not to respond and start a dialogue with the talkative boom operator. He closed the gap between them with amazing and positive quickness.
The boomer used his pilot director lights to help Rudi maneuver his bouncing, heaving bomber into the yardstick sized refueling envelope. The lights were located midway down the underside of the tanker, and by flashing the four indicated directions of UP, DOWN, FORWARD or AFT, the boom operator could direct the bomber pilot in total radio silence air refueling.
As long as the BUFF pilot managed to keep the boom inside the limits of the air refueling envelope, which equates to a four by four by six foot closet of space, the fuel would continue to transfer between the two attached aircraft at the normal rate of six thousand pounds a minute; almost a thousand gallons every sixty seconds.
This scenario was about to take place, five miles above the South China Sea, in the black of night, surrounded by unpredictable thunderstorms, with a reduced forward visibility of less than a quarter mile, and at an airspeed of three hundred miles an hour.
"Contact!" the boomer announced, followed by the distinctive metallic clunk of the two compatible aircraft mating. The thump was immediately succeeded by another unmistakable sound, the click and high pressure swoosh of a disconnect, as the refueling toggles released, creating a cloud of jet fuel before the boom flew back into its trail position.
"Disconnect!" was the immediate boom operator call.
"What the hey!" Rudi said on interphone. "Check your panel, Cope!"
"Ready for contact, I'll watch the contact light this time. We may have to go EBL for this one, pilot," Zoomie answered.
"It sure as hell wasn't me!" Rudi replied.
He knew from experience, that in spite of the very rough weather conditions, he was in perfect position, and no where near any of the boom limits. This could only mean a malfunction of some part of the boom limit electronics or the refueling toggles. He would have to resort to the Emergency Boom Latching system, if he were to complete this bombing mission.
"Contact! -- Disconnect!" the boom operator said again, over the slamming hiss of another separation. "Check your sys-tems Cinnamon One."
"Roger, ready for contact," Zoomie answered as he placed the system into EBL.
"Contact Cinnamon One!"
"Roger, contact," Rudi answered the boomers voice. "Just keep on pumping petrol and don't get an itchy trigger finger tonight," gave veiled reference to the boom operator that his receiver's system was in EBL, and not to punch Rudi off too soon in a panic.
The next ten minutes became a lifetime conducted in complete radio silence, as Rudi met the task and remained on the boom with both airplanes rotating and bouncing wildly around their aluminum pipeline.

From Chapter 29 - Cinnamon

"Bongo, Bongo, Cinnamon flight of three, point Bravo at one eight oh five zulu!" Zoomie called in to the GCI site controlling the area for this strike mission.
"Roger Cinnamon, squawk Standby for positive ID," came the casual answer loud and clear.
Soon after checking in with Bongo, the dark coastline of Vietnam shimmered in the moon's glowlight. To the south, Rudi could see the aurora of Saigon light up the horizon. The rest of the country on their course was dark, with only infrequent lights betraying the presence of some village or armed encampment. It was difficult to tell from forty thousand feet.
Every time Rudi flew over this war torn land, he felt the same remoteness of his participation in the conflict. Tonight his impersonal feelings suddenly became real. He spotted the very distinctive sharp glow of parachute flares being dropped below at his ten o'clock position.
"Looks like the search for Charlie goes on night and day, eh Cope?" he clicked on interphone.
"Yea," Zoomie clicked back, "that's quite a long string of flares tonight, they must be on to something."
Buddha cut in the middle of this discussion with, "Our target is just west of those flares. I'm watching through the optics, take a look nav!"
"Cinnamon, this is Milky, turn starboard to two four five, squawk Stand-by!"
Rudi's cell would release their weapons with deadly accuracy tonight, directed by radar guidance from the MSQ site closest to the target complex.
"Cinnamon, Milky, sixty seconds to release, check your systems, steer two starboard, two four seven degrees!" The remainder of the bomb run was silent, except for the MSQ site's directions.
"Cinnamon, Milky with twenty seconds, port one to two four six degrees."
"Cinnamon, ten seconds, nine - eight - seven - six - five - four - three - two - one - HACK!" The ground controller raised his voice to a modified, croaked yell at the word "HACK", to insure that Cinnamon One did indeed hear the critical weapon release command.
With all of the emotion of an automaton, Buddha responded to HACK by manually triggering his weapon release switch, and an-nounced almost yawning, "Bombs away."
Once again the crew and aircraft experienced the rapid shuddering throes of doom, as the five-hundred pound bombs fell away in their pre-designated sequence into the blackness below.
Just as Rudi started his roll out to wings level, Buddha shouted over interphone, "Jesus Christmas, you should see the secondaries we got tonight! Goddamn, we actually hit something! Holy Mother, it must be a POL dump, its too big a fire ball to be just some exploding gas tanks on trucks!"
An immediate spontaneous cheer rose up on the crew's private radio link, which reminded Rudi of a Saturday afternoon TV touch-down cheer in a local pub. He tried not to imagine the type of yelling that was taking place down on the floor of the Vietnam jungle tonight. They had in fact hit a huge gasoline and oil storage dump. By the time the bombs from Cinnamon Two and Three hit the area, their shock waves and shrapnel carried the flaming wreckage throughout and beyond the target box, creating a miniature fire storm in the surrounding, defoliated jungle.
Some of the falling bombs exploded high in the air as they hit the compacted waves of flames and debris, showering thousands of square yards of terrain with lethal chunks of jagged, hot iron. To add to the unearthly effect, the domes of searing heat bulbs created their own electrical imbalance, powerful enough to force neighboring thunderstorms to discharge gigantic lightning bolts.
The accumulative inferno from three BUFFs acting in concert, incinerated every organic cell and melted every inch of metal within a quarter of a mile. The earth was vaporized to incandescent powder for a depth of three feet. Liquid tongues of flames coiled voraciously into the labyrinth of tunnels throughout the complex, devouring the human moles that had scurried to pile up at the dead end traps of ancient earth. The target box was reduced to a bowl of violent death.
The waiting and watching GIs on the ground just two klicks beyond that carpet of hell, stomped and cheered like crazies when they saw the huge mushrooming fire ball. The beardless, pimply-faced second lieutenant platoon lead-er was fresh out of the West Point on the Hudson prep school. He was at the head of his column waiting to enter the target area immediately after the BUFFs sterilized it. His face was painted black and streaked with the sweat of fear. He caught himself stunned with opened mouth, when he saw the tremendous explosive glow and heard his wildly screaming teen-aged troops. After he recovered his composure from the spectacle of horrific light, sound and heat, which had now reached the group, he instinctively turned to check his men and saw another sight that would make an eternal imprint on his mind.
His dancing, weapon waving soldiers were on a slight rise of land behind his position, silhouetted by the yellow-orange searing glare, against the backdrop of a shattered moonscape from previous bombings. Knowing that there would be no body count tonight in that SAC crematorium, the lieutenant took off his helmet and sat down on something hard buried in the soggy trail.

From Chapter 36 - Ebony

By the time Rudi and his cell were well into North Vietnam, heading northeast toward their target, the sun was blinking through gigantic thunderstorms, which had built up over the mountains to the west. The rendezvous with their support aircraft had been accomplished as briefed. Rudi knew that some of his former BUFF pilot buddies were now driving B-66's.
"We're at the IP, pilot," Jeep announced. "E-dub, we're entering the SAM lethal line."
"Rog, nav," Rudi acknowledged.
"Rog, E-dub."
"Roger - I'm moving the crosshairs a little left pilot, - uh -," Buddha never finished the statement.
Jack had been sitting in his dark and lonely corner of the upper crew deck, half-listening to the monotonous tones of the bombing team's checklist. Suddenly, before he could take his next breath, his ears were full of enemy SAM radar signals.
"Crew, we're an item of interest, I have a TTR at twelve o'clock!"
"Roger EW, do your thing," Rudi answered calmly.
"TTR just went down, pilot," Jack said with a curious tone.
"Rog, they may send the first salvo unguided to prevent jamming, or to protect themselves from any Wild Weasels they think might be up here with us!"
The quiet tension was abruptly broken by the previously heard cool voice from the escorting F-4s that had now been excited to at least one octave higher.
"Casper, take it down! Visual SAM, take it down!"
"Casper Two, roger 'dat!"
The support aircraft had sighted a SAM launch, and their best defense was to immediately descend, which would place them in a position that was normally beyond the missile's designed capability to turn and follow the target.
Rudi cursed to himself when he saw the cloud deck they had just entered, blocking any hope of seeing any of the SAMs that were coming toward him and the rest of his cell
"Ebony Bromo, heading now zero three three, stand by for final countdown - five, four - three, two, one, HACK!"
"Pilot, I've lost both TTR and uplink, both of them are down," Jack reported, in a repeat of his earlier quizzical voice.
"OK, let's hope those bastards blew it today," Rudi said in his best matter-of-fact voice. He expertly pegged the attitude indicator at forty-five degrees of bank, and watched intently as the horizontal situation-heading needle quickly spun counter-clockwise toward the briefed target withdrawal direction. For some reason he found some small sense of solace by continuing his talking.
"They also know that we have some cloud cover at our altitude, and --," then it happened.

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Catalogue Information

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