"Intrepid Prankster" (Part Two)

“U.S. Marine Lieutenant Kenneth Babbs was a formidable specimen.” (Richard Tregaskis, Vietnam Diary)

Welcome to a new series on the Massé Musings Substack platform: EXTRAORDINARY LIVES. Some of these individuals are famous, but most are not. Their lives are extraordinary because of the challenges they have faced, the impact they have had, and the special qualities they possess. This new extended profile is of Ken Babbs, a member of the legendary 1960s Merry Pranksters, featured in Tom Wolfe’s bestselling classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I met Babbs via his son O.B., who was a student when I taught in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon in the early 1990s. Ken Babbs remains the most colorful individual I have ever encountered, and his life story is an American original. Hope you enjoy the second installment of this four-part series.

Author’s Note: This narrative contains both witnessed and recreated scenes, documented dialogue and facts gathered through extensive interviews and secondary research. But there is also material based on informed speculation. Ken Babbs is a real person, but the truth about him is often elusive.

"Intrepid Prankster" (Part Two)

“U.S. Marine Lieutenant Kenneth Babbs was a formidable specimen.” (Richard Tregaskis, Vietnam Diary)

At Stanford, Kesey and Babbs pursued their literary paths. Kesey worked on a novel (Sometimes a Great Notion), while Babbs crafted short stories and fought to keep “The Dream” alive. But the competition in graduate school was brutal. Babbs’ tales that dazzled the profs at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, fell short at Stanford. Maybe this small-town Buckeye hadn’t lived enough. Or maybe he needed to try novel writing (“To match my natural long-windedness.”). 

            Babbs was married now and starting a family. He had new demands as a husband and young father, and he still had to fulfill his undergraduate Navy R.O.T.C. requirements. As his writing stalled, his frustrations grew at Stanford. He flunked his foreign language oral exam and dropped out of the prestigious graduate writing program. “The Dream” was officially put on hold.

•••

            In 1962, Ken Babbs entered Navy flight school. Maybe this was how he would find literary fame—by becoming a great aviator and war hero. Except there wasn’t a war on. At least America didn’t think so back in the early JFK administration during the heady days of Camelot.

            Babbs earned his wings as a Marine pilot and was stationed in southern California. He lived off-base with Anita and the kids. His idea of fun was to take his buddies for “outrageous” joyrides in a helicopter he had “borrowed” for the day.

             Life as an officer was A-OK until Babbs got his orders for active duty in Vietnam, a place he barely knew existed. In 1962, there were 10,000 U.S. advisors supporting the South Vietnamese military’s fight for independence. For the next 18 months, Ken Babbs was “in country.”

            He kept a diary recording his adventures of life in the ’Nam. How cocky and naive he and his fellow pilots were, fueled by Marine pride and pure adrenaline. Each day at dawn, the dark green choppers at Da Nang Air Force Base were primed and ready to go.

            Up north, the terrain was mountainous with dense rain forests and trees as tall as 300 feet, which threatened helicopter access in areas controlled by the Viet Cong and NVA troops. Down south, conditions were better-suited for helicopter operations. Even during the rainy season, choppers could land in most Delta locations, as long as they weren’t under fire.

            “We were only technically supposed to haul supplies, evacuate wounded and carry South Vietnamese troops,” recalls Babbs. “We weren’t supposed to engage in combat unless fired upon.” 

            Ken’s squadron was divided on the issue. The hawks wanted to shoot whenever they felt like it. The doves said they would fire only in self-defense. Babbs knew what it felt like to pull the trigger, returning enemy fire on several missions.

            “When you’re caught in a shitstorm, you do what you gotta do. You can have any philosophical attitude of war you want, but none of it means squat until the moment of truth.”

            In those early days, it was exciting to be a dashing warrior, and Babbs seemed typecast: “U.S. Marine Lieutenant Kenneth Babbs was a formidable specimen ... about six-feet-four, with a horrendous moustache and wearing a long sheath knife, a side arm and a bullet-studded bandolier,” wrote Richard Tregaskis, author of the 1963 historical account Vietnam Diary.

            At dusk, back from their missions, the pilots would gather mixing drinks (“I developed a very colonial gin and tonic habit.”), preparing hors d’oeuvres, and chowing down on char-broiled steaks. But as time wore on, the monsoons came, and the missions grew more dangerous. Babbs’ spirit waned as camaraderie among the Marine pilots broke down and more of them began to question what they were doing in Vietnam. 

            “There’s nothing on the line for us over here,” Babbs would write in his diary. “Time will tell, but looks to me like we’re pissing our goodies into a sink hole ... and there’s no bottom.”

            Some gung-ho whirlybirders ragged on Babbs and the others who were having second thoughts. (Going soft on us, Buckeye Babbs?) Ken allegedly decked Lt. McFall of Wichita Falls, Texas, one night when they both had drunk too much gin. They fought behind the “water buffalo,”  the huge cistern by the mess tent. Babbs swore he would kick the living shit out of anyone else who questioned his loyalty or bravery, and no one did.

            Then dysentery hit and Babbs’ weight dropped by almost 40 pounds in a matter of weeks. He was bed-ridden and delirious. Some days he was so weak he barely had enough strength to hold a pen. But he kept writing it all down. His account would resurrect “The Dream” and tell the truth about early American intervention in Vietnam.  It would reveal the war as it really was, not some glorious campaign for freedom and democracy, but a surrealistic exercise of national hubris, a horrible mistake, and the ultimate psychedelic experience: “We went in like Boy Scouts and came out like Hell's Angels.”

•••

            In 1963, Ken Kesey published his first best-selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on his experiences working at a state mental hospital in Oregon. Babbs was proud of his friend’s success, and he believed that his own glory days as an author were on the horizon.

            He returned to the states in early 1964 a decorated and disenchanted vet. (“To hell with domino theories, vertical envelopment strategies and rules of engagement. To hell with military regimentation.”) He spent his days in San Juan Capistrano, drinking gin and tonics, smoking pot and working on his war novel, Who Shot the Water Buffalo? 

             He and wife, Anita, had three children now, and money was a problem in the Babbs’ household. He balanced unpublished writer’s despair with lingering hope of literary success. His 500-page manuscript, a M.A.S.H.-like satire of the Vietnam War, was finished in mid-1964. But the country wasn’t ready for such an exposé of U.S. jingoistic fatal flaws in Southeast Asia. Babbs sent his book to some big-name publishers—Viking Press, Scribner’s and Farrar Straus & Giroux, but they all rejected the novel.

            Family and friends encouraged him to keep trying. Shorten it, revise it, do whatever it takes. But get the damn thing published. 

            “Ken just quit on the book,” his younger brother, John, would say years later. “Shoved it in a box and walked away from it.”

            After years of clutching “The Dream,” Babbs let it go. He had three young children and a wife to support. His kitchen table was covered with bills and rejection slips. This wasn’t how life was supposed to turn out for the promising young author.

            Kesey kept calling, telling him to get his arse up north to La Honda: Come on back to our old Stanford haunts. Stop worrying about the book. Writing isn’t important anymore. Not in the literal literary sense. From now on, we celebrate life as art ... and art as life. It’s the new age of creativity.

            Babbs was tired of living up to everybody’s expectations. Tired of trying to do all the right things, make all the right moves, be one of the best and brightest. Tired of the whole damn mainstream scene. Now it was time for something different—time to let loose, be free and have some real fun. It was time to get on the bus.

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© 2023 Mark H. Massé

NOTE: To access more of my fiction and nonfiction, please visit my Authors Guild website: www.markmasse.com & https://www.amazon.com/author/mhmasse