Taking a cue from his two older brothers, one of whom had joined the Army and the other the Navy, Buffington signed up for the Navy because, as he put it, he didn’t want to walk and preferred sailing. While he was in boot camp, the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded, and global tensions in the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR continued to boil to the surface.

From there, he was stationed out of his home port at Pearl Harbor, and his service took him to different posts across the Pacific Ocean refueling ships aboard the USNS Kawishiwi after about four to six months of shore duty.

As the conflict in Vietnam continued to escalate, culminating in the U.S. officially entering the war in 1965, the Kawishiwi — which refueled ships including the USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier — moved off the coast to help other ships refuel, and Buffington was part of that crew. He explained the process of the work he did on the massive ship, which could carry 7.5 million gallons of fuel.

“The gunner’s mate would shoot a line over. We called it a shout line, they’d shoot that over, and from there, we’d hand pull the heavier line over, and with that would go the cable that the hoses were on and he finds it, and they would hook that up and we would run the hose over and take the pigtail and drop it into their tank and then they would commence to pump fuel,” he said.

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO — A young Ken Buffington in his Navy uniform. Buffington, a Marshalltown native who still resides here, served from 1962 to 1966 and spent time in the Blue Water area off the coast of Vietnam.

After a six month tour, he returned to Hawaii but quickly received orders to return when another ship broke down. He spent the Christmas of 1965 in the “Blue Water” area off the coast of Vietnam and crossed the dateline on New Year’s Day 1966. He never came into direct contact with enemy ships, but he did set foot on Vietnamese soil once at Da Nang Harbor to refuel the USS Repose, a hospital ship, before heading back to Manila Bay in the Philippines. The Kawishiwi was the first ship since World War II to use the underwater rigs in the Philippines to refuel.

“We did a lot of firsts and a lot of things, but like I said, I was just a grunt. I just did my job. That’s all,” he said.

He then completed a one-month extension of his service and was discharged on Sept. 12, 1966, and unlike many Vietnam veterans, Buffington said he never really encountered any problems upon coming back to the United States.

“I just did my job. They told me what to do and that’s what I did,” he said. “You learn to take orders, and you learn your job. You start out as a seaman apprentice, and then you go through and you graduate.”

Upon returning, he met his wife Terri, started a career at Swift and Co., started a family and eventually moved over to Fisher Controls before retiring from there in 1999. Today, he belongs to the local chapter of the American Legion, and he cited the opportunity to take an Honor Flight as one of the great experiences of his life, recommending that every veteran do so if they can.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.