Buddy Herrington’s story starts in rural Georgia, where he grew up the son of a building contractor in a town so small, “3,000 people” included everyone in the graveyard. A chance encounter with a roommate doing push-ups with a math book under his nose — training for the Air Force Academy — sent Buddy’s life in a direction he’d never imagined. He didn’t know what the Academy was. By the end of the conversation, he knew he wanted in.
After four demanding years at the Academy and a college-break trip through Europe that included hitchhiking through Yugoslavia and crashing a motorcycle outside London, Buddy went on to pilot training and was assigned to the C-7 Caribou — a short-takeoff transport plane built to land on jungle airstrips too small and too dangerous for almost anything else. In Vietnam, he flew troops, supplies, and — on the worst days — the bodies of the fallen, back to the rear. It was a job that demanded gallows humor to survive emotionally, and steady hands to survive physically: no defenses, no way to outrun ground fire, just tight, unpredictable circles down onto short runways under threat of attack.
From there, Buddy moved into one of the most demanding cockpits in the Air Force: the B-52 Stratofortress. He flew combat missions out of Guam during some of the most dangerous years of the air war over North Vietnam, refueled mid-air in what he calls “a planned collision,” and sat nuclear alert during Cold War standoffs in the Middle East and Korea — moments when, as he puts it, the threat was entirely credible. His 28-year career eventually took him to Air Force Space Command, where he helped stand up the earliest GPS satellite systems, and to the Pentagon, before he made a decision that surprised almost everyone who knew him.
After nearly three decades of service, Buddy walked away from a promising career track to attend seminary. He’s now spent over twenty years as a Methodist minister in St. George, Utah — leading disaster relief after a historic flood, building bridges between faith communities, and, as he puts it, still trying to help people the same way he did in the cockpit: showing up, doing the job, and trusting the people next to him.
Catch Buddy’s full story — and every episode of Ask A Vet — on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen.