A very good man. You can be a good man with a small circle of friends, but in my friend's case, people came from all over the country, and even one Japanese man he worked with there, an interpreter of ours from Kosovo who had resettled in Canada, and friends and former colleagues from New York to Los Angeles and many places in between. A couple hundred people, easily and it seemed no two knew Buck from the same part of his life.
There were friends from back to his days growing up in Kansas, buddies from his army days in VIetnam, a small college All America from the days he played D-2 basketball, younger journalists from when he taught at Cal State Fullerton, others from when he ran some small newspapers in California, a guy who worked with him in Japan for the WSJ, another for when he worked with the New York TImes in NYC, a retiree Army Colonel who he was embedded with during Desert Storm, a Vietnamese-American who became a USMC helicopter pilot who my friend met on an assignment - and ended up ghost writing his book about coming here a a boatlift refugee to flying for the Marines in Mogadishu, a guy he became friends with when he was on an academic scholarship in Wales back in the 1970s, a lawyer who had gone to law school with the guy at Notre Dame before he switched to journalism....if you are getting the idea that the guy led a full life, you'd be right.
I was proud to be asked to eulogize a man who had touched so many. I hope I did him justice. Many came to me and seemed to be sincere in saying that I had touched them. I don't think a lot of them knew the story of when he risked his own ass to give me a chance to get out of an ambush in Bosnia, and I think that went over. Nothing like making the departed a hero!
Sorry to run on. I guess I still feel a little energy left to get his story out there.