One curio I saw everywhere I went in Vietnam in 1970 were these gaudily colored elephants about knee high. They were flat and just the white of the plaster of Paris or whatever cheap material they were made of on the top. Sometimes they were colored quite well, sometimes pretty sloppy. But, they were THE thing everyone over there seemed to have, maybe like a cuckoo clock if you were in Germany. But these things were too cheap and to gaudily colored to be close to the quality of a German cuckoo clock. One day, thought, I just happened to see one in an office where some GI was pounding away on a typewriter (something few people today ever remember seeing), and I asked him: "What do you call that?" or something like that.
He looked around, saw where I was pointing and replied, "Tha'ts a BUFE."
"A what?"
And then he spoke the letters of this unique acronym, something very common in the army: "It's a Big Ugly Fnnn Elephant."
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