Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  When I think now about my big brother, a host of memories settle around me. I can still see him as a teenager diligently tinkering with George, his old red motor scooter, the greasy parts lying in pieces on the floor of the carport. Then I’m hugging his waist and the wind is blowing my hair after he has gotten the Cushman running and we’re taking it out for a spin. I felt special when he let me hang out with him.

  To this day, I can hear the unpleasant honking of his tuba. I can still picture his messy bedroom and smell his sour gym socks and the sweet glue he used to build model airplanes. I remember how small I felt the time he asked me why I wouldn’t play with the girl across the street. I made up an excuse, but he saw through it. “Who are you?” he asked. “Queen Elizabeth?”

  Pete was fourteen when the curiosity and confidence that in time would lead him to Vietnam were captured by a photographer from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The picture, taken at the Boy Scout Jamboree in Stoddard County, Missouri, shows a yard-long king snake “showing affection for Pete Hunting,” who nonchalantly eyes the snake while holding it a few inches from his face. He was photographed again for the paper as a high school sophomore when he built and flew a seven-foot box kite. A few years earlier, Pete demonstrated similar ingenuity, along with his ever-present sense of humor, after our family had moved from posh Lake Forest, Illinois, to southeastern Missouri. He carved a letter to a former teacher at the Lake Forest Country Day School on a rough-hewn piece of wood and somehow persuaded the Dexter post office to mail it.

  He left for college in 1959. I missed him so much that a month after he started at Wesleyan, he wrote to Mom and Dad, “Better tell Jill to quit crying. This could get ridiculous. I appreciate her thinking about me and writing, but how old is she now, anyway?”

  To save money, he hitchhiked home on vacations, thumbing his way from Connecticut to Missouri, then to Oklahoma when we moved there after his freshman year. He wore a tie and taped a “References” sign to his suitcase, hoping some driver would give him an opportunity to produce the tongue-in-cheek letters he had put his friends up to writing.

  When Pete was around, I just knew something amusing or interesting was going to happen. He was affectionate and fun loving. One of his friends described him as a person who took his work seriously, but not himself.

  He loved playing jokes, and he played them on me. My grandfather had a camp in Maine, a rustic, rambling old place so remote that we had to cover the last stretch by dinghy, in shifts. One time I’ll never forget, it was dark when we pulled up to the dock. Pete had gotten there first. When I scrambled up out of the boat, he was waiting for me. He came roaring and springing at me in the pitch-blackness from behind a stuffed bear cub he had dragged out of the great room.

  Sometimes he took things a little too far. There was the time he pulled the legs off a daddy longlegs one by one to see what would happen, and if the dot would hop. He knew I had severe asthma, but I remember him pinning me down and tickling me as I wheezed and gasped for breath.

  It didn’t occur to me that these childhood memories would have to be enough for a lifetime or that, when I saw Pete in the summer of 1965, it would be the last time I would ever see him. Things like the wood carving he’d made of an old man, a pair of earrings he gave me, and a flippant letter from college — “Write me, knothead, okay? Just kidding, you’re not a knothead very much. I was being brotherly” — would become my treasured possessions.

  Soon after Pete was killed, my family stopped talking about him. My father, my sisters, and I learned that to mention Pete’s name, let alone his violent death, would be to set off my mother’s tidal-force grief. We were all shocked and sad, but the enormity of Mom’s emotion and her abandonment to it, especially after she had been a model of decorum, was fearsome.

  My mother’s grief was so intense that how the rest of us felt seemed unimportant, even irrelevant. I can understand her better now, but back then her behavior was confusing and off-putting. We tacitly accepted that it was just easier not to talk about Pete. His death and everything else about him became my mother’s personal possessions — possessions she was not willing to share.

  At fifteen, I didn’t know that the way my family coped was unhealthy. It would be years before I learned that there was another way and that, by some standards, my mother’s conduct was self-indulgent. Maternal love is exalted in many cultures, but in the Buddhist tradition, the suffering of a grieving mother is not idealized; to the contrary, it is considered the antithesis of the spiritual ideals of detachment and dispassion. The ancient Greek writer Plutarch suggested that excessive sorrow was a form of impropriety. Writing to his wife after the death of their daughter, he said that a virtuous woman must fight against “the incontinence of her soul.”

  My mother seemed to feel that no one understood her suffering. She may have been right. But I would like to think that if she had been able to turn the force of her emotion on nurturing and being nurtured by my family during our most difficult time, she might have brought us together instead of silencing and dividing us.

  Although the grief of a sibling sometimes goes unacknowledged, as my sisters’ and mine was, it is profound. In her Vietnam memoir, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Le Ly Hayslip put it well when she said of losing her brother, “No matter how many men you love, or how many men love you, no bond is thicker than the blood which passes through the umbilicus to brothers and sisters.”6 Usually, brothers and sisters outlive their parents and their loss stays with them longer.

  Silence in the face of grief made it harder for me to bear, but eventually my curiosity and determination won out. I would venture beyond the confines of my family with just one question: What happened to Pete?

  TWO

  “Kiss the Sisses Good-bye”

  L

  ate in the afternoon of June 2, 1963, through the viewfinder of his movie camera, my father slowly panned across the lawn behind Olin Library on the campus of Wesleyan University. He also took in the brownstone chapel covered with ivy, families strolling on the sidewalk behind College Row, and rows of chairs set up for the evening’s one hundred thirty-first commencement exercises.

  Dad had received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston University, but he had begun his undergraduate studies here. He had lots of stories. My favorite was that he had earned money by baking beans and selling them in the dorm. Mom had started college at Smith. She transferred to Wheaton after the dean of students suggested that a year somewhere else, without the social distractions of the other colleges near Northampton, might be profitable. Wheaton would teach her to study. Mother did not return to Smith and she may not have learned to study, because she didn’t graduate. After Wheaton, she moved back in with her parents. She took classes at the Yale music school until the following December, when she and my father were married. Pete was born in June.

  The four years at Wesleyan had not been easy for Pete. Coming from southeastern Missouri, where his summer jobs had included working on a farm, he felt different from his more sophisticated and, in many cases, prep-schooled classmates. At times he was homesick. He struggled to keep up, explaining in a letter his freshman year that he was “not as fast as the other boys.” Pete had been accepted by Wesleyan only after being wait-listed, with four applicants in line ahead of him. Yale, where my mother’s male ancestors had gone in an unbroken line since 1701, had turned him down.

  During his first two years he withdrew from physics and nearly failed calculus and French. The dean placed him on academic probation after the fall semester of junior year. Probation carried “the stern warning that we will expect considerable improvement by June,” Dean Mark Barlow wrote. Pete pulled his grades up slightly, and Barlow sent a note to my parents saying that Pete had “just simply stubbed his toe this past semester, and has learned considerably from it.” In four years, he earned just two As, one in physical education and the other in advanced Chinese.

  The graduating class of 1963 processed to the stage behind
the library. The tassel on Pete’s mortarboard bobbed against his cheek as he turned to look at Dad, flashing a tolerant, embarrassed half-smile recognized by all parents. Blond, blue-eyed, and six feet tall, Pete crossed the platform with a long stride, reached for his diploma, and shook hands with the president. Then he took the steps quickly, opening the black leather case on the way down as if to make sure the thing was really in there. A little while later, he plopped his mortarboard on my head and I mugged for the camera.

  That spring, Pete had played Frisbee in front of the Alpha Delta Phi house with a fraternity brother, David Biddle, who recalled how excited Pete was about going to Vietnam. Another Alpha Delt, Pete’s roommate Bill Owens, remembered a number of discussions in which Pete debated whether to take a government job or attend graduate school in Michigan or California. Whether either school had accepted Pete is unknown. He had scored in the fifty-third percentile, a mediocre fifty-four, on the Graduate Record Examination advanced test in his major, government. He may have thought that practical experience on the ground in Vietnam would improve his academic prospects. In his application to International Voluntary Services he wrote, “I want to acquire some teaching experience. I want time to think, and acquire a ‘feel’ for the area’s people and culture — all in preparation for graduate school. I would rather serve my country through organizations such as IVS than the military.”

  “We all thought he would go to graduate school,” Bill Owens recalled, “but I think he wanted more direct language experience.” One day Pete showed him what he had received in the mail. It was an offer from the Central Intelligence Agency. The letterhead was folded in an unusual way that hid the masthead and agency name. “The offer would have been very language-intensive, but probably less people-oriented than the IVS job he finally accepted,” Owens said. Pete laughed off the CIA letter. He was “very enthusiastic” about joining IVS.

  By April of his senior year, he had begun counting the days to graduation. IVS had sent a formidable list of immunizations he needed. He imagined “running the gauntlet with my undershorts at my knees, getting the needles in all four areas every two seconds, emerging . . . with old, worn, bent hypodermic needles they didn’t bother removing when they missed.” He had also taken “a few liberating steps backward” from a nursing student he had been dating, Sue Patterson. Her attitude about the future was less casual than his, he said, and he felt relieved to be making plans on his own. His rpm’s were running high, he wrote in a letter home. With only fifty-six days left at Wesleyan, he was “as restless as an octopus in a pan of hot water.”

  Some of Pete’s fellow students had concerns about his decision. One was Bruce Kirmmse. A class behind Pete, Kirmmse remembered “a tallish, lean, rather quiet, serious, idealistic young man with owlish clear-rimmed glasses. Soft-spoken and determined.” Wesleyan was “very international-oriented in those days,” and many students were watching the situation in Vietnam. Kirmmse and his friends were skeptical about going there “to do ‘good’ in what seemed to be an inescapably no-good situation,” he said. “But Pete was determined to go there and do good peacefully. I think he was the first person I knew personally who died in Vietnam. Not many from our age group and social class at Wesleyan died over there.”

  Stephen Rankin also questioned Pete’s decision. Like Kirmmse, a class behind Pete, he was already thinking seriously about what to do after graduation. His interest in international affairs had led him at one point to consider a career with the State Department. But the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 had caused him to doubt that he could support U.S. foreign policy. By 1963, he recalled, many at Wesleyan were aware of increasing military involvement in South Vietnam and support for the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem.

  Rankin came to know Pete over meals at EQV, another fraternity on campus. Wesleyan had no dormitory dining halls, and students took their meals at eating clubs. Although Pete was an Alpha Delt, he joined EQV’s eating club in the fall of his senior year. It had a reputation as a more intellectual and political house than Pete’s, where the atmosphere was more literary and easygoing. Rankin recalled that Stuart Byron, who later became a New York film critic, made an eloquent speech proposing that Pete be admitted. His interests had changed, Byron stated, and Pete was now seeking a more stimulating environment. Pete did not want to join the fraternity, only to take his meals there for a few months. Rankin wondered what kind of unorthodox character Byron had turned up. He thought this Pete Hunting must have either unusual strength of character or diplomatic skills to risk the opprobrium of his own fraternity brothers by joining another club. “I was very pleased that my expectations of eccentric behavior were disappointed,” he said. “Pete seemed mature, well grounded, good humored, and approachable. I greatly admired the easy rapport that he established with the many different personality types that EQV attracted.”

  The two had many conversations over lunch and dinner. Rankin came to seek out a place near Pete wherever he happened to be sitting. “He had that great knack of making you feel good about yourself, even when the feedback from others was predominantly negative,” he remembered.

  When Pete said he was going to Vietnam, Rankin was astounded. They all knew that the situation in Vietnam was getting worse. More than once he asked Pete whether he would not be putting himself at risk. Pete admitted that he would be, but displayed an “almost serene confidence and optimism that good communications and well-managed projects would command popular support.”

  John Sommer was another member of the Wesleyan class of 1963 who joined IVS that year. Graduating with honors, he had applied to the Peace Corps, but IVS’s offer came first. Rankin observed in Sommer the same “radical serenity” and confidence. He and Pete seemed to share a belief that they could make a contribution.

  The CIA was recruiting at Wesleyan in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until after Pete’s death that his classmates wondered if there had been a connection with IVS. There was the job offer he had shown his roommate. The real questions began, however, with the story that two Vietnamese had led Pete to his death. Reporting by Cronkite, the wire services, the New York Times — and later the propaganda machine JUSPAO, the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office — all fueled the intrigue.

  When one of Pete’s classmates saw his name on a plaque at the entrance of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the 1970s, he may have inferred, as did people who had not heard of IVS, that Pete really worked for the government. Although he did not, IVS had USAID contracts for its work in Vietnam. The small voluntary organization strived to maintain its autonomy, but the relationship inevitably aroused suspicion. IVS volunteers fought an uphill battle trying to convince Vietnamese friends, co-workers, and students that IVS was independent.

  My father had tried to discourage Pete from going to Vietnam. As an FAA examiner, he had given a helicopter check ride to an army officer who had recently returned from Southeast Asia. Captain Art Boudreau told Dad it was too dangerous for Pete to go there. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, he insisted. “I knew what was going on and I had a premonition that we were going to lose. I pleaded with your dad not to let Pete go. It was really suicide to be out in the countryside. Your dad was very well informed and had some serious conversations with your brother, but he wouldn’t listen to him. Pete was stubborn about it.”

  If my parents had reservations about Pete’s going to Vietnam, I was not aware of them. Even if they were against it, I am certain they would not have tried to stop Pete. They placed a high value on independence and on doing the right thing, whatever the risk.

  After commencement weekend at Wesleyan, my father returned to work in Oklahoma City. We had moved there in the summer of 1960, when Dad took a job with the FAA in the Examination and Records Division as a writer of flight manuals and pilot exams. That fall, Cis entered Swarthmore College. Holly and I started junior high and elementary school in Oklahoma.

  I adjusted to fif
th grade about as smoothly as Pete had to Wesleyan. That year, I wrote to him that I had failed the first quarter of resources and science class. I described the “very affectinate [sic]” stray cat we had adopted and named Valentino. I hatched a plan to pick Pete up the next summer at my grandmother’s house in Woodbridge, some twenty miles from Wesleyan, on our way to Maine. Meeting at Nana’s house would be more fun, I said, but we could also pick him up at college. This was “just brain-work,” I explained, “but it never hurts anybody else when you’re only dreaming, does it?” Pete dubbed me “the correspondent of the family, by George.” I said I would try to write more often. He complained that my sisters, meanwhile, hadn’t “filled their quotas.” He asked my parents to crack the whip over their heads.

  Mother, Holly, and I spent the summer of 1963, as we spent a portion of almost every summer, at Round Hill Farm. Nana’s house was a large saltbox colonial built in the 1700s. Her father-in-law, a New Haven surgeon and professor at Yale, had bought it when one of his sons contracted tuberculosis. The place in the country had restored the boy to health. It had a tonic effect on all of us.

  We associated Round Hill with stability, security, and good times. Except for having to remember not to say “y’all” in front of my Connecticut cousins, I hadn’t a care in the world there. Some years we stayed next door to Nana’s house in my Uncle Jim’s cottage. That summer in my little room there, I read To Kill a Mockingbird and The Ugly American. Outside my window grew pink flowers called bleeding hearts. The spicy sweetness of boxwood perfumed the air.

  For two hundred years the house had sat mostly unchanged on a small rise bordered by a stone wall and quiet lane. Venerable “husband and wife” matching pine trees framed the front door. A small waterfall in back produced a soothing rush day and night, year round. When we weren’t staying with our uncle, Holly and I shared one of the front bedrooms. Squirrels in the trees sometimes awakened us by tossing pinecones against the windows. We usually arrived at the farm in the dark, and looking out the windows that next morning guaranteed a thrill. There was the swimming pool, waiting for us.