Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  The reason I know what was said is that I have a copy of the service. All I remember about it is arriving at the church under weeping skies and seeing a lot of people I didn’t know.

  Cis remembers that Mom was worried about the potential awkwardness of two women Pete had dated meeting each other. One of them, Sue, remembers not that, but the aloofness she perceived in the IVS staff members who had come up from Washington. These men included the organization’s executive director, Arthur Z. Gardiner, who had never met Pete; the personnel officer, John Hughes; and Tom Luche, one of the first IVS volunteers sent to Vietnam. Willi Meyers was also there. He and Pete had gone to Vietnam in the same group and were good friends. Now a recruiter for IVS, Willi would soon return to Vietnam to assume Pete’s duties in the Mekong Delta.1

  Pete was buried in a family plot in a cemetery facing West Rock, a sheer cliff northwest of New Haven. We placed wildflowers from the farm on his casket.

  I am sorry to say that when my mother handed some of the flowers to me to place on the casket, I was thinking only of myself. With what I regard now as appalling pettiness, I resented her for expecting me to take part in a rite, one more in a series of rites, for which I was unprepared. I was close to Pete and had not been reluctant to express affection for him, and placing flowers on his coffin was my mother’s gesture and not mine. Mine-and-not-mine was to become a theme of our family story.

  At fifteen, I was too young to know that children can take part in mourning rituals and find them meaningful if adults respect their feelings. The adults around me expected silence and gave silence. Not knowing where to look for comforting guidance, I stared at the casket and the immense hole over which it was suspended.

  Holly and I were both in the cast of The Music Man that year. When we returned from Connecticut and before we started back to classes, we went to a rehearsal. Several of my friends who were also in the cast saw me come through a door to the auditorium and gathered around me. My appearance made a strong impression on Nancy Kerby, who still vividly remembers that I was wearing a plaid jumper and “looked just so, so sad.”

  After the dress rehearsal a couple of nights later, a boy in Holly’s class who played the lead character, Harold Hill, invited me to go out for a hamburger. He was the student body president and I was in awe of him. At fifteen, I had never been out on a date and wasn’t sure I should go without my mother’s permission. Holly said it would be all right and I should do it. Off we went to the Split-T, a popular restaurant, six of us in the car.

  Later, on the way home, we had stopped at a large intersection and were entering it after the signal changed when we were hit head-on. Not all cars were equipped with seat belts in those days, and the four of us in the back seat were not buckled in. I flew forward and hit the windshield with such force that it cracked. A second before my head met the glass, I “heard” a voice — not an audible voice — say, “Put your hand up!” I raised my left hand to my forehead. Two bones in my hand broke.

  The driver of the other car and I were taken to the hospital by ambulance. As emergency technicians hoisted the stretcher I was on into the ambulance, one asked whom he should call. I told him our telephone number and said, “Just don’t ask for my mother.” I was afraid the news would be too much for her after Pete’s death. She had been anticipating the call, however. Holly had come home and said she had driven by a big accident. My mother, who had a sixth sense, knew that I was involved.

  In the emergency room a doctor stitched my head wound and wrapped my broken hand in a cast. He gave my mother pills for my double concussion and told her to wake me every two hours. The next day, loaded with drugs, I was back on stage for the final performance. When I returned to school, I learned a rumor had circulated that I’d been killed.

  When the wound on my forehead became a vertical scar, my history teacher started calling me Slot. He was the wrestling coach and a macho guy, but he showed a kindness I have never forgotten. He thought up one reason after another to issue hall passes to a friend and me. He would send us to the office to see if there was anything in his faculty mailbox. He handed us change and asked us to bring him a Coke from the vending machine. I didn’t realize it at the time, but letting me out of class was his way of giving a break to a girl who had just lost her brother and survived a head-on collision.

  In a letter I found many years later, Dad had written to one of our relatives about how things were going at home. Besides my being in an accident, our two Dalmatians had “done a thorough job” on a toy poodle up the street and my parents had bought the neighbors a new puppy. Dad’s plane had ruptured a fuel line aloft, but he smelled it and “got down quickly.” Trying to make light of a difficult situation, he said he might hide awhile in the closet, where a poisonous spider would probably bite him.

  His grief over Pete’s death was not obvious. The only time I heard him speak of it was one afternoon when the two of us were in the car and he was pulled over for speeding. As he handed over his driver’s license, he said simply, “I’m sorry, officer. I didn’t have my mind on my driving. I’ve just lost my son in Vietnam.” The policeman sent us on our way.

  My mother was different. She lost her temper more easily than before, and Dad, Holly, and I kept out of her way to avoid setting her off. We tiptoed, figuratively and literally, around the house. She couldn’t sleep at night, and her nerves were so badly frayed that my father muted the ring of the telephone by inserting a piece of foam where the hammer struck the bell.

  When I came home from school, I could count on finding Mom in the living room, always in the same chair, hunched over a pad of graph paper. Who knows how long she might have been sitting there, lost in drawing house plans. An ashtray on the table beside her would be full of cigarette butts with red lipstick prints. In her right hand she held a pencil, usually a stubby one. She drew house plans prolifically, obsessively on her green graph paper. For the remaining two and a half years that I lived under my parents’ roof, she generated house plans by the hundreds, each one no more than a few inches across, as if by drawing the perfect floor plan she could restore order to her fractured psyche.

  Sometimes as I walked up to the house after school, I could hear her at the piano. Her beautiful playing was a concert for one, however. As soon as she became aware of someone coming, the music would stop. But for a minute I could occasionally catch the rippling notes of “May Night” or the jazzy rhythm of “Manhattan Serenade.”

  My mother’s depression took up a lot of space in the house, which had always felt a size too small for us. The living room, dining room, and kitchen were one L-shaped room, so that all of the common living space was exposed. Our Oriental rug was too large for the living room and had to be turned under along one side. We had too much furniture for the space. My parents’ bedroom was so crowded that the only way to get from one door to the other, on opposite walls, was to make your way along a single lane between bureaus, shelves, and tables that were heaped with newspapers and magazines. In the living room were still more shelves, crammed with books upon books. The piano sat in one corner, and over it hung a guitar and a cello on the wall. Sitting on the piano bench with the instruments looming overhead produced a sensation of something vaguely precarious and impending.

  After Pete was killed, the living room became a shrine to him. Our household with four children had once been lively, but now it was restrained. My mother put photographs and drawings of Pete around the living room, including a pencil sketch dated August 6, 1965, and signed Tay-Do. It had been found in Pete’s vehicle. There were brownish spots on the paper, which someone said were bloodstains.

  When anyone but my closest friends came to the house, I felt embarrassed by the display. It seemed so raw and loud, even though it was understood we did not talk about Pete.

  My family was more comfortable with secrecy than most. My mother’s great-grandfather, William Huntington Russell, founded Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale. I have wondered, half seriously, if we had a gene
tic predisposition to secrecy, or whether it was a New England Yankee trait or merely a family eccentricity.

  I had heard stories about my ancestor General Russell, but I knew hardly anything about Skull and Bones until after my college years. Only once did I hear it mentioned in the family. On that occasion, someone made a humorous reference to the society in the presence of a Bonesman relative. The tradition is supposedly that a member of Skull and Bones leaves the room if the name is mentioned. In this case, the relative just laughed. Even so, another family member didn’t think it was funny and demanded that we change the subject.

  What I did know about my famous ancestor was that he founded a military academy in New Haven and organized the Connecticut militia for the Civil War. More than three hundred of his graduates served in the Union army. He harbored escaped slaves in the school and, as the family lore goes, told his students never to tell anyone about the mysterious sounds they heard. I imagined the creaking of doors late at night, footfall on squeaky stairs, and pots clanging in the kitchen as meals were hastily prepared for weary travelers.

  Skull and Bones’s roster reads like a Who’s Who of the American upper class. Although my great-great-grandfather’s name is associated with this elite group, he was better known in his day as an Abolitionist. John Brown was his personal friend and a frequent guest in the Russell home. In his will Brown named my ancestor a trustee of his estate.

  General Russell was born in Middletown, Connecticut, where Wesleyan University was established in 1831. Three of his ancestors had been pastors of the First Congregational Church there for a continuous period of 118 years. He was a descendant of Noadiah Russell, one of the ten Congregational ministers who founded Yale in 1701. To attend classes there, my great-great is said to have walked the twenty-six miles to New Haven “owing to financial necessity” and to have taken up teaching for the same reason.2 In 1833 he graduated at the head of his class. One explanation has it that General Russell founded Skull and Bones to redress the injustice of Phi Beta Kappa denying membership to a deserving classmate.

  My mother was proud of her ancestry. She could be imperious, and even toward us children she maintained a certain reserve, as a photograph of our family taken during my childhood illustrates. She stands near us without touching anyone, her arms folded across her chest.

  At the same time, she had a very generous and outgoing side. She had an unusual capacity for warmth that won her many friends throughout her long life. In college, her dorm room was such a gathering place that she was nicknamed Madame de Rambouillet, after the hostess of a seventeenth-century literary salon in France. During my teenage years, when Holly’s friends or mine stopped by the house and we were not there, they would stay and talk with my mother. She never lost her reserve or forgot her New England roots, but she loved the friendliness of the people of Oklahoma.

  Both my mother and father were strict parents, but the house rules were hers. Words my friends used with nary a thought never passed my lips at home — racial epithets were unthinkable under any circumstances, but so too were profanity, barnyard language, and references to bodily functions. Body parts, with the exception of extremities, were largely off limits. I remember my mother telling Pete not to use the informal “thanks” but “thank you,” although she eventually let up on that one. Still, she was not a prude. Her rules seemed to be based less on propriety than on class consciousness. One’s station was revealed by one’s speech and conduct. To me, rules such as not waving to a friend from the car seemed ridiculously old-fashioned and ill suited to the open spirit in Oklahoma. A lady doesn’t wave, Mom said. She nods.

  She was emotionally intense and, as Dad would say, given to hyperbole. It wasn’t enough for her to describe her father as an honest businessman; he was “the only man in New Haven who could get a bank loan during the Depression.” She didn’t just love her country, she “passionately adored” it. “Always,” “never,” “ever,” and “only” were among her prime vocabulary words. Temperamentally, I was more like my father. For as long as I can remember, I regarded my mother somewhat warily.

  My family told a story about my emotional declaration of independence. I was three or four when one day I asked my father’s permission for something. As many fathers of his era would have replied, he told me, “Ask your mother.” I said I didn’t want to ask her, because she didn’t know what the other side of the moon looked like and she didn’t know how sand felt between my toes. We were not allowed to talk back to our parents, but I had invoked a poem by a favorite family author, “Sand-Between-the-Toes” by A. A. Milne, and my father thought it was funny. Even that young, I had measured a certain distance between my mother and me.

  In the aftermath of Pete’s death, the distance between us increased. On one occasion she misplaced her pen. She accused my father and me of taking it to make her think she was crazy. I remember looking at him helplessly. In truth, she was a little crazy.

  She was in tears many times during my remaining high school years. Her mind was often elsewhere. Once, it was her turn to provide a ride home for my friends and me after the rehearsal for a school play. We waited a long time for Mom before I called to see if she was on her way. She said she was coming. More time passed and my friends grew impatient. When I called again, she said she had gotten up from a nap when I called the first time, but she had forgotten what she was doing and, instead of getting dressed, went back to bed.

  In April 1966, six months after Pete’s death, my parents received a letter from Vice President Hubert Humphrey inviting our family to Washington. He had recently returned from South Vietnam. In a ceremony at the presidential palace, Premier Ky had given him a medal awarded posthumously to Pete. Humphrey would deem it a privilege, he said, to present the medal in his office, with IVS officials present.

  Humphrey was one of several U.S. politicians who in the early 1960s sought out IVSers for their opinions. He visited the IVS house in Saigon and considered the young men and women — sometimes to their chagrin — part of the American mission in Vietnam. It was thus more than a formality for Humphrey to extend an invitation to the family of the only IVS volunteer to have been killed.

  On April 27, we were escorted into the vice president’s office at the White House. Humphrey entered the room and welcomed us. With obvious emotion and moist eyes, he eulogized Pete. The mood was extremely somber. My parents, sisters, and I fought back tears, as a journalist present observed. He added:

  Mr. and Mrs. Hunting withstood the poignant moment, his right hand clasping her left, while Humphrey said, “Peter represented the best of this country as a volunteer for peace, for the love of mankind. . . . But no medal can take the place of your son. . . . He didn’t mind the danger of going to remote villages. His was the kind of work that America is known for. The way we treat people is the way we treat God.”3

  After the medal presentation we were standing for photographs when U.S. Senators Fred Harris and Mike Monroney of Oklahoma rushed into the room. Humphrey apologized for inviting them late. I remember that the two men wore wide grins oddly unbefitting the occasion.

  The ceremony was over, but Humphrey lingered with us for almost an hour. The mood lifted and he began telling us about the lowly status of the office he held. Speaking animatedly, he illustrated his point by showing us various cast-offs in the room. There was a chandelier that had been banished from Theodore Roosevelt’s earshot after the tinkling glass kept the president awake one summer night. A mirror on the wall had been the focal point of a rift between President James Madison and the Congress, and now served as a reminder of the separation of powers. Humphrey said that nothing original was ever purchased for the vice president’s office. Finally, he recommended that we have lunch in the Senate dining room. I remember his enthusiasm for the bean soup, and because he urged us to order it, we did.

  At that time, Humphrey was taking criticism for being overly loyal to President Johnson and too hawkish. Some thought he should be staking out his own positions if he wa
nted to win the White House in 1968, and complained that he was preoccupied with ceremonies. Carl Rowan, the syndicated columnist, defended Humphrey. Referring to the medal presentation and to Pete, he doubted that voters would think much of a candidate who was too busy to present a post-humous medal to a young man who had died working for peace.4

  The morning after the ceremony, Cis and I walked from the hotel where we were staying to a department store. I bought a floor-length yellow gown to wear to the junior – senior prom. I was straddling two worlds, that of a fifteen-year-old Oklahoma sophomore just getting interested in boys, and the sad, confusing, go-it-alone environment of my home.

  FOUR

  “Just Heard over the Radio”

  A

  s his language class in My Tho came to a close, Pete found out more about his work assignment in Phan Rang. He would be teaching English and assisting with hamlet self-help projects, such as digging wells. He would be a contact in the field for the “prov rep,” or provincial representative, assigned to the area. The prov reps represented the U.S. Office of Rural Affairs. They controlled the purse strings, he noted in his journal.

  The job would allow for some imagination. Pete looked forward to “lots of living in the villages,” he wrote, and even wearing native dress. He would do “a lot of sleeping in the hamlets themselves” and get to know the local people. He would eat and drink the same food as they did, including a “really powerful distilled-oil sort of stuff” — the Vietnamese condiment nuoc mam, made from fish.

  If Pete was aware that the Vietcong were systematically assassinating hamlet chiefs and schoolteachers, and that a group of IVS volunteers working at the agricultural station at Nha Ho, near Phan Rang, had moved to the city for safety, his letters and journal did not mention it.