Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  The author with Pete (circa 1960). Author’s collection.

  Pete, left, with unidentified fellow members of the Wesleyan University yacht club (date unknown). Photographer unknown; author’s collection.

  The author, with a book and a cat on her lap, around the age when Pete left for Vietnam, in 1963. Author’s collection.

  The International Voluntary Services education team (Summer 1963) at the IVS house in Saigon, left to right: Don Fuller, Phyllis Colyer, Dick Carlton, Louise Ross, Chuck Ross, Carlie Allender, Carl Stockton, Anne Hensley, Walt Robertson, Renate McDowell, John Sommer, Willi Meyers, Pete Hunting, Bob Biggers, and Gene Stoltzfus. On the back of this postcard, Pete wrote a birthday greeting to his mother and asked her to send his Chinese dictionary and telescope. Photographer unknown; author’s collection.

  After the bloody coup d’état that deposed South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother Nhu in November 1963, Pete sent a postcard to reassure his mother. Author’s collection.

  From an unwritten postcard found among Pete’s papers; the caption reads, “Village notabless [sic] in festival dress.” Author’s collection.

  Fishing village, Phan Rang Bay, Vietnam (circa 1963). Photo by Pete Hunting; courtesy of Sue Patterson.

  Fishing boats, Phan Rang Bay (circa 1963). Photo by Pete Hunting; author’s collection.

  On the back of this photo, Pete described the scene: “Stern oarsman stands on port gunwhale and sculls the boat. . . . Took this while crossing a bay on this little ferry. Chap’s leaning way out over water. [He] posed and nearly fell in the salty brine. About a minute later I discovered the bottom was made of rice straw; saw it undulating up and down beneath floorboards and was quite excited until I found it was made that way.” Probably Phan Rang Bay, Vietnam (circa 1963). Photo by Pete Hunting; author’s collection.

  Vietnamese women hauling manioc to market (circa 1963). On the back of the photo, Pete described the pole and baskets as the “Vietnamese equivalent of wheelbarrows, easier to haul ‘in the long run.’ (Last couple of days have been bad for puns.) The road to Nha Trang (Vietnamese Riviera). Ate a lobster a good 18 inches long, no kidding, I was so hungry for lobster and good seafood. Ate at François’, of course.” Photo by Pete Hunting; author’s collection.

  On the back of this photo, Pete, described the smiling woman: “Cham lady. Vietnamese women don’t carry their baskets on their heads, or wear such flowing gowns.” Ninh Thuan Province, Vietnam (circa 1963). Photo by Pete Hunting; author’s collection.

  “Montagnard stud heading to market to sell his kindling.” Pete wrote on the back of this photo. “Will get about 75 cents for it all, takes all day to go back and forth to market, takes about a day to collect the wood.” Ninh Thuan Province (circa 1963). Photo by Pete Hunting; author’s collection.

  Pete with unidentified colleagues (date unknown). Author’s collection.

  Pete and his first IVS stationmate, Chuck Fields, light a fire to smoke fish in a charcoal kiln. Ninh Thuan Province (date unknown). Photographer unknown, U.S. Operations Mission; author’s collection.

  Pete with unidentified children, probably Ninh Thuan Province (date unknown). Author’s collection.

  Bricklaying 101. “They didn’t know you’ve got to soak bricks in water so’s they won’t soak all the water out of mortar,” Pete wrote on the back of this photo. “Didn’t believe me till I showed them how easy it would be for somebody to stove in the wall.” Ninh Thuan Province (date unknown). Author’s collection.

  Well construction at Thuan Tu, a Cham hamlet, Ninh Thuan Province (date unknown). Photo by Pete Hunting; author’s collection.

  Residents of an unidentified Cham hamlet gather around their new well, with Pete in the background. Ninh Thuan Province (date unknown). Author’s collection.

  Unidentified scouts, Ninh Thuan Province (1964). Pete, a former Boy Scout, hoped to enlist the Phan Rang troop’s help with service projects. The scouts had more enthusiasm for “campfire dancing” and practicing semaphore signals. They were the “salutingest bunch of young men” he had ever seen. Photo by Pete Hunting; author’s collection.

  In her letter, Bradford said Scarborough was disappointed that the dedication had been arranged so hastily that neither officials in Saigon nor my parents had been invited. She added that the simplicity of the occasion “would probably prove to be a saving grace.” She apologized that the construction had taken so long.

  Don Luce visited the library eight months later, in February 1969. By this time he had resigned from IVS and was speaking and writing against the war, under the aegis of the World Council of Churches. He was impressed to see how well the library was operating. He informed my parents that young people were reading at tables and checking out books. The library was so well used that the books were fraying, but IVS was having them repaired. Only eight books had been lost. A taxidermied tiger donated by Larry Laverentz still presided over the room.

  Liberation soldiers had entered the library one night during a battle with South Vietnamese troops. The wooden window frames had taken machine gun fire and a grenade had blown a hole in one wall, but repairs had been made. The fact that the library was still operating, Don said, attested to the esteem in which the people held it:

  It is a tribute to the service that the library is giving the community that the NLF soldiers were careful not to harm anything within the library. None of the books were taken, or destroyed. The tiger was left unharmed. I also think that it is an indication that whatever happens politically in this sad land . . . the library will continue. This is as Pete would want it.

  He noted that in the Asian calendar it was the year of the chicken. According to Vietnamese tradition, “When the year of the monkey (1968) turns to the year of the chicken, there will be peace,” he said. He hoped it was true. The people’s belief in the saying was so strong, he added, that their will might make it true.

  But the war would continue for six more years.

  In the fall of 1968 I left home. College provided a way out of the tensions of living under my parents’ roof, but the strain between my mother and me only increased after I began to take part in antiwar demonstrations in the spring of my sophomore year. Because I was in Massachusetts and my parents were in Oklahoma, it was easy at first not to tell them about the protest marches.

  I was afraid to tell them that I believed the war was immoral and the United States should withdraw. I was not a pacifist, but I blamed our country’s military involvement in Vietnam for Pete’s death more than I did the people who had actually killed him. I thought that if American combat troops had not been sent to Vietnam in 1965, Pete would still be alive.

  Only once did I find the nerve to tell my parents that I felt our leaders were wrongheaded. When I did, my mother rebuked me with the words “You are betraying your brother’s memory!” I didn’t believe it was true, but her accusation stung all the same.

  She became an arch defender of the war, but my father did not. Interviewed by the Oklahoma City Times for a story about the views of “survivors of lost GIs,” he stated:

  I think it’s a hell of a drain on the economy. I’m violently opposed to the administration’s course of action. I just think we ought to end it. My personal conviction as to stepped-up bombing is that it would lead us right into what the air force has wanted for a long time — a full-scale war with China.9

  Because my family did not discuss the war or Pete, I did not know my father’s words had been published in the newspaper, but I sensed that his views were more like mine than my mother’s. Once when I was home on spring break, he asked me to recommend a book that would help him understand my generation — at least those of us who were rebelling against the war, our elders, and our society and its prevailing norms. I suggested The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society, by the social psychologist Kenneth Kenniston. Dad seemed interested, but he never mentioned it again and I doubt he ever read it. For one thing, he hated psychologists even though he had a master
’s degree in abnormal psychology.

  I realize now that I could have talked to my father about so many things if only I had known then how to initiate a conversation of substance. When I was a student at Wheaton College, he came to Fathers’ Weekend one year. I enjoyed our time together and his amusing stories about visiting my mother there three decades before. When I think of the opportunities I missed to talk with him about things that mattered to me, I feel sad that we were both so emotionally standoffish. My father could be too strict and insensitive, but he also was wise, open to reason, and, deep down, tenderhearted. I never asked him what happened to Pete. He was loyal to my mother, and we never discussed the way she took possession of Pete’s memory, or her irrational behavior and depression.

  A few years after I finished college, I visited my parents in Massachusetts, where they had moved during my senior year. By then we had begun to talk about Pete a little, although not about his death or how we had coped with it. Pete had been gone more than ten years and my mother could talk about him without crying. Still, I was careful around her.

  I had passed the age Pete had been when he was killed. Now I wanted to understand him not just as a brother, but as a young man. I had a better grasp of the war in Vietnam and wanted to know what he had said about it. His letters were the key. If there were any chance of seeing them, I would have to ask my mother for them.

  One evening I waited until my parents and I were comfortable in the living room after dinner. I said I would love to read Pete’s letters. Could I?

  Tears came to my mother’s eyes. There had been a flood in the basement, she said. All of the letters had been destroyed.

  So they were gone. Pete was out of my reach for good. I would never again see those blue airmail envelopes or my name written by my brother’s hand. I would never know whether he had criticized or supported American foreign policy, or what he thought of the men who shaped it. My fifteen years of memories would have to be enough for a lifetime. It wasn’t hopelessness I felt, but resignation.

  It didn’t occur to me to ask my mother if she was sure the letters had been destroyed, or how she had discovered they were ruined, or if I could look in the basement myself.

  Around this time, my sister Carol became interested in a form of spirituality that is generally associated today with the New Age. A psychic friend of hers said she had received a message for me from Pete. Although I have always been skeptical of claims of otherworldly knowledge, I stifled tears as Cis said that Pete wanted me to know he was all right and I didn’t need to worry about him. He had written the same thing to me in a letter from Vietnam.

  Cis, Holly, and I began taking annual retreats in 1978. That year, we met at a state park. Cis brought four of Pete’s letters that she had saved. They were the only letters of his that we had. We read them aloud and, for the first time, wept together and talked about the brother we loved so much. That weekend was a turning point for us. We grew closer and began to find our voices for talking about the loss we were all living with.

  SIX

  Mr. Tall American

  I

  t was a new year, 1964, and a new president occupied the White House. In his State of the Union address on January 8, Lyndon Johnson urged members of Congress to carry forward the plans and programs of John Kennedy, “not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right.” In the same speech, he declared the War on Poverty.

  Three days later, a fifteen-year-old figure skater named Peggy Fleming won a place on the U.S. Olympic team.

  On January 8, the musical Hello, Dolly! opened at the St. James Theater, starring Carol Channing. Another 2,843 performances would follow, breaking the existing record for a Broadway run.

  In Vietnam, Pete had spent Christmas with the IVS team at the villa in Dalat. It didn’t “seem much like the season” to him, and he wished he could be home with the family. Still, he urged us not to try anything rash like telephoning. “Please don’t,” he stressed. “For one thing, you wouldn’t be able to reach Phan Rang. For another, we might go to Nha Trang or Dalat. And thirdly, it costs about $75.”

  He didn’t say why, but he was discouraged. His recent letters had offered clues, however. The education chief was lazy, the former province chief was in jail after the Diem coup, a schoolteacher in the next town had committed suicide, and his stationmate Chuck’s mind was “just one big rusty nail,” he had vented to Cis. He told Sue, “I get so mad at the people I work with and live with sometimes that I’d like to have someone to come back to, to forget it with.” On Christmas Eve, his spirits lifted a bit when the group drew names and opened presents.

  The following day, fueled by eggnog laced with alcohol, Pete and several of his teammates decided to go paddleboating on a lake. He described what happened next in a letter to Margo Bradley:

  Forty-five minutes later, my drunken paddleboating partner and I had been rammed by another playful paddleboat crew. The port pontoon took on a few gallons and we sank. . . .

  Having had some training in drinking and having developed a modest capacity in the days of my youth at Wesleyan, I was still untouched and commenced fishing for my soggy boatmate, at which time the boat owner was fast bearing down upon us with a wrathful look in his eyes.

  There followed a very complicated social situation, what with all the handshaking and social amenities taking place in French.

  My comrades had taken to the reeds along the shore and hoisted the groggy one over the gunwale in six feet of water. Looking back on it all, one is inclined to ask himself, searchingly of course, if these things happen only to certain people. . . .

  Altogether, it was a very jarring holiday. No snow, one or two accidents. All the people I care about so far away.

  New Year’s Day found Pete nursing a hangover after a party back in Phan Rang at the American military compound. His mood had lifted and his sense of humor had returned. “Thank God for coffee,” he wrote. “It has been a hot, sweaty, dusty, thirsty holiday in Phan Rang.”

  For Christmas, Margo had sent some books, but they had not arrived yet. He hoped her package looked as unlike a bomb as possible and thanked her in advance for the gift: “Believe it or not, the only one of Mark Twain’s works I have is a well-worn Tom Sawyer. Having already lost a few things in the mail, there is the possibility that never the Twain shall meet.”

  For the twenty-eight months Pete lived in Vietnam, minus a few weeks when he came home on leave or took vacations in Bangkok and Hong Kong, he corresponded mostly with my immediate family, our closest relatives, and two women, Sue and Margo. He had dated both of them in college. While he was away in Vietnam, Sue was completing her nursing studies in Connecticut and Margo graduated from college and was working in Manhattan.

  Decades later, both Sue and Margo would offer me their letters from Pete. Even after I read them, I could only guess what his true feelings had been. It was clear that he had cared deeply about each of them, although not necessarily to the same degree at the same time. I have wondered if he was the Archie to their Betty and Veronica.

  Sue had saved every word Pete ever wrote to her, beginning with the notes he left at her dormitory saying he had stopped by. Some of these letters contained intimacies no brother would want his little sister to see, but Sue gave them to me uncensored.

  Margo’s letters, by contrast, came to me expurgated. Believing they should be shared with a wider audience but unsure how to proceed until I unexpectedly contacted her in 2004, she had typed all of the letters, discreetly omitting the most personal information. She said she had disposed of the originals.

  Over time, Pete gradually began writing more to Margo and less to Sue, until in his last letter to my family he enumerated the qualities in Margo that he believed might suit them for a life together. While I could not be sure how his thinking had evolved, I could trace his shifting affections when I photocopied the letters onto different colors of paper. For Pete’s letters to the family, I used white paper. I used green paper for the ones to
Margo and pink for those to Sue. Then, by arranging all of the letters in chronological order, it was easy to see that the pink letters tapered off after a year and eventually ceased altogether, while the number of green pages steadily increased.

  In his letters to Sue, who had become his steady girlfriend by the end of college, Pete showed a vulnerable, tender, and randy side. I’ll never know if he revealed the same traits to the sophisticated Margo; what is clear, however, is that writing to her brought out the best in him. His witty, intelligent letters at first bordered on attempts to impress her but, as time went by, showed him confiding, more and more, his insights about Vietnam and what he was doing there.

  Pete had been in Vietnam less than three months when, without mentioning anyone by name — Sue, Margo, or possibly someone else — he wrote in his diary about a woman he missed:

  Moon is beautiful tonight. Storm has cleared. Everything in a clear pale half-light. Now and then a cloud — transparent — drives across its neighbor orb, dressing it in silver fleece threads. Wish I were home admiring it with her, or she was here admiring it with me. Wish she could’ve driven down from Nha Trang with me, today.