Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  A week later, he mused about small things that gave him pleasure, things he wished he could share:

  In moments of peace and relaxation, passing shadows, fragrances, and half-thoughts come to the doorstep of my mind and pass on, but do not make my acquaintance — only vaguely remembered, smiling thought-faces. Tonight the moon was a beautiful orange in a green, smoke-cloud sky, and I longed for my faraway sweetheart.

  He was not without female acquaintances, however. In mid-October he received letters from two girls in Vietnam, both of whom asked why he was shunning them. “Whew!” he wrote to Sue. “Sometimes I just don’t know about these people.”

  Bicycling home from the market one day, he found that he had acquired a small fan club:

  All the students were out marching, practicing for Independence Day. I’d pass the columns of boys and they’d all say “Hey, hello” or “Ong Peck,” which is how they pronounce Pete. I know lots of them. Then I had to go past the girls’ ranks. They just love to tease me. All this sighing and swooning. God, I hate parades.

  After six months in Vietnam and almost daily contact with Americans stationed at the air base in Phan Rang, Pete told Sue, “I really feel sorry for some of these military guys. They don’t trust their wives and don’t deserve the trust of their wives, either. They darn near go stir crazy, sitting around over there.”

  I mentioned this comment to one of Pete’s IVS friends, some of whom were surprised to hear he’d had a girlfriend, or even two, back home. I said that it sounded as if he were telling Sue he was true to her. The friend didn’t dispute it, but what he said next — “What time period was that?” — answered my implicit question.

  At least one woman Pete knew in Vietnam was less interested in him in particular than in a potential American husband. “The cigarette girl downtown is hot for my body,” he wrote. “Other day she informed me she was on the prowl for a tall, blond, handsome husband, as she slowly drew the 25 piasters out of my hand. Eeeyow.” A smoker since college, he would have been a good customer of hers in this period leading up to the Federal Trade Commission’s June 1964 announcement that, effective the following year, American cigarette manufacturers would be required to label packages with a warning about the harmful effects of smoking.

  Half a world away from the people he cared most about, Pete was also literally up to his knees in hamlet projects. The IVS annual report for 1963 – 64 cited his digging of wells as an example of “how the IVS educational development volunteer operates — even outside the immediate province of education.”

  A high school near Sacramento had provided funds for constructing a well in coastal Thuan Tu hamlet. Pete recorded the construction project on eight-millimeter film that he sent home and we watched in the living room. The sequence begins with the image of a Cham elder wearing the traditional garb of a white tunic, his head wrapped in a white cloth and very thin legs extending from a pair of shorts.

  Standing on the flat bed of his Land Rover, Pete enters the frame dressed in cutoffs and a long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows. A third again as tall as any of the other adults, he tugs a heavy concrete well liner to the vehicle’s edge. The muscles in his face, legs, and arms tighten with the exertion. He places one hand on the flat bed, hops down, and with five other men, all of slight build, lowers the cylinder to the ground.

  Next, from several feet beneath the earth, the camera slowly pivots three hundred sixty degrees to take in dozens of children looking down from the well’s rim, smiling against an intense blue, cloudless sky.

  The action moves to two Cham men who are guiding a second concrete cylinder downhill in the direction of a large hole. Uphill, other arms hold taut the two ends of a rope from which the weighty ring is suspended. The lowering and rolling of the concrete well liners are repeated several times as the rings are moved into position beside the hole.

  Building the well in Thuan Tu involved more than heavy lifting. It became an object lesson in the science of hydraulics and a foundation for friendship. In a letter to the California students who had contributed to the well-digging project, Pete began by describing the hamlet’s remote location along a cowpath on the far side of a settlement whose inhabitants were rumored to be Vietcong sympathizers.

  He then explained what he and his Cham co-workers had learned from laboring together:

  We made twelve trips out in my little Land Rover vehicle. Each trip out we’d carry a pre-cast, reinforced concrete well ring; each returning trip we’d have a load of Cham women taking rice to market. It was a good opportunity to practice my Vietnamese, since on most trips I didn’t take an interpreter, and it probably had a small “psychological” effect, as they say.

  The traditional method of digging a well out there was to dig a hole down to the water level, then to lay bricks or stone up to the top, starting from about half a meter or a meter under water. This had to be done during the dry season, when the water level was at its lowest. Besides being time consuming, this method never did guarantee much water during the dry season. . . .

  Laying bricks under [water] seems to be a bit of a problem, especially if the mason is confronted with flowing sand. With a concrete ring, a man gets inside and digs the dirt out from under the bottom ring, adding one ring on top of another, as the whole column gradually sinks. When the man reaches the water level, the work goes a lot faster, even though he must work under water.

  But the workers didn’t take my advice and dug the well the hard way. When they reached the water level, I jumped in to show them what I was talking about. They thought this [was] quite a jolly sight, and I guess it effected a change in their attitude.

  They invited me to their Cham temple where I dried out over a cup of tea; they changed into their national dress so that I might take pictures, some of which now hang on the temple walls.1

  To thank them for their contribution, Pete sent the students in Sacramento a weaving made by one of the Cham women of the hamlet. He explained that blankets of this kind were used to decorate funeral platforms and were burned along with the casket and other ceremonial objects.

  Digging wells in hamlets engendered the goodwill that IVS considered fundamental to its mission in Vietnam. Successful projects also could produce unexpected outcomes. In one case, Pete found himself on the receiving end of a marriage proposal. In a letter subsequently published in an IVS annual report, he explained what had happened:

  The Cham people are one of Vietnam’s cultural minorities. Actually, the word “tribe” is a bit misleading. They seem to be as advanced as the Vietnamese, using whatever standards you might wish to apply — cleanliness, agricultural methods, etc.

  One difference is that theirs is a matriarchal society; the mother of the bride does the proposing, for instance.

  I learned this when one old “Ba,” whom I have occasion to meet frequently, asked me if I would be interested in marrying her daughter. I tried to be non-committal, but diplomatic, about it; but the next thing I knew, she and her daughter were standing in my yard, all dressed up, giggling and carrying on, with presents for me.2

  He elaborated on the marriage offer in a letter to Margo:

  The Cham lady whose blankets/tablecloths I help sell offered me her daughter in marriage. She brought it up one day in a casual sort of way and the next thing I knew, she brought the girl over for an introduction and was willing to pay for palm readers and someone to read my horoscope, which is the equivalent of our blood test, I guess. Think I’ll take a vacation soon.

  The amity between Pete and the Cham people in hamlets where he worked was lasting. He continued to visit them even after projects were completed. The friendships were preserved on celluloid, as both Pete and his visiting teammate John Sommer filmed smiling Cham weavers at their large wooden looms.

  More than forty years later, I would discover additional evidence of one such friendship when, by an extraordinary coincidence, I chanced to meet the granddaughter of the “old ‘Ba.’ ”

  Pete had thought he
would be teaching English in a classroom, but what constituted “teaching” in Vietnam went well beyond the classroom. The jobs of the

  seven IVS education “hamleters,” as they called themselves, varied considerably from province to province, depending on the problems they encountered, ideas they came up with, and the educational level of the people. While many villages were eager for education, others, such as Montagnard groups that had been relocated from the forest, did not know what a school was.

  The volunteers might identify hamlets likely to support a new school, distribute classroom supplies provided by the U.S. Operations Mission, or show teachers how to make geography globes from local materials. They might suggest a teaching technique based on knowledge and skills they had acquired “from having simply undergone the fine experience that is American education,” as one IVS annual report put it.3

  Several new schools had been constructed in Pete’s province under the Strategic Hamlet Program. In three months he had visited all but three, which were unreachable because of heavy rains.

  He had repaired one school’s water pump. He had demonstrated to the district education office staff how to use a new mimeograph machine and translated the instruction manual for them. Because there was a shortage of filmstrip projectors, he had made drawings of the filmstrips about science and health, mimeographed them, and distributed them to the schools. He had shown teachers how to make inexpensive ink from black dye and rounded up discarded medicine bottles to use as inkwells. In exchange for Vietnamese lessons, he was teaching English to the chief of hamlet education.

  He reported to the IVS office that he had made seventeen trips to ten different hamlets. Sometimes he went late in the day and returned in the evening because of competing claims for the Land Rover, which he shared with Chuck.

  The biggest education-related problem in Ninh Thuan was paying teachers’ salaries in the poorest hamlets. Each teacher received only six hundred piasters (just over eight dollars) a month. Government support was threatened by cutbacks, which would leave the people hard pressed to support a teacher. A program was devised to pay part of their salaries with food. The food would include U.S. surplus commodities such as bulgur wheat and corn, along with rabbits.

  Chuck, who had arrived in Vietnam before Pete, put his animal husbandry schooling to good use. Working with the provincial education chief and a local veterinarian, he hit upon the idea of raising rabbits as a food source. Funds to purchase the animals and build cages for them would be provided by the Office of Rural Affairs.

  Pete’s home movies of the rabbit project show him carrying wooden frames, followed by “after” shots of white rabbits installed in cages. Working without power tools, he built the hutches at the house in Phan Rang where Chuck had insisted they move. “I can’t figure why Chuck was so taken by the place,” Pete complained, describing craters filled with trash and a neighbor who threw her garbage over the fence into their yard. “I asked him why, and he said it was more like a farm than the other place. You can say that again.”

  They purchased thirty-three rabbits. Pete noted a couple of months later that the number had risen to forty-two. “Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits, rabbits,” he said. “They’re sort of cute, but the way I’m thinking now, they’d look even cuter in a frying pan.”

  A hamlet called Khanh Hoi asked Pete for financial assistance from IVS to build a tilapia fishpond. The community had been confused about the availability of self-help funds, which required the sign-off of three officials: the Rural Affairs representative, the U.S. military adviser for the province, and the Vietnamese province chief. Self-help funds had been misused under the Diem regime, but “since the coup and subsequent arrival of a fireball province chief, these misconceptions have been cleared up,” Pete’s monthly report stated. IVS would help with the fishpond. A portion of the proceeds from selling the farmed fish would help support the hamlet school and its teacher.

  The Rural Affairs self-help guide, published in Vietnamese and English, contained detailed instructions for preparing a tilapia fish pond, in a chapter with the caffeinated title “Would You Like to Have All of the Fish You Can Eat All of Your Life at No Cost Whatever?” In the tilapia, it said, nature had provided a delicious and inexhaustible food supply. The fish would multiply “constantly,” each pair reproducing as many as ten thousand young per year. Tilapia could be used in nuoc mam or eaten fresh, dried, pickled, or smoked. “All you have to do to receive this wonderful gift,” the manual promised, “is use the natural resources you have around you and apply a little of your own time and labor.”4

  A second project, capitalizing on Ninh Thuan’s existing fishing industry, was put forward by Rural Affairs man Bob Friedman. He wanted to get Chuck and Pete started on a portable fish smokehouse. They would build it in Hai Chu hamlet as a demonstration project, in the hope that other communities would adopt the idea. Smokehouses would provide fishermen with a way to preserve their catch for up to six months. Even though the people were not used to the taste of smoked fish or meat, Pete noted, “The RA man likes smoked fish, so that’s how it goes.”

  The Rural Affairs manual gave detailed instructions for building and operating a smokehouse. The project was outlined as an easy, low-cost solution to a problem — namely, that the comparatively slow dehydration rate for fish dried in the sun invited spoilage. Smoking a fish before sun-drying it would effect rapid dehydration. The manual assumed that the superiority of the method would trump flavor preferences. “Once you become accustomed to the smokey taste,” the manual stated, “you will probably like the flavor.”5

  Two weeks after the smokehouse was completed and introduced in the hamlet, Pete wrote home to ask how his movie of the demonstration had come out. On the way there, he had shot film perched on the tailgate of Friedman’s jeep, “holding on for dear life [and] twisting through midair, pulling the trigger of the camera with one hand and pawing for a handhold with the other.”

  The movie opens on the broad plain outside of Phan Rang. Craggy mountains and a barren landscape rush by. On a footpath beside the road, a woman wearing a conical hat carries two baskets suspended from either end of a bamboo pole. A settlement enclosed by tall bamboo bounces into view.

  Some eighty people, apparently the entire population of Hai Chu, have turned out, half of them children. They crowd around a table laid with several bowls of fish.

  The scene shifts to a shore and fishermen bringing in their catch. From his boat, one hands a basket of fish to a woman who has waded into the water to receive it with outstretched arms.

  Back in the hamlet, puffs of smoke rise amid the crowd. A Vietnamese army officer approaches, hand on hip, observing. Another man holds up a fish and explains something to the onlookers. The officer places a fish in the smoker.

  A serious Pete, the only American in view, enters the scene dressed in khakis and a short-sleeved white shirt. A leather camera case hangs at his hip. When he looks in the direction of the camera and whoever has trained it on him, the scene ends.

  Two years later, Friedman sent my parents a photograph of the same occasion. He explained that the fishermen of the village were very poor and had known nothing about the smoking process as a way to preserve fish. “I know you must have read much in recent months of commentary questioning the United States’ purpose and goals in Vietnam,” he continued. “About the worthiness of Pete’s work and objectives there can never be any doubt. He was dedicated to the improvement of the Vietnamese peasant, particularly the children, and as I think I’ve told you before, I consider him to be one of the most outstanding persons I’ve ever known.”

  Pete was becoming known in the province and had acquired two nicknames. Although Ong My Cau, “Mr. Tall American,” fit every American man, a group of elderly women marveled at Pete’s towering height. Their theory, it seemed, was that a person never stopped growing. “Since I’m already a quarter to a third again as tall as they are, at the tender age of 22, they exclaim ‘Ui-Cha!’ at the prospect of how tall
I’ll be at forty years.”

  The second nickname, Ong Mui Cau, was uniquely Pete’s. The same group of women remarked on “the beauty, the noble incline, the strength and grandeur” of his nose. They wondered aloud how Americans, with such large noses, managed to make love.

  But it was the children with whom the nickname stuck. “I’ll go out to a hamlet that I’ve never been to before, and the kids will come out running and screaming,” he said. “And then they take a second look and exclaim something to the effect, ‘Hey, it’s Mr. Big Nose.’ ”

  He began taking meals in a local restaurant, where the food was better than at home, and befriended a Vietnamese neighbor who enjoyed “taking a nip or two” of kumquat nectar in friendly company.

  Margo’s gift of Mark Twain books arrived. Pete was grateful for a touch of humor in his off-hours, even if a sergeant at the American military compound who was “suspicious of people who think and speak in polysyllables” had found him out.

  He was also reading Ian Fleming. The James Bond books were a letdown. “They’re such a blow to the psyche,” he told Margo, “when you read of luxury and suspense, etc. while sitting on your duff in the tropics.”

  Visiting dignitaries were coming through on inspection tours. In March 1964, a “storm of petty bureaucrats — otherwise called an Evaluating Committee” — arrived with grandiose plans for economic development. One of the projects they wanted to check on was the installation of irrigation windmills that would make use of Ninh Thuan’s coastal breezes. When one U.S.-engineered windmill had been put in place, its arms had promptly snapped off. Pete anticipated that the committee would recommend termination of the project, even though he was sure the windmill only needed thicker wood.