Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  But the bureaucrats were “thinking in terms of canning factories for this province,” he complained. “When you think of the planning, the staffs of technicians, the preparations that go into economic development programming in the States, and then you see these Committees come in and in two days plan a year’s budget or give the province a canning factory, you can see why some people don’t appreciate foreign aid.” He decided to look around for a way to make inexpensive windmills from local wood.

  Pete reported that U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Secretary of State Dean Rusk (held over by Johnson from the Kennedy administration), and Vietnam’s new head of state had all recently stopped in Ninh Thuan:

  Last weekend the clouds parted and Cabot Lodge, Dean Rusk, and Premier Khanh descended, God-like. It was really quite a show. There must’ve been sixteen helicopters and five huge transport planes out on the airstrip. Undoubtedly unnerved the Vietcong up on the mountain considerably. Their croplands are visible from the airport.

  The reason for the visit was to show Rusk one of the most peaceful provinces in the country and the potential for social and economic development which the government can exploit, thus winning back the hearts of the people (provided Vietnam gets enough foreign aid).

  Describing the same visit in another letter, Pete said the trio had “dropped in for some pep talks the other day.” The people accompanying them had done “quite a snow job on Rusk,” he noted. “He sure must be a tired, overweight, gullible old man.”

  The fact-finding visits by high-level officials were precipitated by Vietnam’s increasingly rocky political situation. In April 1964 Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara advised President Johnson that twenty-two of forty-three provinces in South Vietnam were at least half-controlled by the Vietcong. Furthermore, he said, the population was apathetic and the government’s position was weakening. He suggested that American dependents be sent home, that a U.S. combat unit be posted to Saigon for added security, and that U.S. officers be assigned overall command of the war.6

  That same month, Ford Motor Company — which McNamara had joined in 1946 and led as president before joining the Kennedy cabinet — introduced one of the most popular models in its history, the Mustang.

  As a civilian attached to an NGO in the midst of an escalating war, Pete, like other IVSers, had a unique vantage point compared with most Americans. He saw U.S. policy as it was developing in Vietnam, not from the lofty position of the war’s architects. He was an eyewitness to the effect of shifting political currents on daily life — his own, and those of his teammates, his Vietnamese colleagues and friends, and the U.S. servicemen he knew.

  In February 1964 the country observed the lunar new year holiday. The “IVS Handbook” explained its significance: “For the three days of Tet, the Vietnamese bid goodbye to the old year and welcome the new by visiting their friends, wearing new clothes, and exchanging gifts in a festival atmosphere that would rival Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter rolled into one.”7 But even Vietnam’s biggest celebration was tempered by the simmering conflict. In Pete’s case, exploding firecrackers tossed into the back of his Land Rover were less festive than unnerving.

  The same date that he wrote home about Tet, the Beatles appeared live for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show. I didn’t watch, because my parents didn’t like rock and roll. At the bus stop the next morning, though, I listened with interest to the debate about who was cuter, Paul or Ringo.

  Pete heard the Beatles for the first time over Radio Australia. “Doesn’t sound so bad if you’re in the right frame of mind,” he said.

  Four little girls had recently been killed in a Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama. Pete followed what he knew only as “the civil rights revolution” in articles from the Saturday Evening Post, Look, and Life magazines. The news of violence back home was distressing.

  He worried about the emergence of the conservative Republican senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, as a presidential candidate. “If Goldwater is elected,” he wrote, “I will not be able to say with any pride at all that I am an American. . . . It will seem to me that the American society has chosen an immoderate, inarticulate, unplanned political road which is horrifying to my ethical and moral feelings.”

  Meanwhile, there wasn’t much new in Phan Rang besides the arrival of a new IVS stationmate. Jim Hunt was a Cornell graduate and even an Alpha Delt there. Hunt had evidently taken the military situation to heart and was stockpiling hand grenades, a cannon, boxes of ammunition, and a Thompson submachine gun. Pete admitted to feeling, by comparison, “rather country squire-ish armed only with my modest automatic rifle.” Even so, he had taken the roof off of his Land Rover and folded down the windscreen to gain a free field of fire.

  “I’ll probably never ever see a vc,” he told Margo, “but the possibility is disturbing. For that reason things get a little tense sometimes and mail means a lot.” Letters from our grandmother were especially comforting: “Nana writes every so often and in her old age she only writes beautiful thoughts, sometimes little excerpts from the Book of Psalms, which I never think about until she brings them to my attention. After reading one of her letters, I always feel very much at peace inside.”

  If the danger of life in a war zone was real, it did not impede Pete’s sense of adventure. “Really weird being over here in the middle of all this,” he said in February 1964. His timing in removing the roof of the Land Rover had been unfortunate, however. That weekend, he and Gene Stoltzfus were caught in a downpour while driving to Dalat:

  It started raining at the foot of the mountains and didn’t stop all the way up. It rained so hard the seats were in puddles and water streamed off the tops of our noses and trickled into our ears because of the slipstreak of wind.

  Well, you should have been with us on the trip back. A beautiful clear day with the wind moaning in the pine trees. On the descent, we could see over the Phan Rang plain all the way to the coast. The clouds scudded over and their shadows seemed to race us down the mountain. It was sort of a wild ride because we lost time on the curves, but it was wonderful and exhilarating, especially when we caught up with a cloud.

  While the well digging and smokehouse building continued, Pete also scrounged a film projector and auxiliary power unit from Saigon. With the equipment he found, he began showing films in remote hamlet schools.

  Man alive. The kids will come in, snap to attention, yank off their hats, bow to you, then proceed to knock themselves pot over teakettle vying for position. They’ll stick their fingers up into the beam of light to make images on the screen while the movie is going, and the old men will swat the kids indiscriminately with long bamboo rods. . . .

  [It] always turns into a sweaty brawl, half the village crammed into a room the size of our living room. This creates quite a ventilation problem; Lord knows one of these chaps is hard enough to take at close range. I usually wind up sitting on the floor in the back row, where it’s coolest.

  One of the films, produced by the U.S. Information Service, explained a method for smoking fish. Pete was showing the movie one evening when he realized he was hemmed in by rifle-bearing members of the local militia. “Looked up to find myself surrounded by bodyguards, which was somehow not as reassuring as you might think,” he said. Before he left to return to Phan Rang, the police carefully examined his vehicle for bombs and hand grenades. The reason became clear two days later, when Pete learned that the Vietcong had distributed rat poison to villagers and were encouraging them to use it on Americans.

  Pete’s interpreter, Kim, was growing nervous about security. Since the Vietcong had “raided Kontum, bombed the Kin-do theater, and hand-grenaded the Saigon ballpark, he’s taken to locking the bedroom and front door behind him,” Pete wrote. “Nonetheless, he leaves the window open for fresh air.”

  Such incongruities were part of daily life. Amid attack scares and mounting deaths of American servicemen and Vietnamese acquaintances, Pete was feeling more and more comfort
able in his new home. “I guess I’m really getting entrenched in the routine over here,” he realized. “I can hardly remember what some of the luxuries are like, back in the States.”

  He began “infiltrating” the local Boy Scouts, trying to enlist their participation with projects such as digging wells and repairing school buildings “in the true spirit of scouting and the country’s revolutionary struggle against the Viet Cong.” The scouting program lacked focus, and Pete, a former scout himself, believed that service-oriented projects were more meaningful than singing, practicing skits, drilling in figure eight formations, and saluting.

  In April 1964 many Americans back home watched the Academy Awards on television. That year, for the first time, an African-American man, Sidney Poitier, won the best-actor Oscar, for his performance in Lilies of the Field.

  That same month, Pete spent a lazy Sunday afternoon napping under a coconut tree on a French rubber plantation. Nearby, the Boy Scouts practiced their semaphore signals.

  “They’re the salutingest bunch of young men I’ve ever laid eyes on,” he wrote. “Makes me tired to watch all the senseless, wasted energy they put into saluting and campfire dancing. I’m on a big, frothing ‘public duty’ kick these days. It’s a shame the way these people are so relaxed about their national situation.”

  SEVEN

  Never “Very Good at the ‘Why’ ”

  T

  he recurring dreams began eight or nine years after Pete was gone.

  I was living in western New York State and working for the Corning Museum of Glass. After college, I had not known what to do next and I had very little ambition, so when a friend from high school asked me to marry him, I had said yes.

  He took a job as an engineer with Corning Glass Works, which in those days did not employ married couples in professional-level positions. I volunteered as a docent at the museum until, a few weeks later, I was offered a menial job on the curatorial staff.

  The company had built a plant to manufacture ceramic liners for catalytic converters. The “catcons” were required for new cars to comply with an Environmental Protection Agency regulation aimed at reducing toxic emissions. Because the technology was new and Corning was a glass, not a ceramics, company, equipment breakdowns occurred frequently. My husband and I lived not far from the plant, so he received most of the middle-of-the-night phone calls. Our sleep was often interrupted by someone demanding that he come out and fix the huge machines, which clogged easily with ceramic dust.

  When the phone rang, he awoke cursing. He left the house and returned two or three hours later, his clothing spattered with caked white clay. When

  emergency trips to the plant became routine, he stopped washing his clothes and pulled on the same ones night after night, like a uniform.

  Perhaps it was because we went to bed in suspense, wondering if our sleep would be disturbed. Or because on nights when he left, I was half-listening for him to return. Or because subconsciously, I was ready to start grieving for Pete. Whatever the reason, I began to dream that Pete had come home.

  In one version of the dream, he returned and said he had been in Vietnam all this time and had not died. In another, he had died but returned from the dead. Either way, I felt overjoyed to see him again. Then the dream would end and I would wake up sobbing.

  Thirty years later, the dream was still recurring. One morning in December 2004, nine months after Pete’s letters turned up, I dreamed again that he was back in Oklahoma City. He had come home with a colleague, a matronly woman wearing what looked like a Salvation Army uniform. The two of them were employed in relief work in another country and were in the United States only briefly. I had been out to dinner with a friend and missed him. He was going on to New York to see Margo. I realized that I could still see him. I could fly to New York! I could call him on the phone!

  What would I do with all of his letters and papers that I had collected? I would tell him I had organized them for him. I was glad I had done it.

  On January 9, 2006, I woke for the first time from a dream of Pete coming home and didn’t feel sad. That week, I had seen my daughter off to college after the holidays, gone in for my annual mammogram, and had dinner with friends. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Pete had been gone forty years.

  My first marriage ended after six years and I married again, in 1982.

  My new husband was involved in ecumenical church work, and we received a lot of financial appeals in the mail. One day in November 1985 a letter came from the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization. I remembered hearing that Don Luce had been affiliated with AFSC after he resigned his position with IVS and left Vietnam.

  When Don went to Southeast Asia in 1958 as an early volunteer with IVS, he was no radical. Raised on a small dairy farm, he had majored in agriculture at the University of Vermont and earned a master’s degree at Cornell. His childhood ambition was to have a job working with people he liked, who also liked him.

  He was sent to Ban Me Thuot, in the mountains. With his teammates and Vietnamese co-workers, he introduced a new variety of sweet potatoes that grew well there.

  During his first year in country, he spent many hours visiting people in their homes and practicing his Vietnamese on them. One evening his hosts brought out some special rice cakes.1 He asked what the occasion was. They told him he would know soon. Don had observed that the Vietnamese love a mystery. They had a saying that a person without a secret was a nobody. The following day, he learned that one of the guests had “gone out into the jungle” — the euphemism for joining the Vietcong. “And I was very confused,” Don said many years later, “because this was a very good person and why was a good person joining the Communists.”2

  Don’s early political biography was like that of many IVSers. Conservative in his outlook, he looked up to John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state and a staunch anticommunist. He did not question U.S. foreign policy and accepted the legitimacy of the Saigon government.3 It was not an ideology, however, but his personal relationships with Vietnamese that, over nine years’ time, changed Don from someone whose ambition had been to like and be liked by people into a peace activist who wanted to help others even if it turned people against him.

  After his first assignment with IVS, he was named associate chief-of-party. A year later, he was appointed to the organization’s top post in Vietnam. He expanded what had been an agricultural program, adding education volunteers. By 1967, the year he resigned, the team was 160 strong.

  When President Diem and his brother Nhu were deposed in 1963, Don hoped that the people’s faith in the new government meant they could defeat the Vietcong. Before long, however, a succession of coups d’état, greater U.S. involvement in the country, and the arrival of American combat troops led Don to view things differently.

  Then a friend and team member was killed. In the first Vietnam War memoir written by Americans, Viet Nam: The Unheard Voices, Don and his co-author, John Sommer, would write about the changes augured by the first death of an IVSer, in 1965:

  Late in that year, Pete Hunting, a good friend and outstanding IVS team leader for the Mekong Delta area, was riddled with bullets in a Viet Cong ambush along the road. Our earlier, almost blithe nonchalance about the war was deeply shaken by his death. Vietnamese friends were equally distressed. Since we were always much influenced by the attitudes of the Vietnamese with whom we lived and worked, we noted their shifts carefully. Some, of course, stiffened in their hatred of the Viet Cong. Others came to resent the Americans.4

  The attitudes of the team also shifted. When USAID moved to divert the focus of IVS away from village and hamlet work toward large-scale development plans, Don resisted. The IVS board was pressured to let its young leader go, but instead stood by him.

  In the summer of 1967, Don took home leave and left his associate Gene Stoltzfus in charge. Gene absorbed the growing discontent among volunteers, who complained that the war was impeding their wo
rk. Some were becoming impatient.5

  Meanwhile, Don was in Washington explaining his team’s frustrations to the IVS board: as the war drove villagers from their homes, volunteers were expected to help the refugees. In doing so, they were tacitly supporting the displacement of the rural population. Some team members asked if teaching English to Vietnamese wasn’t “Americanizing” them. The board passed a resolution supporting IVS’s independence and its commitment to the people of Vietnam.6

  Don returned to Saigon in July and convened a meeting of his entire team. They voiced their concerns, but no decisive action was taken.

  The following month, Gene took a vacation in Laos. As he watched American planes in the sky heading toward Vietnam, and then heard their bombs exploding in the distance, he thought, I’m going to do something about this.7

  He returned to Saigon and submitted his resignation to Don, who, as Gene remembers, said “something like ‘If you go, I do too.’ ”8

  As word spread among the team, other volunteers wanted to follow suit. They were discouraged from leaving, however, because the plan of action was to alter U.S. policy. If it worked, IVS would be needed in Vietnam.

  In the end, four resigned: Don, Gene, Willi Meyers, and Don Ronk. But on September 19, 1967, forty-five of their teammates joined them in signing a protest letter addressed to President Johnson.

  The letter began with the signatories identifying themselves as IVS volunteers working in agriculture, education, and community development. They felt compelled to say what they had seen and heard in Vietnam and to speak on behalf of the too little understood, too often unheard voices of the Vietnamese. “It is to you, Mr. President, that we address ourselves,” they stated.9

  They called the war self-defeating and “an overwhelming atrocity.” Further, they observed anti-Americanism growing in proportion to the escalating violence. They recommended five actions: de-escalation of the war; an end to the spraying of herbicides; the cessation of bombing in both North and South; recognition of the National Liberation Front and representation of the NLF in peace talks; and the establishment of an international peace commission, with agreement by the United States to accept its recommendations.