Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  The letter was the first public denunciation of the war by members of the American community in Vietnam.

  To avoid its being leaked to the American press corps in Saigon, Don aimed to get the letter to Washington as quickly as possible. He intended to follow correct procedure by delivering it to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s office for teletype transmission to the White House. He handed the letter to the U.S. mission coordinator at the embassy, who read it and asked him to return in two days.

  Don explained that he wished only to transmit the letter quickly, before the news outlets found out about it and reported it without the president’s foreknowledge. “A certain feeling of tenseness also contributed to our desire to send off the letter without what seemed to us unnecessary delays,” he remembered.10

  The mission coordinator left for forty-five minutes to speak privately with Ambassador Bunker. When he returned, he again said to come back in two days. He pointed out that criticizing government policy as a guest in Vietnam was unethical, and as Don later wrote:

  He added that such irresponsibility would make it impossible for us to get jobs in the Foreign Service. He said that the IVS transportation priorities would be upgraded. (We had complained two weeks earlier about our flight priority being lower than that of a colonel’s mistress.) In frustration, we tried to explain that our protest was not about technicalities. . . . But he interrupted, saying he did not want to discuss U.S. policy with us, that that was not an IVS concern. We gave him the letter and left in frustration and anger, asking that its contents be forwarded by the teletype to President Johnson. Five hours later, we made the letter public to the New York Times. The next morning, Ambassador Bunker agreed to see us.11

  In addition to the letter appearing on the front page of the New York Times, it was published by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Newsweek, and Christian Century.

  The New York Times and Washington Post ran a series of articles about the significance of the resignations. On September 25 a Times editorial concluded that Don, his three top aides, and his team, all of whom knew Vietnam intimately, had effectively issued a warning that the United States was losing the “other war” — the critical civilian effort — in Vietnam.12

  The IVS board hastily came together on September 21 to fill the positions vacated by the four who had resigned. They also authorized Executive Director Gardiner, a former USAID mission director, to leave immediately for Vietnam and mend relations with Ambassador Bunker.

  When the four protesters returned to the United States, more than seventy-five members of the Senate and House of Representatives asked them for a private or small group meeting. They were asked how our country could withdraw from Vietnam responsibly and end the war and the Vietnamese people’s suffering. They were urged by some to meet with President Johnson, but an interview with one of his aides made it clear that such a meeting would be a waste of time.

  Some advised them to meet with Vice President Humphrey. But recently, in the presence of officials who afterward repeated his words, he had called the resignations “one of the greatest disservices to the American effort in Viet Nam.”13 No meeting with Humphrey took place.

  At the suggestion of a junior State Department employee, appointments were scheduled with senior officials. When the protestors arrived, they waited two hours before being sent away because no one was available to meet with them. Secretary of State Rusk had said that their views did not reflect those of most Vietnamese. Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy claimed that the four lacked a proper perspective. More sympathetic, lower-level officials confided, however, that their perspective — because they had observed U.S. foreign policy at close range and were so close to the Vietnamese — was disturbing.

  In Saigon, friends and co-workers, including some who had distanced themselves from Americans, descended on the IVS office. Some of them admitted that they had heretofore suspected IVS of being a cover for the CIA. Others said they now knew that some Americans genuinely cared about the Vietnamese.

  After a brief return to Cornell, where he lectured and wrote from a base in the Southeast Asia program, Don made headlines again in 1970 when he helped expose prisoner abuse in a South Vietnamese jail.

  That year, President Richard Nixon sent a delegation of ten congressmen to Vietnam. They would visit detainees of the Saigon government in return for permission to see where the North Vietnamese were holding American prisoners of war.

  Don was working for the World Council of Churches. He accompanied the delegation as an interpreter and one who knew about jails. Many of his Vietnamese friends had been arrested.

  Tom Harkin, later to become a U.S. senator, was an aide to Congressman Neal Smith. According to Don, Harkin convinced two members of the delegation to look into accusations of torture in the Tiger Cages, built in 1939 by the French, where suspected enemies of South Vietnam were held. A prison adviser in the United States had likened it to a Boy Scout recreational camp.14 Don had heard otherwise and obtained drawings showing the location of a secret cellblock. As he recounted years later, what they found there was shocking:

  Using maps drawn by a former Tiger Cage prisoner, we diverted from the planned tour and hurried down an alleyway between two prison buildings. We found the tiny door that led to the cages between the prison walls. A guard inside heard the commotion outside and opened the door. We walked in.

  The faces of the prisoners in the cages below are still etched indelibly in my mind: the man with three fingers cut off; the man (soon to die) . . . whose skull was split open; and the Buddhist monk from Hue . . . I remember clearly the terrible stench from diarrhea and the open sores where shackles cut into the prisoners’ ankles. “Donnez-moi de l’eau” (Give me water), they begged.15

  Harkin photographed the Tiger Cages and published them in Life magazine. Almost four hundred detainees, men and women, were removed from the prison after a public outcry resulted.

  Don kept up with many of the former inmates. One of them read about the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau, and identified with the prisoners who remembered someone’s kindness to them in a time of dire need. I was traveling with Don in Vietnam in 1991 when he was asked to come to the desk of our hotel in Saigon. A man waiting there handed him a bottle of expensive American whiskey. He had heard Don was back in town, and he felt he owed him something.

  I stared at the masthead of the year-end appeal from the American Friends Service Committee. I remembered my parents mentioning Don’s affiliation with AFSC. He had kept in touch with them, even visiting them in Oklahoma City while I was away at college.

  Although they liked Don, my mother disapproved of his opposition to the war. Since Pete’s death, she had become a staunch backer of our country’s policy in Vietnam. She also defended President Nixon and Vice President Agnew (even when they left office in disgrace), and the National Guard troops who shot and killed students during an antiwar demonstration at Kent State University (when I too was in college and protesting the war).

  Seeing the AFSC letter, I hoped I might locate Don if I wrote to the organization. I sent a note requesting his address, signing it with my married name. I mentioned that Don and my brother had worked together in Vietnam. Instead of replying to me, the recipient at AFSC forwarded the note to Don.

  He wrote back a couple of weeks later. He said he tried to keep up with people he had known in Vietnam, but he didn’t recognize my surname.

  This time, I wrote a letter. I said my mother had taken Pete’s death very hard and I didn’t know much about what had happened to him. I wondered what his political views had been. I mentioned my opposition to the war in my college years.

  It was the first time I had spoken so openly to anyone but my sisters about Pete or my family’s reaction to his death. The subject had been all but taboo. To this day I can’t explain why I chose that time and that person to break the silence.

  A week later Don wrote to me again:


  Getting your letter brings Pete very close to my mind . . . his smoking fish in Phan Rang, working on a windmill to bring salt water to dry in the salt flats, practicing Vietnamese with me. We were very close and spent many hours just in relaxed talk.

  None of us are ever very good at the “why.” But we all did foolish things back then. Pete was driving in an area where he wasn’t known, where he had never worked, and was caught in an ambush. We were always safer in the communities where we lived and worked — people understood what we were doing. I think, tragically, Pete was misunderstood for a soldier. He became one of the innocent people — more than a million non-combatants who were killed.

  I suspect that Pete would have been a part of our letter to Pres. Johnson protesting the war. Those of us who drafted that letter were his closest friends — John Sommer, Gene Stoltzfus, Willi Meyers, Don Ronk. We were all very close and would not have sent the letter until we all agreed.

  We have all continued in work for Peace in our various ways — John Sommer is a dean at the Exp[eriment] for International Living (and on [the] IVS board); Gene is a Mennonite minister working on urban issues in Chicago (also on [the] IVS board) and is about to go to the Philippines for 6 months to study issues of Peace there for the Quakers; Willi teaches agricultural economics at Iowa State; and Don Ronk is in Hong Kong (I think) editing a magazine on Asia.

  I’m still working on peace issues. I mentioned the Vietnam curriculum. I’ve done quite a bit on Korea too — edited a poetry book, went to the north as a soundperson for ABC-TV. I’ve been back to Vietnam since the war — saw some of the windmills Pete built still standing and still pumping salt water into the salt flats to dry. . . .

  I have been much involved in the religious peace movement. . . . I was employed in Vietnam by World Council of Churches in 1968 – 71 until I got kicked out. . . .

  My love to you, your family, and all of Pete’s family. If ever I can be of any help, let me know. And please feel free to write — it means a lot to me to keep this contact.

  Peace and love,

  Don

  In my early thirties at this time, I was a wife with a one-year-old child, living halfway across the country from my parents and sisters. The experience of being a mother was a revelation to me. I had discovered, in the bond with my little girl, a depth of feeling and a capacity for love that were new to me. My days often consisted of taking long walks, pushing my daughter in her stroller along the bike path and sidewalks of my new home, Sonoma, California.

  I studied conversational French with a group of women friends. I read books by and about the psychologist Carl Jung. I tried to improve my cooking.

  I had not learned my way around the kitchen from my parents. My practical father, a minister’s son and one of six children, was by far the better cook, but he flew solo. He said that anyone who could read could cook, a veiled criticism of my mother. She was an avid reader, but not of recipes. After Pete was gone and I was the only child left at home, the three of us took our meals catch-as-catch-can. Often we ate dinner barely speaking, while we watched television. We went through a lot of frozen chicken potpies, canned beef slices in gravy, and cheap cheeseburgers from a place called Quick’s, to which my mother would dispatch me with a few dollars. When I got to college, I was the only person who loved the cafeteria food. Eventually I taught myself to cook. If I was going to eat well, I had to fend for myself.

  And then, in 1985, a year without marked highs or lows, and with no deliberation on my part, I had opened the door to something remarkable. I had found my way to Don Luce, the first of many individuals with whose help I would retrieve my lost connection with Pete.

  On a whim I had reached out to Don, and he had met my curiosity with kindness. In doing so, he had dispelled a feeling that my questions were illegitimate and offensive. I didn’t know it, but I had embarked on what was to be a redemptive, even miraculous journey.

  Still, something he had said troubled me. If Pete had acted foolishly and gone somewhere he shouldn’t have, had he invited his fate? If his youthful over-confidence had led him to take an unnecessary risk and drive where it wasn’t safe, his death seemed even more of a waste.

  Something else Don had written hardened me toward my mother. She said I had betrayed my brother’s memory, and although I didn’t believe her, I hadn’t known how to refute her. By guessing that Pete would have had a hand in writing the letter to President Johnson, Don “proved” to me that my mother was wrong and I was right. Her archconservatism seemed to be a way of insisting that Pete had died both for his country and for the U.S. mission in Vietnam. I didn’t think Pete was motivated by patriotism of that kind, and Don’s letter confirmed it. I was years away from empathizing with my mother, even though I now understood the limitless love of a parent for a child. She had lost her firstborn. Yes, she could be rigid, but I couldn’t see then how like her I was.

  Don said that my letter had brought Pete close to mind. I thought that Don was as close to Pete as I would ever come. I wondered if Pete’s life would have taken a course like his.

  I didn’t guess what Don would do next. Unbeknownst to me, he shared my letter with two more of Pete’s friends. Without my realizing it, these three men would launch me on a quest. Before I reached the end, I would find more of Pete’s friends than I could count.

  John Sommer was raised in a politically moderate household in Montclair, New Jersey. Although tolerant and open minded, his parents shared with other Americans of that era a fear of communism. His mother organized the basement in case there was a nuclear attack.

  For his first three years with IVS, John felt that U.S. policy overall, if not its implementation, was right for Vietnam. In February 1965, John’s parents came to visit. His father opposed U.S. policy, and John remembers, “I thought one of my objectives would be to show him we were doing the right thing. By the time he left, the measure of progress I had made was that he was ambivalent. It was when the U.S. military started coming in such big numbers, and later on in 1965 when Pete was killed and we saw the negative repercussions of the U.S. troop involvement, that my thinking really began to change.”16

  In 1967, his first tour with IVS behind him, John returned to Vietnam for four months to lead a USAID-sponsored internship program. It was intended “to convince college students of the righteousness of U.S. policy.” He anticipated that the program would produce the opposite effect, and it did.

  During that time, he had many conversations with IVSers about their role and what action they might take. He would have willingly signed the letter to President Johnson, had he not already returned to the United States by the time it was published.

  He accompanied Senator Edward Kennedy to Vietnam as a consultant to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Refugees and subsequently graduated with a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He passed the foreign service exams and was offered an assignment in Vietnam, which he declined. He held positions with the Peace Corps, Ford Foundation, and USAID before becoming dean of the Experiment in International Living’s School for International Training, in Vermont. That’s where he was on New Year’s Eve of 1985, when he sat down at his typewriter and wrote to me.

  Don Luce has sent me a copy of your letter to him, which I was very moved to read. He sent it because your brother Pete and I were good friends in Viet-Nam, and indeed before that when we were both students at Wesleyan, class of ’63. It is hard for me, too, to believe that it’s now 20 years since his death. I remember so vividly being called to the post office in Hue, where I was then living, to pick up a cable, the cable with the news, and the staggering disbelief, overwhelming sadness, and I think anger.

  Pete, Gene Stoltzfus, and I had in a way a special relationship, being in the same “strategic hamlet school program” in adjoining provinces. During our first two years in country, Pete was in Phan Rang, with Gene in the province to the north and me in the one to the west; we’d get together occasionally at on
e or the other place, enjoying the cool mountain air in my Dalat or the beach in Phan Rang or Nha Trang. We’d share our experiences in similar work, and, for sure, our frustrations. I remember one visit in particular — in part because it’s recorded on film (movie) which I’d love to show you some time — when Pete took me to some Cham villages; the magnificently colored Cham blanket that I bought there hangs behind me at this very moment as I write this letter, as it has somewhere in my home or office almost ever since.

  I did not know of your mother’s especially hard reaction to Pete’s death; I always wanted to meet your parents, but geography intervened. On the other hand, I don’t know that his letters would offer much insight into how he “felt about the war.” As you’ll recall from Don’s and my Unheard Voices, we were not in those days politically active or perhaps even very conscious. That only came later, really in 1966. Pete’s tragic death made us in some ways more emotionally involved, and dubious about our policies, as well. For many of the frustrations to which I referred above had to do with the sorry state of the Saigon government which seemed a sorry ally indeed, and one unlikely to be very effective in achieving a non-communist solution for Viet-Nam. Speculating on what Pete’s position might have been a year later is like speculating on what would have been different had John F. Kennedy lived longer. On the one hand, I think Pete was a bit more conservative than some of us, but on the other hand I find it hard to believe he could have felt differently than the rest of us, as one saw increasingly, beginning around 1966, what was happening to that poor country and its people. Indeed, I suspect he would have been proud of your position protesting the war in those later years.