Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  As for the circumstances of Pete’s death, Don has probably told you what any of us knows — the impression that he simply was at the wrong place at the wrong time, apparently in front of a military convoy for which the ambushers were waiting. I do know that when I flew down to Saigon for his memorial service, it was a very moving time for all of us — the first time most of us had lost a peer and a friend in the course of a cause in which we believed, that of a better life for the Vietnamese people. After his death, I was asked to take over his job as team leader for the southern part of the country, in addition to the Hue region, and with it the vehicle which he had been driving that last time through the verdant rice paddies of the Mekong delta.

  I could go on, but perhaps this is enough for now. . . . I thank you for provoking by your letter the memories which are flooding through me as I write. I hope we will have a chance to meet one day. Meanwhile, please share my good wishes with your sisters and parents.

  Sincerely,

  John

  The other person who replied to my letter to Don was Gene Stoltzfus. He and Pete were the best of buddies. They bought Hondas and planned to drive them across Europe after their IVS contracts expired. They also talked about staying on in Vietnam as employees of the U.S. Operations Mission and going skiing in Japan — “despite the fact that he’s from the flatlands and doesn’t know the least about skiing,” Pete wrote. “Not that I’d be any help to him in that matter.”

  Gene grew up in a Mennonite community in Ohio. His father was a minister and bishop in the church. He attended Mennonite schools, including high school and Goshen College.

  He arrived in Saigon a pacifist. With Pete, John, and the other 1963 recruits, his introduction to Vietnam included a month of language training in My Tho. His first Sunday there, Gene was walking to the city’s athletic fields when he saw helicopters transporting wounded Vietnamese soldiers.17

  Both Gene and Pete took home leave in the summer of 1965 and returned to Vietnam as team leaders. Gene’s base was Nha Trang. Pete moved south to the Mekong Delta.

  As the war intensified, IVSers struggled to maintain their organization’s autonomy and distance themselves from the U.S. mission. But ultimately, Gene concluded, “To be genuine, we had to speak out more forcefully about the war and about the American presence.”18

  In the fall of 1967, the midnight oil burned at the IVS house in Saigon as Gene and others drafted the letter to President Johnson. “Some people in the office were unhappy [about what we were doing], and there was always so much to do during the day, so we worked at night,” he recalls. “Everyone pitched in. Some people were writing drafts of the letter. Some people were running the mimeograph machine. People were talking about who would take this letter around to show the others.”19

  They agreed that everyone on the team should see the letter so no one would feel left out. They caught rides around the country on Air America — which belonged to “the three dirty letters,” the CIA, Gene said. Some but not all supported the protest. The group was “very highly polarized at the time of the letter.”

  Gene took the letter downtown and spoke personally about it to Bernard Weinraub of the New York Times. Weinraub suggested holding it until the coming Monday, when there would be more room on the front page than on a Sunday. The Times was the only paper the group approached. With the letter’s publication, other news organizations descended on the IVS house. Don took some of the interviews and Gene handled others, telling himself, Just act like this is routine.

  After returning to the United States, Gene gave “about a thousand speeches.” He earned a master’s degree in international relations from American University and returned to seminary to finish the studies he had begun before going to Vietnam. He and his wife documented human rights abuses in the Philippines before settling in Chicago and founding a peace and justice group. In 1988, Gene became the first director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, a pacifist activist group.

  A few months after I wrote to Don, Gene wrote to me.

  Your letter to Don Luce caught up with me via John Sommer just before I left for the Philippines in January of this year and I have been carrying it in my case ever since. I was deeply moved by your letter and the story of your life. Peter was very important to me. In 1963 I went to Viet Nam together with him, studied language together and spent many many happy days and evenings together with him. I could recount so many stories of rides on motorcycles, youthful dreams, adventures and long long discussions about Viet Nam and our role in the emerging war. At the time of his death I considered Pete among my closest friends. Only two days before his death he took me to the airport in Saigon for a trip to Nha Trang where I was living at that time. Pete was a soul brother.

  The moment when I learned of his death is as clear as yesterday. I had gone to the USAID compound in Nha Trang where a cable from Saigon was waiting for me. It was handed to me by the duty officer. I was crushed. Although, during the previous two years I had come to see the face of death, with Peter’s passing it touched me at the Center. I caught the first flight to Saigon and wept the whole way. I helped to arrange the funeral and desperately tried to find meaning in all of this. In that moment I felt the tragedy of Viet Nam and went on from there to know more deeply the pain that my brothers and sisters in Viet Nam were facing daily. Peter’s passing was a watershed for me because it opened a new center to my emotional life which allowed me to go from that point and make what at that time were hard decisions about the war. As you know later several of us resigned, returned to the States and turned all of our energy to working against the us death machine. In a way I always felt that I had a special responsibility to work for peace because of what happened to Peter. Until today I still tell the story of Peter when it seems appropriate and would love to talk with you about your brother.

  As my work in the Peace movement grew I found myself reaching deeper for spiritual strength and depth. In 1973 I returned to seminary and completed studies, worked for some years with the church, was married to Dorothy Friesen and later spent several years in the Philippines. In the Philippines I once again saw the depth of injustice and how far our world has gone from the way of shalom. When we returned to the States we settled in Chicago and have founded a little peace and justice group with which I am now working. I’ll enclose a few of our materials.

  The writing of this letter has moved me over a long period of my life — most of my adult experience. I have little doubt that Peter would have been with us all the way in our peace actions. At the time of his death his thinking was moving much like our own. It had not yet jelled for any of us yet but we knew within ourselves that something very big was amiss. I hadn’t known of your mother’s continuing pain over Peter’s death. I visited your parents briefly when I was on a speaking tour in Okla. City in 1968 and that was a very special time for me.

  I hope that there will be a time when we can meet. Thank you for sharing your feelings with Don and through him with John and through John with me. You can be proud of Peter’s memory and live a full life with the beautiful knowledge that he continues to inspire many of us. My prayers and good wishes are with you.

  Sincerely,

  Gene Stoltzfus

  Don and John had asked me to give their regards to my parents and sisters.

  I didn’t.

  Why didn’t I?

  I had dropped my guard when I wrote to Don. Our exchange of letters, along with John’s and Gene’s replies, felt very personal and private. I wasn’t used to talking with my sisters about feelings so unexplored and intense.

  More than that, I was sure my sisters would react strongly to the letters from Pete’s friends. I had been on the receiving end of my mother’s powerful emotions, and I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of theirs. I had a strong aversion to people who did not control their emotions. I overcontrolled mine.

  Although Cis, Holly, and I had begun to talk about Pete together, we still trod carefully in our parents’ presence. The subject
of what had happened was still off limits. I didn’t even consider telling my parents I was in touch with Pete’s friends.

  Most of all, I considered Don’s, John’s, and Gene’s letters to be mine. My sisters would have loved to read them, but I had taken the initiative. I didn’t have to share what belonged to me. So I hoarded the letters and didn’t mention them to Cis and Hol. Unconsciously, I was reenacting my mother’s possessiveness of Pete, for which I had not forgiven her.

  There had been no avowals from Don, Gene, or John that we must meet. But within a year of hearing from John and Gene, I met them.

  Gene came to the San Francisco Bay Area in the fall of 1987. On the campus of San Francisco Theological Seminary, I met a big, tall, brown-eyed man. We walked and talked nonstop as twilight turned to night. I told him about Cis’s psychic friend who said that Pete was helping people in Central America. Gene said he wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where he was. Before we parted, he said that talking to me was like talking to Pete.

  A few months later, John’s work brought him to California and we met at a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco. It was easy to recognize him, because he was as slender and black haired as in his author photo of twenty-some years past. I had brought my copy of Viet Nam: The Unheard Voices, which he inscribed, “For Jill, in fond memory of your brother and my friend Pete, on the happy occasion of our first meeting.” As he started to write the date, he looked up and remarked that it was April 30, 1988, the thirteenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

  I had yet to meet Don. One steamy night three years later, under a street light in Bangkok, he would shake my hand and gaze so deep into my eyes that it seemed he was looking at me but seeing someone else.

  EIGHT

  “At War in Another Year”

  B

  angkok is a dream world — telephones, television, transportation, skyscrapers, ice cream and coffee shops, banks — egad.”

  Pete was writing from Thailand, where he had flown in May 1964 for a week of vacation. He stayed in a guesthouse run by Christian missionaries. It was inexpensive, quiet, and peaceful. “Didn’t realize how much I’d relaxed,” he wrote, “until a helicopter flew over the house and I tensed up suddenly like one of Pavlov’s dogs.”

  He liked the familial atmosphere and civility of the guesthouse. “I never was overly religious, particularly as regards the ritual, but it’s so nice to have grace before the meal and to talk to dedicated and curious people,” he said. “Sure beats a hotel. I feel so renewed, refreshed.”

  One evening, he attended church. “I could almost feel your presence there beside me,” he told Sue.

  Pete had not realized how stressful life was in Vietnam until he reached Thailand. No one was throwing grenades or waging war against anyone else. He could be “uncontroversial” for a change. Saigon and Bangkok were as different as night and day: “a foggy night and a sunny day.”

  Bangkok was so modern, it seemed like a city back home. It made Saigon look “dirty French provincial,” he noted. “A fellow could really get to dislike the French after a tour in Vietnam.”

  It was not only the cities that were different, but also the students. The Thai youth he met went out of their way to show him Buddhist temples and other sights. Compared with the Vietnamese, they were hard working, aggressive, and unpretentious. One young man was studying law while also waiting on tables, selling fertilizer, and collecting bills. If a counterpart in South Vietnam existed, Pete didn’t know about it.

  Even the frogs, with their loud chorusing, were a revelation. “They must be bigger than flowerpots,” he wrote. “One gave me a good start last night, perched on the tree limb somewhere outside my window.”

  He spent his last night of vacation in a hotel, courtesy of World Airways. His flight had been delayed when the airplane was found to have landing gear problems. He took a long soak in the bathtub and watched the movie Tom Jones.

  Pete would not have sprung for a hotel room. He had pinched pennies the entire week, forgoing cabs and riding local buses. “It was touch and go at first, not speaking the language, not knowing my location, not too clear on my destination, nor aware of where the bus was going,” he wrote. After several hours of haphazard sightseeing, he stopped for a draught in a pub and someone gave him a city map.

  An attack of miserliness overtook him and he left Bangkok early. He had spent a lot of money on a set of bronze flatware for twelve. He bought it against the distant day when he would get married. “It ought to be good and black by then,” he said.

  Ever since his undergraduate days, Pete had worried about money. Our family was middle class, and he had attended college without a scholarship. He felt guilty about using so much of the family’s resources. His letters from Wesleyan frequently mentioned expenditures such as the high cost of eating or replacing his worn-out shoes. He wanted to apply for financial aid, but Mom refused to disclose the personal information required on the application form.

  His letters from Vietnam continued the financial-pinch theme. Early in 1964, he began asking my parents to withdraw part of his salary from a bank in the States and send it to him via the IVS office in Washington. In addition to receiving a modest living allowance paid in piasters, IVSers earned a salary that was deposited to an account back home. The sum was so meager that it fell below Internal Revenue Service reporting requirements. Pete referred to it as “my (guffaw) ‘salary.’ ”

  He had been with IVS about seven months when he asked for seventy dollars. “It’s a contribution to my own work,” he explained to my parents. “I’ve found the best way to get something done around here is to do it yourself with your own fund to draw from. It won’t become a habit, however. I want it to build a hand-operated drilling rig with which I’m going to dig a lot of wells for the schools in the province. No sweat; just please send the money as soon as possible.”

  It did become a habit. He had been listening to the Beatles over Australian radio — “She Loves You” was climbing the charts — and wanted to visit Australia before heading home unless by then he was too broke. He had been digging more wells, but the USAID program was so bogged down that he was dipping into his paycheck more and more to buy parts.

  He had dug a well for the school at Thuan Tu, but another hamlet was more resistant. They said digging a well would break the “dragon vein,” or energy flow, but Pete suspected there were other reasons:

  It’s either a case of not being able to dig because of big rocks, or the people want a well but don’t want to dig it. Or, as in a Montagnard hamlet, they’re afraid of disturbing the subterranean dragon. The Montagnards will probably come around and decide to dig their well, but it’s amazing to go into one of those hamlets and confront some of their old people who still believe in tiger tooth medicine and dragon veins.

  The Rural Affairs manual stated that wells were one of the greatest needs of Vietnamese people.1 Providing water for some of the strategic hamlets was considered particularly vital. The manual cautioned, however, that without establishing some means to maintain and repair the pumps, and to furnish spare parts for them, the well-digging program would lose the people’s approval and support.

  Not only did Pete convince several hamlets of the need to dig wells, he put his shoulder to the job. Then, when the pumps stopped working, he fixed them. At Ninh Qui hamlet, scum had collected on the mechanism. The people “hadn’t had whatsoever it was they should have to buy the stuff” to clean and repair it, he wrote, but “it cost only about 35 of my dear pennies to fix the problem.” While showing them the scum, Pete fell into the well. “Glad there was water in it,” he said. “Had darn near the whole village trying to fish me out of there. What a farce — The American Advisor.”

  Before long he was broke from buying books, and parts for well pumps and a windmill he was designing. He was also supporting three elementary school students, at a cost of $1.50 a month, and a Montagnard boy whose high school tuition came to $8.50 a month, including food. The boy was like a litt
le brother. One day he brought Pete a bottle of honey. “I thought it was rice wine,” he wrote. “Took a big swallow and was very confused, because it was fermented but it wasn’t rice wine.”

  The word “penniless” entered Pete’s letters in August 1964. He couldn’t afford postage stamps, so he held off on sending home the films he had shot. He had accumulated such a backlog of bills that a mere three hours after receiving his living allowance and feeling the “cold cash in my sweaty palms,” he was broke. Three hours was a new record.

  Nana sent a Christmas package that arrived in Phan Rang several months late. The package included a check. Pete felt guilty, as he did whenever she displayed such generosity.

  I’m already very well off. . . . I’m sure there are things around the farm or some of the younger cousins for which your gifts would be well deserved. Always appreciate your letters, though. . . .

  One of the hamlet schools recently asked if I would help them dig a well, so if you don’t mind, I’ll use your check to help them out. They can use the money more than I can.

  My mother’s largesse drew similar comment. When she sent a check for his birthday, he wrote, “Mom is a good Joe and all that. But, Mom, you should control your generosity a little bit more. Thanks very much for your present, but it’s about twice as much as I know what to do with. Maybe I’ll plow it into my foreign aid program.”