Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  Adjusting to Vietnam’s tempo had taken a while. Especially when time weighed heavy, a slightly wistful note came through in Pete’s letters. Early in April 1964 he wrote that an army buddy was going home in August. He wished he were going home, too.

  He sometimes sounded sentimental in letters to Sue. Some days, it seemed like only yesterday when the two of them had walked across the Wesleyan campus, past Foss Hill to the new tennis courts. He wondered if Wesmen were “still on a kick over esoteric folk-type music.” Had she seen any of his fraternity brothers? “Here it is, coming up April,” one letter said. “I remember this season used to pass so slowly at Wesleyan.”

  Sue worried about writing to Pete when she was low. He encouraged her not to hold back. “When you get wrought up like that, go slow, or stop and take hold of yourself over a cup of coffee,” he said. “Don’t waste your energy worrying about a situation you can’t remedy, and just sit it out. Don’t worry about me coming back; I’m coming back for sure.”

  She was within days of graduating from nursing school when Pete imagined her in nursing whites: “You’ll be out and wearing one of those cute — gnarxryl — little uniforms. For God’s sake, be careful when you go into those solitary confinement rooms.” In the same letter, he reminded her he’d be heading home before they knew it. “I’ll probably want to turn around and come right back over here, though,” he concluded.

  He was getting entrenched in the routine, managing without his interpreter, and finding pleasure in the quotidian. It was the little things, like kidding around with friends, that made life wonderful. One day a major at MAAG, the military advisers’ compound, pointed out that the beer cans were unsterilized. He warned that drinkers could be exposed to cholera. Pete’s hard-working hands were notoriously dirty, and he brought down the house by demonstrating how he always wiped the lip of his beer can with his thumb. “It’s amazing, the depths to which humor will sink into drollery, when people are hard-pressed for comic relief,” he said.

  Sue must have asked how close he was to the front. There was no front line, he explained, “because ‘Charlie’ is all over the place. ‘Charlie’ is MAAG jargon for vc. You know where they got it? From the Charlie Tuna ad on TV.” The nearest he had come to shooting anyone or to “plain ol’ general killing and blood-letting was driving about two and a half feet up a water buffalo’s ass (’scuse me, sweet) the other day when I happened upon a whole herd and applied brakes, of which there were zip, nix, naught, nary a bit. Much to my surprise. And the buffalo’s.”

  Sampling exotic foods was another form of adventure. He visited a nuoc mam plant with a neighbor and his brother. Afterward, they returned to the neighbor’s house to drink beer and introduce Pete to spring rolls: “They take shrimp, lettuce, mint, carambola juice, peanuts, hot sauce, beef strips, and whatever else is handy, roll all of it up in rice paper. A good trick in itself. Then one dips it all in nuoc mam, eats the package, and licks one’s fingers with much concentration. At least I do. That nuoc mam smells.”

  In June 1964 Pete set about organizing a motorcycle trip with some of his teammates. After their IVS contracts expired, three wanted to return to the States mostly by sea. The other four hoped to persuade the Honda corporation to underwrite their overland trek across Asia and Europe. Their stops would include the Malay Peninsula, India, and Ceylon. The motorcycles would cost six hundred dollars apiece — a little less than the amount IVS allowed for a return air ticket.

  The motorcycles would be delivered to Vietnam from Hong Kong. Pete calculated that because a new Honda 300 sold for a thousand dollars in the United States, he could sell it when he got home and end up in the black. He thought he might then enroll at Oklahoma University “just to warm up the think-muscles” before applying to law school or taking the foreign service exams.

  In the same letter in which he laid out his motorcycling grand design, he asked if Holly and I had grown gigantic. He wanted a recent photograph of the family, this time without anyone posing. “Holly and that jaw of hers look like a shark when she poses. All my Vietnamese friends ask me, ‘Who’s the shark, sitting second from the left?’ and want to know if that’s what we call a mermaid. I tell them no, and that a mermaid is in reverse, the fish part being the lower section.”

  Dad had been teaching Mom to fly. She had probably wrapped up, meaning crashed, her first Cessna 150 by now, Pete teased. How about sending a picture of her resting one foot on the crumpled cowling?

  And incidentally, how should he go about voting in the presidential election “from way out here”?

  By the following month, Pete had discovered that Hondas sold for about the same price in the United States as in Vietnam. He decided to buy a less expensive brand whose resale value was supposedly just as good. Having found a bike for about half the cost of the Honda 300, he asked my parents to transfer $356 to his checking account.

  Better transportation would enable Pete to get around more easily. If Mom and Dad ever harbored parental concerns about a motorcycle accident, the next paragraph of his July 19, 1964, letter would have raised a far worse fear:

  This week the Vietnamese, especially the vc, commemorate the Geneva Accords — called the Week of National Shame. I was almost material for a vc celebration the other day. Two men came to the house asking me to take a windmill out to their hamlet the following day. I’d heard there were vc in the province, so I checked with MAC-V [the military advisory command] that evening and was warned to stay clear of that particular area. The next morning a reconnaissance plane spotted vc in the rocks along the road I would’ve taken. Phew.

  With no transition, he asked if Holly and I were back from canoeing camp and if the reports of topless bathing suits — introduced by designer Rudi Gernreich — being the fashion were true. “What’s happening to the country, for crying out loud?” he asked. “Are people wearing the things? Girls, I mean?”

  Seven thousand miles separated Vietnam and the United States, and the cultural upheavals that were taking place back home accentuated the distance.

  Work on the windmill continued. After a year of waiting for the education program in his province to get rolling, Pete concluded that his most significant contributions as an IVSer would be the things he did on the side, like digging wells and engineering a windmill with two pumps so it could be adapted to different locations.

  The windmill design was evolving. Pete had altered the trapezoidal wooden arms, or fans, twice. He had tested three different kinds of pumps. He was almost there, but the experimentation was costly and he was seeing “bleak days financially.” Mom and Dad were ignoring pleas to send his checkbook. He supposed it was good they were.

  A blotchy eight-millimeter movie taken around this time shows Pete doing the carpentry work. He enters the scene dressed in baggy khaki pants, a T-shirt, and white sneakers. He sits down in the shade opposite a small Vietnamese man. They grasp the handles of a two-man saw. Sawdust flies, and a bright green gecko on a tree watches as they push and pull. Pete turns to the camera and beams his “fish face” — a grotesque smile that is a kind of joke on the Hunting side of the family, whose men have the angular jaw and long face it requires.

  Things were just moseying along, he told Margo. One day he fixed a pipe for a school well. Another, he visited a new hamlet school. The next, he wrote letters, studied Vietnamese, or worked out a new project on paper. After that, he visited yet another school and talked about planting gardens or raising rabbits and pigs. He bought a new radio, but it didn’t work. It was typical of his frustrations.

  But what really got on his nerves were the supercilious people he worked with.

  They know I’m only 22. That isn’t a problem with the Vietnamese, who are generally very easy to get along with, but it is with the overseas American bureaucrats. They sit behind their desks and say, “No, it’ll never work.” I wish someone would pay me $8,000 a year for that.

  Sent some pictures to my mom the other day. Dad reported she wept for relief to see me actual
ly alive in Vietnam. What are you all reading in the newspapers over there, anyway?

  Although the violence was growing worse, Pete steered clear of it. Ninh Thuan Province was considered more secure than the Mekong Delta. One teammate there was stationed in “some very bad territory.” He had told of leaving a school only five minutes before the Vietcong entered and removed the flag. The same friend had driven across a bridge just as a battle commenced on the river below him. “He’s very casual about it,” Pete said.

  Vietcong propaganda sprang up regularly in one area where Pete had dug a well. “The first few times I went out there, they were a bit on the formal side, shall we say. By the end of the project they’d invited me for tea at their local temple and given me a lesson in the Cham language,” he said. “During my stay I’d given 60 or so people a lift into town in the back of the Land Rover, including one hysterical woman who’d just learned her son had been wounded and killed in a vc encounter north of town.”

  One night, Pete was awakened by a sergeant who said he would have to come over to the MAAG compound. He was issued a revolver and assigned a battle station. The chief of police had informed the Americans that a suicide squad was infiltrating Phan Rang. The chief had agents in the Vietcong; Pete allowed that both sides probably had agents. The following day, the scare was over and he was back at his house. “Takes all the glamour out of being a civilian,” he said. “Makes you feel left out.”

  Kidding aside, he acknowledged the trouble farther south:

  Down there the communists are less discriminating and have tried planting plastique [explosives] in IVS handlebars, etc., considerably shaking the faith of some pacifists on the team who think of themselves as “friends of the people” and who naturally assumed the feelings of tolerance and goodwill were reciprocal.

  Less than a week later, however, danger had come close. An American stationed at MAAG was shot down in his observation aircraft. The younger brother of a Vietnamese neighbor also was killed. “I knew him, too,” Pete said simply.

  In a lighter moment, he asked his Vietnamese friends where the local stills were hidden and how they mixed their drinks. They mixed them with women, they joked. “Well, we mixed up a few . . . but I can only remember how he threw the first one together. A little gin, carambola juice, crushed ice, vermouth, sugar. . . . It’s very hard to use chopsticks under such adverse conditions.”

  He played a running game with the neighborhood youth. At night they tossed small rocks through the door at Pete and his housemates, now Jim Hunt, a Cornell Alpha Delt, and former teammate Larry Laverentz, who had taken a job with USAID. The boys considered everything that wasn’t tied down fair game, including Pete’s Land Rover, which they pushed out of sight. Pete retaliated by throwing water balloons at them until he realized they loved it. “Next thing,” he said, “they’ll want us to throw soap at them, too.”

  Security rose and fell. In June, things quieted down in Phan Rang, although less than ten miles off a battle was under way on a mountain.

  Americans seemed more optimistic since the latest change of government in Saigon. At the same time, some intellectuals in South Vietnam had seesawed to feeling more anxious. Pete guessed that they were worried about what might happen to the country, and more so themselves, after it was pacified. Was the real problem not getting their fingers into the pie?

  He observed a growing restlessness with President Johnson’s inaction in neighboring Laos. Referring to the liberation forces in Laos and Vietnam by their old names, he wrote:

  [Johnson] continues to dabble in political clichés without doing anything positive about Laos. When the Pathet Lao and Viet Minh pushed through that last offensive, what they were doing was securing the Ho Chi Minh trail. Right now, the Viet Minh quite blatantly use the Vietnam – Laos and Cambodia –Vietnam borders as refuge. A lot of people are really burned about it. Laotians and Vietnamese are getting quite impatient with Johnson, too.

  With almost a year in Vietnam under his belt, Pete turned twenty-three in June 1964. On the same day, General Maxwell Taylor was appointed U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, replacing Henry Cabot Lodge.

  Also that June, General William Westmoreland replaced General Paul Harkins as commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Harkins was said to have “fed Washington rosy reports” and not only emphatically maintained an optimistic outlook but also demanded the same of his staff.2 According to journalist Stanley Karnow, Westmoreland was the corporate executive type, a manager. With Taylor, he would Americanize the war. Lodge had not been a team player.3

  On July 27, President Johnson sent five thousand more American military advisers to Vietnam.

  Pete continued to regale us with stories of his escapades and his insights into Vietnamese culture, but increasingly he also discussed the military and political situation. The education aspect of his job — the English teaching he had hired on for — had not yet coalesced. His work was more about meeting needs as basic as food and fresh water.

  His frustration with bureaucracy and American policy was mounting. As a government major, he probably took a special interest in the development of programs. College courses were nothing, however, compared with the experience of observing strategy and policy in the making — and observing it from the unique vantage point of a civilian volunteer in a war zone.

  In July 1964 he compared ambassadors Lodge and Taylor, and generals Westmoreland and Harkins:

  Of course, there’s a lot of talk about Gen. Taylor and Westmoreland. It is said that Cabot-Lodge resigned as much because of his frustrations in trying to expand rational economic development programs as because of political call of duty. . . . It’s not all that bad, but we’ve got more than enough Goldwater types in the ranks and officers than is healthy for our country or Vietnam.

  Taylor never believed in the A-or H-bombs as providing wholesome security, bucked a lot of Air Force Brass Command and senators with stakes in Atomic Energy Commission contracts, and didn’t begin to gain ground with his way of thinking (i.e., preparedness for nibbling wars of conventional or guerilla nature) until Kennedy put McNamara in. Moreover, Taylor is a staff man, which Lodge has not been.

  Westmoreland is a “field and troops” general rather than a staff general, such as Harkins was. . . . Harkins did more to confuse Washington on military and civilian matters in Vietnam than all of USOM and the rest of the military put together, and is particularly responsible for the confused and ineffective American effort in the last years of Diem and first few months of the [South Vietnamese military regime that ousted him].

  What [the new South Vietnamese premier] Khanh did was to snub growing French attempts to have Viet policy their way, and in turn to pick his own American advisers — colonels and majors whom he knew and respected from the field — putting Harkins out in the cold where he belongs. As a result, the Viets are now winning this war. The provincial aid program for this province is an amazingly good development program, thanks to Khanh’s delegation of authority, and flexibility of our province chief.

  Also just recently north of Saigon, 800-odd vc attacked a Vietnamese artillery company . . . which numbered about 100 men including several American military advisers. The Viets and Americans had few rifles and bullets, but lots of artillery, and were firing howitzers at 30 yards, propping them on jeeps and walls to get the angles, their backs to wall, stripped to their jockey shorts. Amazing story of pluck, as heard on the MAC-V grapevine.

  He had gotten wind, through Sue, of bad news from home. My father had been in a helicopter accident but fortunately had suffered only broken bones. Trouble always came in threes; there was Dad’s crash and two recent flights of Pete’s:

  Going down [to Saigon], the hydraulics system of a cargo plane failed and we landed like a fast freight car running off the end of the runway, mulching up beaucoup meters of cornfield before stopping. I thought, Well, that was exciting.

  Then on the return trip, landing on a short runway the pilot reversed [propellers] and only the port-side pr
op reversed, sending us skewering up on a wingtip straight for an 8 by 8 concrete pillbox, which we were about to enter the hard way when the pilot — with much effort — winged the bird over to transverse the runway in the opposite direction. From there on down the rest of the strip we merely fishtailed back and forth on each of the wheels in succession.

  As if that weren’t enough, he returned to Phan Rang to learn that six Vietcong had been killed the night before in a hamlet where he was working. Two more Vietcong had been killed and another captured the week before. Unheard-of numbers of villagers were informing on the insurgents. Opinion and morale among American military officers had risen.

  Fighting in the mountains and hamlets, American aircraft getting shot down, Vietcong insurgents killing and being killed — in retrospect, it is hard not to see Vietnam in 1964 as a country at war. But Pete perceived the situation differently. On July 11, 1964, he wrote, “We’ll probably be at war over here in another year.” He didn’t object, as long as someone smart was giving the orders.

  The struggle still held the possibility of victory for the South and defeat for the Communists. American combat units had not yet been sent to Southeast Asia. The word “quagmire” had not yet become affixed to the conflict. “Vietnam” was not yet synonymous with a foreign policy debacle. All that lay ahead.

  If Pete was sometimes sentimental in his letters to Sue, he was witty, insightful, and generally at his best as a correspondent when writing to Margo. His letters to Sue began to taper off in the summer of 1964, while his letters to Margo became more frequent and richer in content. He and Margo seemed to exchange ideas and questions, as when Pete replied to her apparently lighthearted inquiry about libations: “No, there is no blanc de blancs here, but . . . I’ve found a place where it is possible to get Black and White scotch, cognac, gin, and soda. A little dark, black room out behind the granary sort-of-situation. Also, can get some good home-brewed sake and kumquat nectar, which is reportedly quite powerful. Maybe they put gin in it, which relegates the potion to the ranks of ordinary drinking and rubbing alcohol.”