by Jill Hunting
By December, the Saigon student corps had still not arrived. It had been the least rewarding month yet with IVS.
Before Pete left for Quang Ngai, another project involving Vietnamese youth had gone better. He wrote to Margo that he was in soaring spirits, despite all the natural disasters, political intrigues, and impending government crises.
CARE, the private international relief organization, had donated five bags of used clothing to a poor hamlet. Pete’s job was to organize distribution of the garments, working alongside the people and ostensibly playing a subordinate role.
The assistant province chief marshaled the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to Ba Thap hamlet, where they sorted the clothes into family-size bundles. They went house to house and distributed 850 garments. It was cold and windy, and the people appreciated the clothing. The assistant chief listened to families who needed special help. He inquired about the overall needs of the hamlet. The people were impressed. They showed their appreciation by singing and dancing.
Some of the donated garments baffled the recipients:
We found an old castaway girdle that must have come from some mastodon of a D.A.R. [Daughters of the American Revolution] Old Guardian Society whip. Had a lot of fun with the hamlet chief joking about possible uses for the contraption. Finally decided he could sew up the bottom and use it as a bag when he goes to market.
Another wonderful old soul found some children’s long underwear in her bundle — the type with the cloth socks built in, i.e., no holes for the feet, but a large hole midway up the garment. She was mystified as to what the garment was used for. Ah, a good day. We’re beginning to make headway with a province youth program.
Pete observed his second Thanksgiving Day in Vietnam at Nha Trang with his teammates. Although there was no turkey, it was a wonderful holiday and a much needed rest from the “limp, do-nothing state of inactivity” in Quang Ngai. The team took an all-day cruise around an island and sunbathed, swam, and snorkeled. As he explored the coral reefs, he was enjoying himself immensely, until he realized he was not alone.
I met the ugliest fish, the most monstrous thing not having legs that I’ve ever seen. I can distinctly remember thinking to myself that this reversal of roles and elements was half-pleasing, half-terrifying, what with me being down in the soup, and no glass walls, and what-all; when suddenly this camouflaged fish moved — I don’t know which creature was more startled. . . . [I] made a quick 90-degree vertical retreat, probably not unlike a Polaris launching, snorkel askew and flappers flipping. Was much relieved to regain the protection of the motor launch.
In a letter home, he wrote that he hoped his sisters had been happy and beautiful on their birthdays. He would be glad to get home and see how much the two younger ones had grown. Could it be true that Holly was learning to drive? And would we please have some family photos taken? “Only, please for Heaven’s sake take them reasonably close up, and maybe give Mom” — who never drank alcohol — “a shot of vodka or something so everyone won’t look so posed. Such medicine should not be necessary in Jill’s case, I don’t think.”
My parents acceded to Pete’s request, apart from my mother taking a drink. We went to a studio for the sitting. For Christmas, Mom sent Pete a photo of herself and Dad, and Holly and me.
She also sent a portrait of herself alone, even though she was superstitious about it. Her father, to whom she had been very close, had sent her a portrait of himself shortly before he died. I think my mother may have believed that her own death was imminent — not that sending a photograph to Pete would be the cause, but an omen. Not only did she tend toward hypochondria, worrying about the latest illness she read in the news, but my parents’ marriage was under a strain. My father was teaching an attractive younger woman to fly. To this day, my sisters and I doubt that Dad had an affair. Mom was possessive, however. She lost a lot of weight and they argued bitterly. Unfortunately, their bedroom shared a thin wall with Holly’s, and she couldn’t avoid overhearing their angry exchanges.
Pete spent Christmas in Dalat with the IVS team. He returned to Phan Rang to find a box of presents from home. What he liked most was the family photograph. He was amazed to see how “chic and big” Holly and I were. “Really makes me homesick,” he wrote to my mother. “I’ll live, but I mean I’m anxious to get back. And you and Dad look so young! Everybody over here looks so old; it’s a funny thing.”
To Cis, he confided that Mom “must have a tapeworm or something to be so sickly and thin.”
He added that “Holly seems to be built on a grand scale — don’t tell anybody I said that. Jill looks to be a definite asset to a smart girls college and modeling.” He hardly recognized us. “I’d hate to get shot over here without having a reunion first,” he wrote, “to get to know you guys all over again. Pardon, I mean ‘young ladies.’ ”
For almost six months, beginning in the autumn of 1964, Pete vacillated between staying in Vietnam and returning to the United States when his IVS contract ended the next summer. The instability of Vietnam, the likelihood of being drafted (his 2A deferment “in support of the national interest” was good until June 1965), and what he called his “woman quandary” added up to a difficult decision.
In January 1965 he wrote to Nana and Uncle Jim that he was considering extending his time with IVS as a team leader for two more years. He would be able to save a sizable portion of his salary. Could they recommend a stockbroker?
Vietnam might fall before those two years were up, however. In that case he would have no job with IVS. On the other hand, if the war went well and “we see the light and make progress” it would be worthwhile to stay and assist with the post-war recovery. It was better than getting drafted. In fact, he said he would enlist before he was drafted. Perhaps it would be good to get some military experience under his belt.
“The war over here is in a pretty bad way,” he wrote on January 7. “Morale is pretty low, what with a virtual political vacuum of the last year.” There was cause for hope, however, given that things hadn’t gone down the drain altogether and the insurgents had not captured the Mekong Delta or grown beyond a certain level. He understood that some people, particularly in the States, seemed to have given up hope. “Perhaps that’s because they never got to know the Vietnamese at first hand and therefore do not know their potential strength,” he said.
A job with the U.S. Operations Mission would pay ten times his IVS salary, but he hadn’t even considered USOM lately. “Even though the pay is good, the work’s frustrating, too far from the grass roots, and USOM is in chaos,” he wrote. “They don’t have enough flexibility or freedom in their jobs, except the province reps. . . . IVS is the real answer in this country.”
The better option if he stayed in Vietnam seemed to be extending his service with IVS. Then, sometime in 1965, he could take two months of home leave. Maybe he would get married then. He had been thinking about it a lot, he said. His wife could return to Vietnam with him and teach English or work in the hospital. The IVS job, which would mean a promotion, would pay upwards of three thousand dollars a year, with an additional three hundred dollars of living and clothing allowances, vacation pay, medical benefits, and insurance. He could help with Holly’s college expenses, just two years away. “Enough pay to finance school and perhaps marriage,” he thought aloud in a letter to Cis, “although on the latter point I run hot and cold, being in agreement with the principle to some extent, but undecided on the person.”
His letters to Margo seemed to fish for her thoughts about his future options. He weighed returning to Vietnam as a team leader for eighteen months in the Delta. He thought about going to law school, if he could get into a good one. “That would make one of my old professors blink like a horned toad in a hailstorm,” he said. Alternatively, “I just might retire if I jolly well feel like it. Get married. Have twenty kids. Sit in my long johns in front of the television set, drink beer, watch the ballgame, burp great resounding burps — if I’d not die of boredom inside of
two days.”
He said that Sue had called it quits when she learned he was considering staying in Vietnam. Margo did not. But neither did she give herself away. “One thing that would clear up a lot of questions would be to know how that girl Margo thinks,” Pete wrote to us. “I suppose, just out of ignorance, that I could haul off and ask her, but some sixth sense tells me that this isn’t the thing to do.”
In January 1965 he wrote that he wanted to marry “a girl who isn’t hell-bent on producing families, family planning, diet control, and all that other stuff.” Margo had spirit and character. They could talk on the same level and about subjects of interest to both of them. “I wish I understood women!” he exclaimed. “What do my sister advisers have to say about all this, hey?”
His letters to Margo deepened. He shared with her the exhilaration of life in Vietnam, as when he described a motorcycle ride:
Everyone has his moments of glory over here. The other day as I was cycling to Nha Trang, the weather quite beautiful, I came upon a covey of doves eating rice upon the road. . . . They were flying and flapping all about me. A few of them were going in my direction, at my speed, and it was so beautiful to see them in flight, so close, against the evening sky. Ah well, so much for the moving prose style of exiles.
On another occasion, he suggested what they might do for fun if she were with him:
If you were over here we could go hunt up some pigeons eating rice grain on the road. You come up on them so fast that you’re in among them just as they get off the ground and you can see them flying right there in front of you, a foot or two above or below, left or right, and sometimes it’s very beautiful. As a rule, I’d say very few people ever get to see birds flying up close like that. But then, we Honda owners are an elite, blessed, and charmed bunch. Some pigeon watchers have gotten carried away, overcome by the beauty of it all. You’re right in there with the flock of pigeons and it all looks so graceful and effortless.
Increasingly, he confided his disappointments as well as his joys. “I’m pretty glum,” he told Margo one day. “Every time I meet a Vietnamese Special Forces military truck, the driver scares me to death with his games — chicken, sideswipe, race-you-to-the-one-way-bridge, etc.”
There was only one problem: The young woman to whom he was growing closer was not just anyone. She was, as he said to a relative without naming her, “a very controversial person.”
In a letter home in February 1965, he wrote, “The girl I’ve come to appreciate is a Catholic, and I know how the family feels about Catholics in general.”
Pete would not have been the first in our family to marry someone who was not of the Protestant faith. One of my uncles had married a Catholic and my mother’s cousin had a Jewish husband. The more significant issue was that “this Catholic happens to be none other than Margo B.” Her last name, Pete continued, “puts Nana in a violent temper, and I also love Nana very much, too.”
Margo’s father and my grandfather had been business associates. But the reason my grandmother reacted so strongly to her last name became clear to me only years later, when I located the woman who might have become my sister-in-law.
President Johnson narrowed Pete’s options for him. On February 7, 1965, he ordered the first air strike against North Vietnam, in retaliation for attacks on a helicopter base and army barracks at Pleiku. The following day, he directed that all dependents of American personnel, civilian and military, be withdrawn from Vietnam. The American Community School in Saigon was closed indefinitely. Pan Am Flight 842 left at noon on February 9 with the first group of returning families.
The USOM newsletter, “The Cyclo,” bid them good-bye: “Write us your news so we can keep up with one another. We wish you all the best in your travels!”1 The same issue reported the disappearance of a high-ranking employee, Gustav Hertz, who had not been seen since he went for a ride on his son’s motor scooter on February 2. He was the second USOM man to go missing.
The first, Joseph Grainger, had been captured by Vietcong more than five months earlier. Later, U.S. officials learned that after he staged a hunger strike and a daring escape, his captors had shot and killed him. Only one other American civilian, a female secretary who died in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, had been killed in Vietnam.2
Beginning a new marriage in Vietnam was now “conveniently out of the question” for Pete. Besides, he had not seen Margo for almost two years. He appreciated her and wanted to get to know her better. But if after seeing her he were to return to Vietnam, he would have to return alone.
His three choices, as he saw it, were IVS and Vietnam, military service and Vietnam, or graduate school, married or not, but no Vietnam.
Pete didn’t know how tense he felt until, in February 1965, he took a five-day vacation in what he called “the cradle and source of fawning self-indulgence.”
He flew to Hong Kong alone. It was not unusual for IVSers to take vacations by themselves, because their stations were far apart and it was difficult even for good friends to coordinate their schedules. “At first,” Pete wrote, “I had to persuade myself that I would have a good time despite being alone. Then I ran across an ex-Yale naval type also going solo.”
They each bought a new suit and sport coat. Pete also bought shoes, a cashmere sweater, and binoculars. Then they set off to explore the island.
The first day we set out for a methodical reconnoiter of Hong Kong and discovered most of the shops closed for Chinese New Year; we ate at a number-one spot known as Jimmy’s Kitchen and were reduced to quivering, jellylike bundles of raw nerves by firecrackers. The first one must have been a magnificent five-incher; it put Bill in a doorway and would have had me in the gutter if someone had jabbed or elbowed me at that exact instant. As it was, I had to “cool it” with a fish face as I unbent after what must have looked like a curiously intent examination of the curb. The rest of the day we just flinched and bravely marched ever onward through clouds of shattered firecracker shrapnel.
After the firecrackers, we dusted off and pulled ourselves together, resolved to descend upon — perhaps ascend is more appropriate — the Hong Kong Hilton — to take it by storm, albeit a very meek storm. It is a glittering, magnificent showcase of wealth and Continental, curly haired, tight-silk-slacked manhood, which appears to be oriented toward male or female roles in the field of ballerinying, indiscriminately. So rich; they probably aren’t even aware of the war in Vietnam except as it provides conversation fodder and sick jokes.
Pete was awestruck. Practically every floor of the hotel had a bar, and he checked out each one, from top to bottom. “Let it be known the Hilton has some very good bars,” he said, even though he preferred the faded grandeur of the very British, less gaudy Peninsula Hotel. The luxuries of hot baths and good food were wonderful, but Hong Kong was another world. When he returned to Phan Rang he told Cis, “Everything about my life in Vietnam is natural, and everything not included is strange.”
On his next trip to the IVS house in Saigon, he regaled his teammates with an account of his holiday. Phyllis Colyer, who with her husband, David, was posted to Nha Trang, recounted his description of Chinese New Year in a letter to my parents the following year:
Tonight is Chinese New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong, and, like Tet in Vietnam, it’s the loudest, wildest night of the year. But the din and spectacle in Hong Kong is like that of no other city. Although this is our first Lunar New Year here, I have the feeling that I know what is going to happen, so vivid was the account Pete gave us in the Saigon IVS office last March of his vacation in Hong Kong at this same time.
If it’s possible for one person to enact the explosiveness of a whole city, I think Pete did it. Not since hearing my grandfather expound on the antics of his early horse trading days have I heard one person so enjoy the telling of a good story — one filled with wit and pure joy of living. That was the way Pete did everything. I think he must have built his windmills and dug his wells with the same vitality that he would burst int
o our house in Nha Trang with, after an hour and a half’s drive from Phan Rang, bringing news, Cham blankets to sell, and filling the room with his continual energy — the same energy which burst from him atop an office chair as he dramatized the explosion of an enormous string of firecrackers hung from atop the President Hotel.
With her letter, Phyllis enclosed a check made out to the Peter M. Hunting Memorial Fund. “But tonight that doesn’t seem like enough,” she said. “Tonight I feel like going out and setting off a rocket for Pete. Tonight we’ll certainly stop at the President Hotel and remember Pete’s unusual capacity for both work and fun.”
Pete was more of a letter writer than a diarist, so it is not surprising that he wrote his last journal entry, on March 5, 1965, eight months before he was killed. What is surprising is how far his ideas about Vietnam’s future had evolved.
A USOM administrator, Doc McCreery, had come to Phan Rang for a meeting with Pete and Mr. Si, the interim chief of primary education for Ninh Thuan Province. Mr. Si had requested only nineteen new classrooms and thirty new teachers for the following year. Using a formula worked out by USOM, McCreery calculated that 40 percent of the children in the province were not in school. Pete was surprised that his estimate was correct. Mr. Si explained that parents wanted their children to stay home and help out instead of attending school.
In Pete’s view, McCreery was insensitive, while Mr. Si lacked the vision to grasp the long-range benefits of educating children. But what motivation did students have? They could receive a technical education, but there were no jobs for technicians. The only positions for educated Vietnamese were with the government, and the government stifled self-motivation and encouraged corruption.