Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  I mentioned the difficulty we’d had coping with the trauma of Pete’s death. My sisters and I talked about Pete now, I said, but we had only four letters he had written to Cis.

  Sue told me she had saved every word Pete ever wrote to her, including notes he left at her dorm to say he had stopped by. She offered to lend me the scrap-books she kept them in. “There may be some references to a hot-and-heavy make-out session,” she said, but it was so long ago that she had no reason to be embarrassed now.

  I thought I detected a note of uncertainty. Not wanting her to regret the offer she had made, I asked if she would like to think about it.

  Three years elapsed before we spoke again. I assumed incorrectly that she had reconsidered.

  I was getting used to these letters and phone calls from out of the blue. They came infrequently, but when I received one, it meant a lot to me. The circle of Pete’s friends I was meeting was expanding.

  Two years before, in 1998, IVS alumni had gathered in Portland, Oregon, for a reunion. During a session devoted to memories of teammates no longer living, Larry Laverentz had talked about Pete. Mike Fairley told him that he and Darlene had traveled in Vietnam with Pete’s sister — and in fact had been through an ordeal together there. Soon afterward, Mike sent Larry my address.

  Larry had joined USAID as the prov rep for Ninh Thuan after his IVS service. It was during that time that he and Pete shared a house in Phan Rang, he said in a letter. They both had busy schedules, so they did not spend a lot of time together, but he knew Pete to be dedicated and highly esteemed by province officials. He remembered him most for his “giving spirit” and sense of humor. They respected each other. They never argued.

  One of Pete’s projects had made a special impression on Larry:

  I recall how hard he worked on building a windmill, an extra project for him. He was so excited as it neared completion and finally worked successfully. Pete also worked with the youth service on projects. Needless to say, as the province representative, I considered his presence to be a great asset.

  I am glad to have the opportunity to pass on my thoughts about Pete to you. I have always felt remiss in not being able to discuss my impressions of his commitment and success with a member of his family. At the time of his death, I was on my way out of country for thirty days. Apologetically, I must say that I didn’t do any follow-up after I returned.

  Vietnam developed some kind of “hold” on many of us, particularly us IVS types. It was easy to get caught up in the adventure and romanticism of the war and all of the peripheral activities. We were generally treated with friendliness, dignity, and respect by the Vietnamese. They seemingly had an ability to block out the war and continue to laugh and go on with life, despite the potential for tragedy in their lives. To some degree, I at least fell into a similar pattern. Vietnam did have a significant effect on my life.

  He offered to tell me more if I wanted to talk sometime. “Thanks for listening,” he closed. “I have felt the need to acknowledge, in my eyes, Pete’s true spirit and greatness.”

  A week later we spoke by telephone. After that, we continued the conversation in letters and e-mails.

  I learned that Larry had majored in agriculture and economics at Kansas State University. In a senior seminar he heard that a group called IVS was seeking volunteers. He signed up to leave for Laos in August 1960, but when a civil war broke out there, the plan fell through. “I got tired of staying home and helping my dad feed cattle, so I went to graduate school,” he said. IVS called the following May and asked if he could leave for Vietnam in June. He agreed and, after a two-day orientation in San Francisco, left with four other new recruits.

  He quickly discovered that the good intentions of IVS were inadequate to the situation in Binh Dinh Province, where he was assigned:

  My initial assignment was misdirected, poorly thought out, and not practical. The idea was to improve the grass for cattle. I came from a large farm in Kansas. The Vietnamese did not need my technical expertise and were much more attuned to what was going on than I was.

  I would ask farmers, “How can I help you?” Almost universally they said they wanted rat poison. They were overrun by rats. The rats lived in the rice fields and came into the houses in the rainy season. The government agricultural affairs office organized rat hunts, where farmers were digging rats out of the dikes between the rice paddies and killing them with hoes. We went to a village office where they had piled hundreds of dead rats on the front steps. We could hardly walk up the steps. In America, you’d have put them off to the side, not on the front steps, but they were proud of their accomplishment.

  A few months later the agricultural affairs office organized cadres from every hamlet to distribute rat poison. The U.S. government was into quantitative analysis. They had told the Vietnamese they needed to measure the results of the rat poison. Cadres were directed to cut off the tails of the dead rats, and according to the province chief they collected over 900,000 rat tails in a couple or three weeks. There were more rats than people — and Binh Dinh province had the first-or second-highest population in the country.

  Later, through IVS, demonstration plots were established to grow plants for the production of warfarin, the anticoagulant in rat poison.

  Larry and Pete shared a house across the street from a Chinese hotel with a restaurant. Sometimes they went there for a bowl of pho, the noodle soup described by veteran journalist R. W. Apple as Vietnam’s national passion.

  The two bachelors had a cook and a maid who understood no English. IVSers learned Vietnamese in language classes taught by northerners, but Pete and Larry picked up the southern dialect spoken by their household staff.1

  For language practice and female companionship, they went to bars. Relationships with women required discretion, as Larry explained:

  Dating in Vietnam was a difficult thing. Girls worked as barmaids and many times as prostitutes also. If you wanted company, you’d go to the bars.

  Vietnamese girls were very vulnerable, and if you wanted to have a relationship with a girl from a nice family, you could, very easily. I visited families who knew me by my reputation, but a girl couldn’t be seen with me in public or she would be labeled as a prostitute.

  Pete was young and good looking, so there would have been some Vietnamese who would have said, “Let me fix you up.” But it would have been in the company of a sister or parents, and hands-off. Pete and I tried to be very careful.

  After working for USAID, Larry returned to the United States and worked in the Foreign Service Institute’s Vietnam Training Center, in Arlington, Virginia. He was talking with another employee one day when Pete’s name came up.

  “As I recall,” Larry said, “this person had some ties to the CIA. We talked about the fact that they found Pete’s vehicle with thirty-eight bullet holes. A squad of Vietnamese had killed him. Through intelligence, they tracked them down and assassinated them. In most cases the Vietcong would not deliberately set up an ambush for a civilian. Pete may have run into a squad by happenstance.”

  Why would intelligence track them down and kill them? I asked. I wondered if going to such lengths was customary.

  “To send a message: ‘You don’t do that to an American,’ ” he said. The killing had been brutal, and, moreover, the victim was someone who was there to help the Vietnamese and do good.

  Larry recalled that about three months before Pete left Phan Rang, he began carrying a gun.2 If he’d had a weapon with him, Larry ventured, he might have tried to defend himself. “He was in good condition. He obviously had a very benevolent side, and he also had a very strong determination and will. When I think of Pete, I think of someone who was strong and active, with a very strong spirit.”

  Don Luce had said only that Pete was driving in an area where he wasn’t known, was probably mistaken for a soldier, and was caught in an ambush. The rumor about retribution was news to me. I had not considered that Pete’s death could have had repercussions beyond IVS.
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  “I tell a story,” Larry said as that first phone call came to a close. “Every IVSer has similar stories. If you hear a story from me or from another IVSer, there’s some commonality in terms of experience, motivations, and unselfishness.”

  He said he would try to find an address for the man who said Pete’s killers had been eliminated, in case he remembered more.

  Later, I related our conversation to a friend. She asked how I felt when I heard that the squad that killed Pete had been tracked down and killed. Well, I said, it was wartime. Pete’s colleagues had told me they expected a certain amount of danger. Don even implied that Pete had taken too much of a risk. But the thought of people avenging his death had not crossed my mind. To be honest, I told my friend, it was a little unsettling that the story gave me some comfort. If the rumor was true, there had been others who, like my family, were dead serious about what happened to Pete.

  Chuck Cable, one of the group I dubbed the Phan Rang Five, had been sorely disappointed when authorities refused to let us stop in Phan Rang. He had lived there for two years and worked on the library, overseeing some of the construction and rounding up electrical wiring, switches, and circuit breakers.

  In 1968, he had escaped the violence of the Tet Offensive because he was on vacation. He returned to Saigon on the second flight after Tan Son Nhut Airport was reopened. He then spent several nights in bomb shelters after one plane bound for Phan Rang was destroyed and another was delayed by rocket attacks.

  A few months after our 1991 trip, Chuck learned that our trouble with the local authorities had caused him to miss a party in his honor. Thirty former students and fellow teachers had assembled at the home of an old friend in Phan Rang to welcome him back.

  He thought the same friend could tell us about the condition of the library. He offered to write to him. It was months before he received a reply, and it was inconclusive.

  Chuck wanted to help me learn more about Pete, and he did. He suggested former volunteers I should call, who had either worked on the library or known my brother. During a phone call, he gave me a list of names and offered to look up their phone numbers in the IVS directory.

  “There’s an IVS directory?” I asked. There was not only a directory but also an alumni association. I joined as a Friend of IVS. I received a roster of former volunteers, with listings of the country to which each person had been assigned, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, and their years of service.3

  Chuck also suggested I call a man named Bert Fraleigh, who had worked in the Office of Rural Affairs. He might have known Pete.

  I sent a note to Fraleigh, asking if he’d be willing to talk with me.

  Yes, he had met Pete, the phone conversation with Fraleigh began. “I was taking care of various field operations for USAID, and there were IVS guys in the provinces,” he explained. “They were not working directly for us. I met Pete because there weren’t many Americans in Phan Rang.” He recalled that Pete was a good singer.

  At the time Pete was killed, Fraleigh had been working primarily in Saigon. Other USAID people would have known more, he said, but the road Pete was driving on was a main highway. It was highly traveled and not considered dangerous.

  I said that the New York Times, Washington Post, Walter Cronkite, and others had carried the story that Pete was led into an ambush.

  “Impossible,” he said emphatically. The prov rep would more likely be singled out. “Pete would have been the last person the Vietcong would target.”

  I asked him about the rumor that Pete’s killers had been identified and eliminated.

  “We did mount a program called Operation Phoenix, to infiltrate the VC and identify who among villagers was a Vietcong spy,” he said. “Those spies — we got to them and encouraged them to defect or they were assassinated. The CIA mounted that program. As to imagining to delegate two CIA guys to go out and shoot the guys who got him, in Vinh Long Province, where Pete lived, we didn’t have any CIA people that I know of. If there were visiting firemen, they would be from Saigon.”

  Visiting firemen? Who am I talking to? I wondered. “What are visiting firemen?” I asked.

  “CIA people in Saigon who would go through the province,” he answered. “A fireman was someone who was just passing through.”

  And doing what? I was afraid to ask.

  But since we were on the subject, I asked if any IVSers were CIA.

  I had posed this question confidentially to a few former volunteers. Some had not hesitated to name a teammate they suspected. Interestingly, no two names were the same. No one mentioned Pete.

  Over the years, when I had mentioned a brother who was a civilian volunteer in Vietnam, some people asked if he was a spy. My parents had been so silent about him that I hadn’t entirely dismissed the question. But the same people who jumped to the spy conclusion had never heard of IVS. Moreover, they were, like me at the time, ignorant of the tremendous civilian effort in Vietnam and of the hundreds of Americans living and working there before U.S. combat troops arrived.4

  At last I was making my way to people who really knew something.

  “There was an IVSer who was CIA,” Fraleigh told me. He worked with Montagnards in the highlands. “They were primitive. Dressed in G-strings. [He] was so effective that they almost considered him to be their king,” he said. “The CIA hired him to help the Montagnards with self-defense. He armed them and organized them against the Vietcong. The Montagnards were never really conquered, and he is one of the very few people responsible for this.”

  He asked if I knew what Pete’s IVS assignment had been in the Mekong Delta. The more questions he asked, the more I realized how little I knew. He recommended a book of essays about Vietnam in the early 1960s, to which he had contributed a chapter about the Rural Affairs program he had helped Rufus Phillips establish. “We were hand-picked by John Kennedy,” he said. “Basically, its purpose was to counter the Vietcong and to help the Vietnamese develop their backbone to fight for themselves. It required great patience, and Americans don’t have patience.”

  IVS must have investigated Pete’s death, he insisted. As chief-of-party, Don Luce or his deputy, Mike Chilton, would have gone to the area where the ambush occurred. There would have been an official report, and someone must have sent my parents a copy. There would have been no reason to prevent them from knowing exactly what happened.

  My father had passed away six years earlier, and my mother’s memory was by now greatly diminished, but I didn’t want to say so. Nor did I want to tell someone who seemed fairly emphatic and who scarcely knew Pete that my family didn’t talk openly about him.

  Fraleigh urged me to keep looking. Someone would have made a report.

  Paul Worthington was one of the first IVS volunteers in Vietnam. He went over in 1957, returned to the United States after his service, and returned to work for Rural Affairs.

  In 1963, between his two tours, he married Linda, a widow with three children. They went immediately to Berkeley, California, for a semester of training with other U.S. Operations Mission employees headed for Southeast Asia. Having served with IVS, Paul already spoke Vietnamese. Linda took classes at the Monterey Language Institute.

  “There certainly were people in Rural Affairs who later were CIA, or who came out of the CIA,” Linda explained when I called her. “In those days, you never said if you were CIA, but Rural Affairs was not a CIA program. It was a community development program.” She named someone who after his IVS service went to work for what is sometimes called “the company.”

  Paul and Linda lived first in Saigon, then in the Mekong Delta. It was so safe, they felt, that they enrolled their red-haired, blue-eyed seven-year-old in the local kindergarten. They lived in Vietnam until February 1965, when all USOM dependents were evacuated by order of President Johnson.

  IVSers stayed.

  People were confused about IVS, she said. “The U.S. military couldn’t understand how these young, mostly men were out riding their motorcycles, talking to t
he people, and all that. Because they weren’t military, they were considered loose cannons. They weren’t following anyone’s orders.”

  In the 1990s Linda served as co-director of IVS. The other co-director was Don Luce. When the organization closed in 2002, the office files were given to Goshen College in Indiana. Many of the old papers were discarded then, Linda said, and it was possible that any reports or communications related to Pete were now gone.

  I asked who else might know what had happened to him. I mentioned the original report of a land mine explosion and the subsequent story that two Vietnamese friends had led Pete to his death.

  I told her Don had written to me in a letter, “We all did foolish things back then.” She cautioned me not to unquestioningly accept his version of events. She doubted he would be inclined to believe that a Vietnamese betrayed an American.

  “Personally, I believe that is exactly what could have happened,” she said. She did not wish to challenge, however, whatever “myth” had formed around Pete’s death. She had heard that he had been killed by a land mine. In any case, she assured me, “Nobody ever accused Pete of wrongdoing in any way.”

  She urged me to talk to more IVSers who were volunteers around the same time as Pete. “See what they know,” she suggested.

  In the fall of 2003 a friend invited me to go to Italy for a writing retreat she was organizing. At the time, we were editors of a food, wine, and travel magazine.

  A few years earlier, I had become interested in truffles, the mushroom relative that grows underground. I had hunted the delicacy in Oregon and Europe, met truffle “royalty” in Italy, published recipes and articles about truffles, and started a newsletter for devotees. I hoped that in Italy, away from the distractions of the office, I could bring into focus a book I wanted to write about this most mysterious of all foods.