by Jill Hunting
One afternoon the other writers and I were talking about our goals. I told them about my passion for truffles. Then, for some reason, I took a detour. I said that my interest in the subterranean food might be related to something that had happened in my family, something we had buried. I talked about my brother and the family that treated his death as a secret. That afternoon, in the golden beauty of the Umbrian countryside, I realized that the story I wanted to tell was about Pete.
I returned home and told my sisters what I was going to do. They were glad. We talked about the four letters from Pete that we had. Holly remembered seeing a green lacquer box containing sympathy letters from Vietnam in our parents’ storage locker. She offered to find it and send it to me.
She asked if it would be useful to have Pete’s journal. Pete kept a journal? So seldom had we talked about our brother, I hadn’t even known a journal existed. Holly kept it on her bedside table. The following week, she sent it to me.
The brown leather book contained thirty-nine pages of entries. They began on June 20, 1963, after Pete had kissed Holly and me, “the sisses,” good-bye at the Hartford airport and left for his IVS orientation in Washington. Tucked inside the journal was a note from October 1964 with the price, 540 dollars, of a motorcycle and the address in Hong Kong for ordering it. There were five walletsize photos of young women, two with a name on the back and another whom I recognized as Pete’s high school sweetheart, Judy. There were two snapshots of friends lounging on the porch of the Alpha Delta Phi house at Wesleyan. There was a draft of a letter to friends and family, written in mid-July when he returned to Vietnam after his two months of home leave.
Bert Fraleigh had mentioned the name of Don Luce’s deputy, Mike Chilton. I found Mike’s name in Pete’s journal. He was one of “a good crew” who had visited Pete at Phan Rang.
When I called Mike, he seemed surprised that Pete had written about him. I reminded him of the day that the assistant province chief’s servant had opened a champagne bottle so violently that half the wine was lost. Hearing this, Mike laughed heartily. Pete had described that laugh.
I asked about a Major Cook who had upbraided Pete when he arrived at Phan Rang without the proper letters of introduction.
“Ah . . . Major . . . Cook.” Mike said. Cook was the senior American officer in Ninh Thuan Province. Someone asked him how many Vietcong were within his sphere of influence. Two hundred eighty-nine, he had declared emphatically. “It was typical of American thinking,” Mike said. “Everything was right in Major Cook’s world.”
I mentioned Pete’s complaints about his first stationmate, including his indignation that Chuck Fields corrected his Vietnamese when he himself had studied five languages. Mike chortled. “Chuck worried about everything,” he said.
I brought up the differing accounts of what happened to Pete that day on the road from Can Tho. I asked if he thought Pete had been targeted by Vietcong or had driven into an ambush set for the convoy that found him soon afterward.
“What happened to Pete is an open question,” he said.
Another question I asked Chuck Cable concerned the man who called my family with the news of Pete’s death. Chuck didn’t know who it was, but he gave me the address of a former IVS administrator, John Hughes, who might know. I wrote to Mr. Hughes and asked if it would be all right for me to call him. Certainly, he replied. He suggested a time for us to talk. His note also mentioned that he had attended the memorial service for Pete in Connecticut.
Our conversation began with my saying I remembered almost nothing about the service. Did he?
I knew from Sue Patterson that some IVS representatives had been there. She remembered them as cold and unfeeling. Hughes could recall very little. He named the men Sue would have met: himself, Executive Director Gardiner, a former volunteer named Tom Luche, and Pete’s teammate and friend Willi Meyers.
Hughes did remember, however, Pete’s last visit to IVS headquarters in Washington, when he was home between assignments.
“He brought me some herbs he had picked up from a Chinese merchant,” he told me. “He said they were reputed to be a great asset to one’s sex life.” Hughes stashed the herbs in the back of his desk drawer.
He visited my parents once in Oklahoma City. I asked what his impression had been. To most people, and maybe to everyone but my sisters and me, my parents seemed to cope well with the loss of their son. Hughes confirmed this. They seemed to accept things matter-of-factly, he recalled, “with no morbidity and no rehashing of the sadness.”
“Do you have any idea who made the phone call to my family that day?” I asked.
“It fell to me,” he said.
I couldn’t believe I was talking to the man whose voice I had heard just before summoning Dad to the phone that sad, long-ago day.
I was jolted out of myself to realize that the question must have stung. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
That morning, Don Luce had called from Saigon. “John, it’s urgent,” he said. “Before the press gets hold of this, we have to tell the parents.”
“As acting director, it fell to me to tell them,” Hughes said. “I did have the courage. I had to say, ‘Mr. Hunting, I have sad’ — or maybe I said — ‘I have bad news from Vietnam.’ I don’t think we talked very long. I felt so terribly for your parents. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
I asked if he had been concerned about the safety of the other team members. Did other parents want their sons and daughters to come home?
“Yes,” he said. “Being alerted to the potential hazard in Southeast Asia, Arthur Gardiner prepared a letter addressed to later recruits, saying, to be casual about it, ‘Let’s face it — there are hazards there. We think there’s a useful role for IVS.’ We tried to be frank and realistic.”
“Have you seen the movie The Quiet American?” I asked.
“I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing it,” he said.
“Why do you think Pete brought you the Chinese herbs?”
“I don’t know what my reputation might have been, but I think it was probably just a waggish thing to tweak a bureaucrat, a desk man. Something for a laugh. ‘Here’s something authentic from Southeast Asia.’ ”
I laughed.
“I’m glad I gave you a laugh,” he said.
TWELVE
“Too Much Talk about Danger”
S
aigon is awash with green uniforms,” Pete wrote to Margo when he returned to Vietnam in July 1965. After an absence of just two months, he was surprised to see the Pearl of the Orient so changed. American military vehicles now strangled the flow of traffic. Jets and helicopters churned up the gray skies. It was a little depressing.
He had come back by way of Europe. He and Cis had arranged to meet in Paris, but the plan fell apart. She was traveling with a friend whose morning ritual included considerable time in front of a mirror; to cover her thinning hair, she wore a wiglet that required an hour just to be fastened to the top of her head with hairpins, and then teased and combed. Their trip had started in Spain. By the time they reached Paris, Cis was at wit’s end. Trying to hurry her primping friend had been futile. When they finally arrived at Orly Airport on the appointed day, Pete’s plane had already landed.
“I bashed myself to American Express” hoping to find a message there from Cis, he wrote to my mother afterward. After two hours of looking for her, he checked into a hotel and deposited his suitcases. He returned to American Express, where he ran into a friend from Wesleyan. They climbed the Eiffel Tower together, worked up an appetite, and went to a restaurant where Pete consumed an octopus. Finally, jet lag overcame him. “Was dead tired,” he told Mom. “Never been so tired!”
Late in the evening, Pete and Cis crossed wires one last time before he gave up and went to bed. The next morning, he flew out. “Cis can really be a meathead when she works at it,” he complained. They would not see each other again.
In Venice, as in Paris, Pe
te ran into someone he had met at Wesleyan — a young woman traveling with her twin sister and aristocratic grandmother. He sunbathed on the Lido until he “parboiled” himself. He loved La Serenissima’s architecture and cuisine, the orchestra playing Strauss waltzes on St. Mark’s Square, and the gondolas and accordion players outside his hotel room. At night, on the canals, he could almost sense the ghosts of Marco Polo, Lucrezia Borgia, and “assorted poisoned troubadours.”
He laid over in Rome, but the Eternal City was a letdown. He found the Coliseum surprisingly small — not much larger, in fact, than the Dexter, Missouri, high school gym. “Can you imagine feeding Christians to the lions in the Dexter High School gym?” he asked Mom in a letter written from Karachi, Pakistan. “I was expecting a bit more in the way of running space. Tomorrow, Singapore.”
If Rome had disappointed Pete and missing Cis had exasperated him, Margo had left another impression. Had he not been returning to Vietnam, he told my mother, he’d have flipped over her:
She was so easy to talk to, joke with, relax with. Physically attractive (Yaow!) but poised and mature. . . . We’re both the type of person that can keep control until I finish what I’m doing in Vietnam and some questions in our separate minds are settled. I guess what this means is, we both found each other attractive, thinking in a serious way, but it’s “wait and see.”
In the same letter, he compared Margo favorably with another young woman whom he had gone out with a few times in Oklahoma City. “More domestic, less world-and travel-oriented” than Margo, she also seemed to have a devious side and a potential to dominate a man. What he liked about her was that she was “natural” and “fresh.”
Margo, by contrast, had been “a long time unlimbering.” She was a lady, he told Mom, “like you are a lady.” Her interests were broad and complemented his. “If someone said to me, ‘You must marry tomorrow,’ ” he summed up, “it would be Margo. I’d have more confidence in what I was getting into.”
Saying good-bye hadn’t been easy. In New York, he nearly missed his plane because they didn’t hear the boarding call.
Back in Vietnam, Pete didn’t broadcast his feelings about Margo. But the friend he considered his best buddy remembers Pete’s response when he asked how things had gone with Margo. Pete shook his head slowly from side to side and said, simply, “Ohhhhh, Gene.”
In Connecticut, Pete had met Margo’s sister and brother-in-law and talked with her mother about the exotic flowers in Vietnam, some of whose English names he didn’t know. Now back in country, he asked Margo to tell her mother that although American soldiers were buying everything in sight, they had left some gladioli on Saigon’s Street of Flowers. “As soon as I get some more film,” he promised, “I’m going to go down there and eh-eh-eh-eh-eh the whole street to solve the problem once and for all as to what kinds of flowers are there.”
At a New York restaurant, he and Margo met a man who suggested Pete write a novel based on his experiences in Vietnam. The conversation may have planted the seed of an idea, because on July 16 Pete sent my parents a short letter asking them to take an article he enclosed to the office of a newspaper in Oklahoma City. He hoped they would publish it and let him contribute four or five stories a month. If an Oklahoma paper didn’t want the article, he asked my parents to send it to the New York Times or Christian Science Monitor.
With his cover letter to the editor, he enclosed a photograph of himself with a windmill he built. “Don’t mean to push it on you,” he explained, “but it’s the only one I have coming close to the topic of IVS or NVS hamlet cadre work.” Both IVS and the organization it inspired, National Voluntary Services, were to be featured in an upcoming ABC documentary scheduled to air in August. Pete was one of two IVS spokesmen who had been interviewed, and if the newspaper cared to scoop ABC, it could, he suggested. His new job as a regional supervisor would provide frequent opportunities to travel in the Mekong Delta. He could report on conditions there in his free time.
The article began with Pete stating how different he had found Saigon after being in the States only two months. During that time, President Johnson had committed another 50,000 American troops to Vietnam, bringing the total to 125,000. The recent buildup threatened to overwhelm what had been a massive civilian aid effort.
It is depressing in the sense that our efforts along social, economic, and (indirectly) political lines will be all the more eclipsed. For civilians connected with the foreign aid program, there is a mental tension created by an unmeasureable dilemma: These new soldiers and military adjustments are needed, but at what number of troops do we lose sight of the social, economic, and political aspects of the war? Will we reach a point where we cannot maintain our position of the past, a propos the Vietnamese trust in our non-colonial interest, our good faith? As our troops pour into the country, will the Vietnamese forget why they must keep fighting the Viet Cong?1
His concerns for Vietnam were dispelled somewhat on July 15, he continued, when he heard Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky address students at a leadership training camp. Pete and other IVSers had been present to offer encouragement and technical and logistical support. The thirty-four-year-old Ky, who had assumed office just one month earlier, identified with the Vietnamese youth who were eager to help their country develop. He exhorted them to rise above setbacks and criticism, admitting that his job required the same resiliency he was asking of them.
Even more than Ky’s remarks, the students’ enthusiasm and receptivity to their new leader boosted Pete’s hopes for the country:
During certain moments of the ceremony, a fraternal, trustful atmosphere seemed to envelop audience and speaker alike. The trainees felt a great pride in what they were going to do, in the fact that their youthful Premier was coming to meet and talk with them. . . . At least two students also took the opportunity to apologize for the Premier’s tardiness, noting that “Young men are always late,” a quote having various ribald connotations which are perhaps appropriate, considering the Premier’s reputation as a playboy.
The emergence of a unified student volunteer movement in Vietnam was a recent development. In the last days of the Diem presidency, dissident students had been a force for change. Successive governments, backed by the United States, mistrusted the young activists. Then, in November 1964, eight hundred students volunteered in disaster areas after central South Vietnam was ravaged by floods. More than five thousand people had died, and many more had lost their homes.
Over several weeks, the young volunteers collected clothing, distributed relief commodities provided by the government, staged theater performances to raise money, and canvassed for donations. Some students came face to face with corruption, as they saw officials take for themselves what was meant to help flood victims. Others proved, as Pete had seen in Quang Ngai, more demanding than resourceful. In the end, however, the students accomplished much good.2
The gains of their disaster relief efforts energized student leaders to request permission from the government to organize a program the following year. After three months, the government granted tacit support. The American aid mission also backed the program, in part, allegedly, to keep the students off the streets.3 More than eight thousand students devoted a portion of their summer break to the 1965 Summer Youth Program, building bridges, repairing roads, teaching in classrooms, providing child care, distributing medicines, painting hospital furniture, and, in general, mixing with the rural population. It was the first exposure for some of them to non-urban Vietnamese and to hamlet and village life — which one IVS annual report held to be “the purest repository of what is traditionally Vietnamese.”4
Of the thousands of volunteers who participated in the 1965 Summer Youth Program, three hundred were chosen for the monthlong leadership training camp that July in Saigon. IVSers such as Pete assumed a supporting role as the trainees carved out three goals: to unify and strengthen the country’s youth movement, to serve the people of rural Vietnam, and to develop an aware citizenry and le
aders for the country’s future.5 From these three hundred student leaders, sixty-six were chosen for the nascent permanent social service organization National Voluntary Services, established on the IVS model.
For the last four months of Pete’s life, working with Vietnam’s promising youth would be a top priority. The newspaper article that he asked my parents to submit reflected his immersion in Vietnamese affairs, and specifically in a national youth movement that had no American equivalent. A busy newspaper editor, let alone his or her readers, may have found the substance of the article difficult to comprehend. The situation in Vietnam was complex, but as my father would say, Pete grasped an underlying principle — namely, that the country’s youth were playing an important role, and in fact were the most promising counterforce to the claims of the Communists:
Having contact with IVS volunteers through workcamps, English classes, and cultural programs, a fairly large number of Vietnamese university students set up their own organization, NVS, which sends five-man cadre teams out into the provinces.
. . . They leave the security, joys, and pleasures of Saigon to live and work in the country for one year, or in the case of rotating teams, a half year.
. . . NVSers are idealistic and highly motivated; what they lack in experience they make up in enthusiasm and perspective. The Vietnamese peasant has long felt that Saigon, the Government, and the Vietnamese educated classes were progressing without concern for the agricultural countryside. NVSers know that they must “bridge the gap”; in effect, they are doing what the communists have promised to do if once they control the country.