by Jill Hunting
The Vietcong would take unexploded artillery, remove the fuses, rewire the duds, and bury them in a dirt or gravel road. They disguised them very well. Then they ran wires into the rice fields and waited. When a vehicle came along, they quickly connected the wires and exploded the artillery. IVS vehicles looked just like USAID vehicles. The Vietcong would blow up any American vehicle.
At one point on their route, an explosive device detonated immediately behind them. They knew they had narrowly escaped being blown up by a land mine. Ray remembers:
We were both pretty scared when we got back to My Tho. We talked to MACV. They said road conditions had worsened on Highway 4: “You should not drive for a while. Stay off the roads. If you have to go out to Cai Be, wait ’til you get a chopper.”
We agreed we wouldn’t drive out there again ’til we got an okay from MACV.
I went to Bangkok for a week of vacation. Pete probably got tired of sitting around. Choppers weren’t going that way. There hadn’t been any incidents on the road.
The intelligence was very tentative and you took your chances. We didn’t think bad things would happen to us. The incident on the road was scary, but it was proof.
I touched down in Saigon and went out to the IVS house. Don Luce told me the news. It was just unbelievable. I’d been looking forward to getting back and getting to the work Pete and I had going. It was one of the saddest days of my life.
I have another thought: If I hadn’t been in Bangkok, I’d have been dead, too.
A week before my fifteenth birthday, Pete called home and spoke with my mother, Holly, and me. Afterward, he told Nana about the call. He said he hadn’t gotten a letter from any of us in a month or two. Mom wasn’t feeling well. Dad was in California with a helicopter project. I had come back from summer camp “with an overwhelming crush on one of Oklahoma’s young, very young, men.”
He had his hands full with new IVS recruits. “Two of them are girls, which means trouble, a priori, and sure enough they are trouble,” he wrote. “Always wanting attention and Western food and that sort of thing. I’ll live, though.” The female volunteers were a fine bunch, he was sure, but an administrative headache. “And they are so uninhibited and unruly. Man alive.”
Two days later, he asked in his last letter home, “Is Jill over her enormous crush? Boy, I sure wish I could have been around to see the phenomenon.”
He was thinking of quitting IVS in June, before his contract ended. Working for USOM instead, he would make more money. Or he might hire on with a construction company. He wanted to get married and go to graduate school at the same time, if he were to get married.
Returning to the subject of Margo, he enumerated more of the qualities he admired in her, addressing my mother:
The thing about Margo is that she’s (1) quiet and poised, though not a mouse — very reserved and discreet, is what I’m trying to say. (2) She has a special sense of humor and I can be as droll as I want and she appreciates it. Maybe droll is not the word. (3) She’s got a roundabout way of expressing her feelings, sort of like Chinese or Japanese paintings — delicate and reserved, but says what she feels at the right moments. I mean, she’s not precipitous. (4) She’s not a sports or athletic type, but appreciates taking walks and playing golf, and sunning or digging in the sand pile. . . . (5) She’s got a broad outlook even though she votes Goldwater — likes French chansons, etc. (6) In summary, she’s most like you, and Jackie Kennedy, except she isn’t brittle, as I thought Jackie Kennedy was just a bit.
Margo was not raised to be a housewife, as I was not raised to be a garage mechanic, though she’d do all right and isn’t ambitious as I’m ambitious to some extent. On the other hand, she’s less idealistic and excitable than I am, but still she’s not money-conscious. Mostly, she’s a hard girl to figure. She’s the only girl I know that has some special qualities you have, a lot of breeding, that doesn’t consider Oklahomans or Missourians as “quaint” or “novel” though she appreciates my background, enjoys my company when I cast puns or corny anecdotes.
Well, I don’t know if the attraction we had for each other will last. I think it will. This summer was the first time in six years we ever told each other how we felt about the other, and the attraction was based on that six years of acquaintance.
Many years later, after I found Pete’s letters, I remembered something my friend Patty told me when her husband died. She said that, in the grieving process, it helps to write a letter to the person who is gone.
I wrote to Pete and said I was sorry I hadn’t written to him more often. I asked him how he had come up with a way to build a windmill. I said I was proud of him and would love him forever.
I had told my brother while he was alive that I loved him, and I’m sure he knew it, but I wish I had told him more often.
THIRTEEN
Pete’s Long-Lost Letters Surface
T
hree years after Sue Patterson called and offered me her scrapbooks with Pete’s letters, I stood inside a highway gift shop in southern Massachusetts, waiting for her. It was All Souls’ Day, November 2, 2003.
I had spent the previous two days in Vermont, visiting my daughter at college. Sue and I hadn’t spoken since August 2000, but knowing I would be coming east for Parents’ Weekend, I had written to ask if we could meet.
A woman about sixty years old with penetrating blue eyes stepped out of a car. I recognized her at once as Sue. Indoors, where we talked and drank coffee, she asked again if I would like the letters. We realized that we had misread each other, both of us thinking the other was reluctant when Sue first said she would share Pete’s letters. Now our only consideration was how to get them safely from Massachusetts to California. She suggested bringing them out and the two of us spending a day making photocopies.
Sue was now a hospice administrator. When I told her that my mother had transformed our living room into a shrine to Pete when I was in high school, she nodded. The “shrine period” could last two to three years, she told me, and the grieving period usually lasted about a year.
She thought Pete must have been lonely in Vietnam and must have sought female companionship there. I didn’t know. I asked, though, if she recognized a name my parents had mentioned: Margo Bradley. “Yes,” she said evenly. “I think I heard that name.”
Over the next few months, Sue and I tried to find a few days when she could visit me in California, but meshing our schedules proved difficult. In the meantime, she sent me a spool of audiotape. Inside the three-inch-square box was a note from Pete, saying he had bought a tape recorder for fifteen dollars and was going to send it. It was to be a graduation gift from her father after she finished nursing school. “Love you, Sue, think about you all the time,” the note ended.
Since reel-to-reel tape recorders are hard to find, I took the tape to KQED Radio in San Francisco, where I had begun contributing commentaries on the subject of war and peace. As a favor to me, one of the engineers transferred the audio onto a compact disc. I drove home with it, wondering what it would be like to hear Pete’s voice again for the first time in forty years.
I popped the CD into my player.
“The first of our little recordings are beginning,” he said on July 6 or 7, 1964. “I can’t think of anything to say. Sort of strange, talking to the box here. It’s a terrible substitute, especially at twelve o’clock at night.” Slurping noises followed.
The voice wasn’t what I was expecting. I was surprised that I could have forgotten how my brother sounded.
It was the spring of 2004, a season that ushered in a series of amazing discoveries.
“We have a big surprise for you,” Cis told me, unlocking the door of Mom’s house in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
I had flown there to help my sisters decide what to do with our mother’s possessions. Dad had passed away seven years before. For a few years afterward, Mom lived in her own house next door to Cis. Then she suffered a stroke and needed more help than her caregiver could provide, so
we moved her to a nursing home in the neighborhood. Physical therapy restored some of her mobility, but my sisters and I eventually realized that she would not be able to return to her home.
By now, dementia had robbed her of many of her memories, but it also had softened her personality. She didn’t worry as much. She was more relaxed with us and laughed easily. From her small room, she admired the beauty of the cardinals and trees outside her window, often exclaiming how tall were the loblolly pines, as if seeing them for the first time. She always recognized my sisters and me, and loved it when we told her stories about our lives and hers. She could be peremptory with the attendants, but they knew how to get along with her. When she regressed for a while to her years at a summer camp where only French was spoken, they actually found someone on staff who could translate.
To pay her bills, we needed to rent her house. But first we had to decide what to do with her possessions. It wouldn’t be easy. She was a saver, a Connecticut Yankee who hung on to things, even grocery lists and rough drafts of thank you notes.
I followed Cis into the house, which was empty except for rented tables onto which she and Holly had placed the accumulation of our parents’ fifty-year marriage, including travel souvenirs, knickknacks, family heirlooms, and even some wedding presents in the original wrapping. I took in the piles of piano music and musty hardcover books, and paintings leaning against the walls.
“You’ll never believe what we found,” Holly said as we walked into the living room. In the far corner sat my old, blue camp footlocker. “It was locked, but Frank found the key,” Cis said.
I knelt and raised the lid to behold a jumble of papers in utter disorder. Then I saw them: Pete’s long-lost letters from Vietnam.
I took in the slender, elongated handwriting — so much like mine — on dozens of letters and thin blue aerograms. Photographs of smiling Vietnamese and cactus-and eucalyptus-studded landscapes peeked from envelopes still bearing their stamps from the now-nonexistent Republic of Vietnam.
Sympathy cards bulged from large brown bags. Carefully, I parted papers that covered reels of eight-millimeter film and spools of audiotape in boxes mailed from overseas. There were road maps of Vietnam, photo albums, Pete’s handmade Chinese-language flash cards, and other windows into his world.
I resisted the urge to rifle through the letters. It wasn’t hard, because Cis was determined for us to get to work and sort Mom and Dad’s possessions in three days. She had been storing many of them at her house and wanted to reclaim the space.
She and Holly agreed to ship the trunk to me once I was home again, knowing that of the three of us, I was the one most determined to learn what had happened to Pete.
Two months later, Pete’s personal effects were on their way to California. In anticipation of their arrival, I ordered chocolate éclairs from a bakery. I felt as if Pete were finally coming home, and it seemed only right to have one of his favorite desserts on hand.
I asked a friend to stand by for a phone call when the trunk was delivered. The occasion seemed too important to experience alone. Once the box containing the trunk was on the floor of my carport, we unpacked it and looked inside at the disheveled contents. We shook our heads to think that these papers, so valuable in my sight, had received such careless treatment.
I couldn’t resist looking at a few letters, including one addressed to me, but I mostly held off. I wanted to read them in order. Besides, they were fragile and I didn’t want to over-handle the aged originals.
Over several days, I organized all the contents of the trunk. I arranged the letters chronologically. Then I took them to the copy store and made three sets of photocopies: one for myself and one for each of my sisters.
Cis, Holly, and I had waited a long time to read these letters — in fact, we had never hoped to see them again. I wasn’t going to withhold them now. We had recently lost our father and two fond uncles. Our mother’s mental capacity was dimming. Through our losses, my sisters and I had grown closer. We had learned to rely on each other’s particular strengths for the many tasks that adult children face as their elders age. I was not going to hoard Pete or his letters, as Mom had. I was determined not to let another day pass before sending my sisters the letters that, finally, I understood belonged to all of us.
On June 25, 2004, I sat down in my living room to read my brother’s words forty years after he wrote them. I took my time. I wanted to savor them. In his sense of humor, intelligence, and buoyancy that trumped whatever frustrations he aired, Pete came to life again. Poring over the letters, I encountered the same energetic personality I remembered.
It was evening when midway through my reading I walked into the kitchen for a glass of water. Suddenly it hit me that the stack of letters was getting shorter and I would soon reach the last one. Pete would be dead. I sobbed at the stark reality that his life, so full of promise, had come to an abrupt end.
I resumed my reading the next night. As I put down the last letter, I felt something I have not experienced before or since: I sensed that Pete was in the room. So vivid was this impression, and so specific as to where he was standing, that I reached out my hand. I wondered if the space would feel warm, or cold, or of form. It did not.
Not knowing what to make of this sensation, I asked an Episcopal priest and friend about it. He told me that he had once led a class for widowed spouses, and that when he asked how many of them had sensed their wife’s or husband’s presence, everyone in the group raised a hand. All had perceived their loved one nearby, on “the other side.”
How can you know? I asked. He shrugged. Well then, if it is “real,” I pressed, what does it mean? He said that, for some reason, God has permitted the veil between the seen and unseen worlds to be thinner at certain times and certain places, such as around Halloween and at, for example, Machu Picchu and Iona, Scotland. Our loved ones may also draw close when we need them, he said, but they don’t stay long.
There was no proving any of this, but it was comforting. Since then, I have felt what I can only describe as a “softening” around All Hallows’ Eve.
Along with sixty-four letters Pete wrote to my family, the trunk contained back issues of Time, Life, and National Geographic magazines featuring Vietnam; the “IVS Handbook” and annual reports from 1963 through 1966; the Office of Rural Affairs manual; and articles about the war in general and Pete in particular.
A bag of frayed ribbons, some with small metal or plastic ornaments attached, triggered my memory of a photograph in the lacquer box sent to my parents by Don Luce. Soon I had matched the ribbons to a letter from the IVS office, confirming that they were collected from a dozen floral wreaths at the memorial service in Saigon. Someone had been thoughtful enough to send them to my parents.
When I unfurled a length of white fabric, painted entirely in Vietnamese save for the word “Hunting,” I recognized it from a color slide I had seen. It was the dedication banner from the library in Phan Rang.
There were horoscope booklets, the kind sold near cash registers, for Cancer, Pete’s astrological sign; Sagittarius, my sisters’; and Scorpio, my father’s and mine. In a chapter called “Character Analysis” in the Scorpio book, my mother had darkly underlined the words “inhuman insensibility towards the natural feelings and reactions of others.” She had almost obliterated, with a pencil, the sentence “You understand life, its difficulties and problems, and are capable of deep sympathy and true understanding.”1
In the Cancer booklet, the monthly outlook for the month Pete was killed urged “extra care in travel, especially if you drive your own car. . . . Taking chances is not advisable.” The day of his death carried a warning of “unforeseen enmity.”2 My mother had underscored those words and drawn a large exclamation mark in the margin.
A leather album opened to a photograph of Pete in a tuxedo, standing beside a beautiful brunette wearing a black dress and white gloves. Somewhere, years before, I had seen a picture of Margo and knew this was she. On the next pages were sch
ool photos of Holly and me.
Cis had sent me a hand-held viewer so I could preview Pete’s films. I looked at the fourteen reels he had sent home before I took them to a professional for transfer onto DVD. Although many were blotchy from heat damage, they brought back memories of watching Pete’s latest movies from Vietnam with my parents and Holly in Oklahoma City. Tears gathered to my eyes when I came upon the footage of Pete’s last homecoming and the two of us standing side by side.
In his address book, I turned to the letter B and found “Margo Bradley.” Having heard my parents mention her name long ago but knowing very little about her, I was surprised to see that her parents’ home was within twenty miles of my grandmother’s. I wondered if I would ever learn what Pete and Margo had meant to each other, let alone meet her.
Reading Pete’s letters had been a mostly enjoyable experience, because he came to life on the page. The two hundred sympathy letters and cards stuffed into paper bags were another story. Many were drenched with emotion. Some were beautifully crafted examples of a disappearing literary form.
I grouped them into categories of IVS people, U.S. government employees, Wesleyan contacts, and so on. Pete had made good friends. I wondered what direction their lives had taken in the intervening years.
Kirtland Mead was one friend I wondered about. He had written to my parents from Germany, where he was studying on a Fulbright scholarship:
I learned of Peter’s tragic end only yesterday. A fraternity brother wrote me, knowing that I was Peter’s friend and would want to know any news about him, however tragic.
There will be many letters like this. Endowed with unusual personal warmth, he had the rare ability to have many close friends. If our experience at Alpha Delta Phi is any indication, Peter was surely the most popular American in the Delta. . . . The only thing that alleviates the sorrow I feel at this loss is that I know he will always be remembered by all the people he was able to help. . . .