Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  I am among those he helped. . . . I came to college rather achievement-oriented. I worked much too hard freshman year, and thus missed many of the opportunities for development with people which were so characteristic of the Wesleyan environment. More than anyone else those early years, Peter taught me these things. Either in the Yacht Club or at night over coffee, he always seemed to have time to listen and to talk. I wish I could say I had given him one-third of what he gave me in the way of attitudes for life. . . . In the midst of deciding what he should do after college, he still had faith that something would come, refused to see life as ruthless or full of tension.

  As you may know, he called me at college from Oklahoma City last year when he was home. I was immensely glad to hear he found his work meaningful, a sense of direction was what he needed; I hope I am right in assuming from this call that he had found it before the end. The world would be too cruel if people so good as Peter were denied even the right to personal satisfaction after having given so much. . . .

  To go with my sincerest condolences in a time of sorrow, I have taken the liberty of composing a poem in terms of the imagery of sailing, where Peter and I first found common ground for friendship. The quest is for the island which must lie over the horizon. I will always remember your son Peter because he made the voyage so beautiful, because he helped me and so many others along the way, and because in the end he found the island.

  He had enclosed a poem called “Sea of Clouds,” written in his own hand. Was he now a published poet or a literature professor? On the Internet, I found his name and a telephone number, and guessed it was the same man. I left him a message, asking if he was the Kirtland Mead who had known Pete Hunting. The next day, he called me.

  Kirt remembered a drive into Manhattan from his family’s home on Long Island. While he sat in the back seat, his father, who had grown up in China, and Pete “rattled on” in Mandarin.

  Pete had visited the Alpha Delta Phi house while he was on home leave, and he and Kirt had stayed up all night talking about Vietnam. “I remember after that discussion telling a friend, ‘This guy is more dangerous to the Vietcong than a whole platoon of soldiers,’ ” he told me. “He was a natural leader.”

  I asked if he remembered a poem he had enclosed with his letter to my parents and if he would like to have copies of both. After I sent them, he explained the meaning of “Sea of Clouds”:

  The poem was first written, if memory serves, in early 1965, as we all realized that our comfortable college world was ending and that we needed to confront the real world. The title came from the Sea of Clouds on the moon, where NASA had landed a probe in preparation for the Apollo manned missions, then in heavy development.

  I sent it unchanged to your parents, believing that it symbolized any young man’s voyage into the unknown. We must all imagine, as I said in my note, that Peter found an Island of repose somewhere over the horizon. He deserved it.

  Peter was that very rare individual who has great dreams and quietly proceeds to make them come true. He was a man of quiet strength and principles who got on with it, living out his destiny. I would have wished to compose the poem directly for him, rather than “repurpose” it as I in fact did. He was not, in my memory, a sailor from birth, as I am, but he liked the sport when I took him along to race Raven sloops in New London at the Coast Guard Academy. He was always up for an adventure and a lark. More than once we got pretty wet riding the rail and screaming downwind under spinnaker. . .

  Please keep in touch. Short of having Peter back, it is nevertheless a great consolation to know that he has a baby sister as loving as you so obviously are.

  We not only kept in touch, but Kirt and his wife, Susan, visited me in California three years later. By then, Kirt, who was not a poet by profession but an international business consultant, was writing poetry again.

  Some letters contained an intriguing detail about Pete’s last day, such as the one from an official of the U.S. Operations Mission working in the Mekong Delta. He stated that for whatever comfort it might offer my parents, Pete’s death was not the result of any “foolhardy action.” Pete was driving on a road that he knew involved some risk, the man said, but it was a risk many Americans took every day in the performance of their duties. Indications were that Pete was killed “almost instantly.” The man offered to send my parents an official report when it was completed.3 He enclosed a sketch of Pete, assumed to be the work of a Vietnamese friend, which he had found on the seat of Pete’s vehicle. It was the same drawing that had sat framed on a shelf in my parents’ house when I was in high school.

  I studied the current IVS alumni directory and old annual reports to match men and women to sympathy letters identifying the writer as a volunteer. Some were no longer living, such as Harold Kooker, whose chance meeting with Pete outside a barbershop in Vinh Long had made him the last teammate to see Pete alive.

  Some IVSers’ family members had reached out to my parents. Carl Stockton had begun doctoral studies at Oxford University when he learned of his teammate’s death from his sister, Virginia. While still in Vietnam, he had asked Pete to call her while he was home on leave. Carl, Virginia, and their mother had all sent their condolences. I sent him their three letters, for which he was grateful.

  I had once believed it was wrong, or at least improper, to ask questions about my brother. When at first I started contacting people who knew him, I had wondered if they would deem my interest in Pete morbid — not unlike the annual visits that the Civil War general Daniel Sickles paid to his amputated leg, which he had lost at Gettysburg, in the Army Medical Museum.

  But as one by one I met Pete’s friends and found them glad to talk with me, I began to overcome the emotional guardedness I had learned at home. We hadn’t discussed Pete, and now I was talking about him with anyone, including complete strangers. The more I did, the more I started to fully inhabit my own life.

  Kirt Mead, Carl Stockton, and Frank Wisner were among the many in Pete’s circle who had gone on to distinguished careers in the private sector, academics, and public service. They had been shaped by Vietnam. “It makes me sad all over again to think of Peter, maybe more so than when I was so young,” the political economist and former Commerce Department official Paul London told me. “He missed a great deal that I have been privileged to have.”

  They had been shaped, and I was being reshaped. My long journey to retrieve the connection with my brother had put me in touch with something beyond myself. My story of loss and family and war was not merely personal, I was learning, but something I shared with many.

  The trunk also contained correspondence between the IVS offices in Washington and Saigon, and my parents. Executive Director Gardiner sent the most specific account of the ambush I had yet uncovered, in the form of a letter Don Luce wrote to the team on November 15, 1965:

  It is difficult to write of the tragic death of Pete Hunting. I do hope a fuller account will make it a little easier in this difficult time.

  We received news of Pete’s death at 4:00 P.M. November 12. His body was flown immediately by helicopter to Saigon.

  He was ambushed fifteen kilometers southwest of Can Tho on his way to Soc Trang at 2:48 P.M. Friday November 12. Five minutes before the ambush, he had passed a military convoy. They reported to have seen two Vietnamese in the car, which one villager later said left with the Viet Cong. The [Associated Press] reported that these two “were believed to have joined the Viet Cong.” There seems to be no basis for this statement. It is just as likely that an ambush was set up for the convoy and the two passengers were forced to go with the Viet Cong.

  The road which Pete was driving on was driven on a fairly regular basis by Americans including the province representative. Pete had checked one source and had been told it was all right to go. That morning he had informed the regional director of USOM he was driving to Soc Trang.

  IVS/Washington was immediately called by military phone. They informed Pete’s family. IVS/Washington was req
uested to send flowers from the IVS members in Vietnam. We also requested that Willi Meyers, a close friend of Pete and a former IVS/Vietnam member, represent us at the funeral. . . .

  The loss of Pete Hunting affects us all deeply. I know that Pete would want us to continue our work in the same spirit which he exhibited during his life.

  I remembered Gloria Johnson’s letter to Don, in which she described him looking more worried after Pete’s death than she had ever seen him. She, along with Phyllis and David Colyer, all former team members, had asked Don what would become of IVS now that a volunteer had been killed. I thought of the anxious parents learning of an IVSer’s “murder,” as it was widely reported, and what little comfort IVS could realistically offer them as to their sons’ and daughters’ safety. I considered Don’s loyalty to his Vietnamese friends and his concern for their future, and what I had heard about his disinclination to believe Vietnamese friends could have led Pete to his death.

  For the first time, I grasped the awful position Don had been in, as IVS’s in-country director. He was just thirty-one, and not only had he lost a good friend and colleague, but the organization’s future and the lives of his team were in his hands.

  Don believed that IVS should continue in Vietnam and Pete would want it to, and it did.

  Three mysteries remained:

  Who were the two passengers in Pete’s vehicle?

  Why did my mother say that Pete’s letters had been destroyed?

  Who was Margo?

  A single word in a letter led me to the enigmatic person whom I had all but given up on finding. Writing to my mother from Rome, Pete said Margo seemed to have changed since her knew her at “Manhattanville.”

  I went to the Web site of Manhattanville College and tried to divine, from the list of staff members, whom to approach. In an e-mail I said I hoped to find an alumna who had been a friend of my parents. Assuming the college’s policy might prevent the release of her personal information, I offered to write a letter that could be forwarded to her.

  Two weeks later, the recipient of my e-mail, who had been on vacation until then, sent me Margo’s address and married name.

  I composed a note to her: I hoped I hadn’t startled her too much by writing. I knew she was important to Pete. Would she be interested in corresponding with me?

  A few days later, I came home to find a message waiting on my answering machine:

  Hello, Jill. This is Margo. I was absolutely floored to receive your letter. It seems we’re on the same wavelength. About six months ago I pulled out Pete’s letters to me and started to edit them with the thought of sharing them with a wider audience. Of course, I wouldn’t have done anything without contacting you and your family. But I hadn’t had any luck trying to find you on the Internet. I was thrilled to hear from you.

  That evening, we spoke for an hour. I asked how she had learned of Pete’s death. She was working in an office in Manhattan when a friend called and said she had just heard some terrible news on the radio. Without saying a word to anyone, Margo picked up her purse, left the office, and walked to the friend’s home. A call to the radio station confirmed the report. That was a Friday. On Monday she returned to work because, as she said, in those days it was expected.

  She had married, but her husband was no longer living. She never told him about the young man who had died in Vietnam.

  Were she and Pete engaged, I asked. No, but they had “talked all around it.” Pete wanted her to come to Vietnam and teach English, but that had been his dream, not hers. “We thought we would live forever,” she said.

  She was sorry to hear that my father had passed away and my mother’s memory was failing. She had corresponded with them.

  I remembered Mom saying that, after a while, she encouraged Margo not to feel bound to our family and to go on and live a full, happy life. The letting-go gesture must have been difficult. My mother had many admirable traits, and one of her best was that she took the high road.

  Margo asked if she had been able “to go on with things,” because “she seemed to have done that so well.” When I said she had shown that persona to the outside world, Margo understood. She recalled her saying, “I keep pushing things back in the closet.”

  Calling my sisters by the nicknames used only in our family, she asked about “Cissy and Holly.” She was happy to hear that they were doing well and we all had children. She had nephews and a niece, but no children of her own. She asked if I was in touch with Pete’s friend Gene. I gave her his address.

  I inquired about her parents. Her mother was gone now, but her father was in his nineties. He still lived in the house he purchased from my grandfather’s estate, she said, and she and her sisters grew up there. Had I stopped to think when I found Pete’s address book that relatives of mine in Connecticut still lived in the same house after fifty years, I would have written to Margo at that address right away.

  Did I know, she asked, that her father had worked for my grandfather? Having gone through dozens of boxes of Mom’s papers, I knew from newspaper clippings that Mr. Bradley succeeded my grandfather as president of the company he founded. One article had a photograph of Mr. Bradley with a few employees and members of my family when they unveiled a plaque in Popeye’s honor.

  Holly had once heard a relative say that our grandfather had a “mistress,” to whom he left a house. I had come across his will and seen the woman’s name, so when I saw her in the newspaper photograph, I had put all this together. She worked for my grandfather and probably had an intimate relationship with him. When he died, she stayed with the company as a corporate officer and worked with Margo’s father. That explained my grandmother’s reaction to the Bradley name. Nana must have been bitterly jealous not to forgive Mr. Bradley for associating with her rival for Popeye’s affection. If, having been under Nana’s influence, my mother was also a jealous wife, that too made sense.

  Speaking with Margo, I detected nothing remotely “controversial” about her. She seemed so genteel, in fact, that I was sure now that I understood why Pete had used that word. The controversy belonged to the past.

  Margo said she would like to send Pete’s letters and to return a posthumous medal my mother had given her. She felt that the medal belonged in our family. Although I had said nothing about the medal, my sisters and I had wondered why our mother would give away a memento of our brother.

  As our conversation came to a close, Margo said Pete had told her not to worry about his safety. He had, however, mentioned dangerous situations he’d been in and close calls he’d had. She asked whether he had said anything to the family about an ominous scene he witnessed shortly before his death. He had not.

  One day the sky had suddenly turned dark, she said, then three cranes alighted from a grove of trees. Pete’s interpreter started shaking, but when Pete asked him what was wrong, he wouldn’t say. Margo received the letter a few days after Pete was killed.

  I had been taking notes, because I didn’t think I would remember all the details of our conversation and I wanted to tell my sisters about it.

  “Premonition?” I wrote.

  Four days later, I received three notebooks, each containing forty-two of Pete’s letters edited and typed by Margo. I mailed two of the notebooks to my sisters.

  A week and a day after that, Sue’s scrapbooks with sixty-eight letters arrived.

  With the sixty-four letters Pete wrote home and one given to me by John Sommer, I now had 175.

  After reading Pete’s letters to Margo, I still didn’t know how they had met or what their dreams for the future might have been, so I asked if she would write an introduction to the letters. She sent this:

  I was 23 years old, and living and working in New York City when Pete Hunting was ambushed and killed thousands of miles from his loved ones in a country virtually unknown to most Americans at that time. He was the man I had hoped to marry. We thought we had our whole lives ahead of us, but on that terrible November day when death took Pete and all of h
is personal hopes and dreams for the future, my life, too, changed forever.

  In [his letters], written between 1963 and 1965, Pete recounted several “near misses” with the Viet Cong, but he always brushed off concerns for his safety. In hindsight, I believe he refused to let any fear he may have felt drive him away from those he was trying to help. Because of his attitude, I simply didn’t fully grasp the dangers he faced working in a war zone, and so his death was all the more unexpected and traumatic.

  In difficult times, we must always keep something beautiful in our hearts. For me, that meant getting through those first grief-filled days, weeks, and months by remembering the many good times Pete and I had shared. Our paths first crossed when we were just kids at Lake Sebec in Maine where his family and mine were staying with Pete’s maternal grandfather. Back then, Pete delighted in spending hours climbing over rocks, exploring the woods, and swimming in ice-cold water. We were far too young and much too different in our interests to be the slightest bit attracted to one another.

  That all changed years later when Pete came East to attend Wesleyan University. By then, he was all grown up, quite handsome, bright, funny, totally unpretentious, and full of Midwestern charm. I had never met anyone quite like him. For the next four years we dated until he joined IVS and left for his great adventure in Vietnam shortly after graduation. Over the next two years, our letters substituted for dates. I saw him for the last time just four months before his death while he was on home leave between his two tours of service.