by Jill Hunting
In time, I tucked Pete’s letters in a desk drawer and pushed memories of him into the farthest recesses of my mind. But we never truly forget those we have loved. Four decades later I retrieved and re-read Pete’s letters and decided to share them with his sisters so they would know even more about their remarkable brother. . . .
Pete was a warm-hearted and generous-spirited human being. These personality traits and his inimitable style come across in [his] letters in which he provides lively accounts of the projects he worked on while in Vietnam — from hamlet education and flood relief to the building of windmills, rabbit hutches, and wells. He was passionate about his work, despite frustrating bureaucratic and other obstacles that created delays, and delighted in the Vietnamese people who he had come to love and admire.
I received Pete’s last letter a few days after his death. He had just witnessed a scene of awesome beauty that may also have been an omen of how violently his life would end. He had also had a surprising encounter with an elderly man who had been with the Viet Minh during the war against the French. Pete was in soaring spirits. The former freedom fighter had understood and approved of what Pete was doing — as did so many others.
We began corresponding regularly. Margo shared some of her happy memories of “Mr. Russell,” the name she used to refer to my grandfather. In Maine, her family and Popeye’s employees stayed with him at one of the two hunting camps he owned at Lake Sebec. My family stayed at the other camp. She told me about taking rides around the lake in my grandfather’s Chris Craft and waving when they saw us on our dock.
She recalled the all-day drive through New England along rough backroads, the hot dog stand where they always stopped, and the heads that turned as Popeye’s eight-passenger black Cadillac sped through small towns. She described the good-natured shouting when a client capsized his canoe and the nightly amusement of someone calling out, after everyone had turned in, that there was a bear in his room. We reminisced about swimming in the frigid lake and roughing it in houses without electricity or running water.
She knew the people and places of my childhood as well as a member of my own family. We were related by two men, my grandfather and Pete.
I suggested that we meet in New York on my return from Italy that fall. When I asked my travel agent to reserve a room for me in the hotel Margo recommended, she advised me, “It’s more expensive than the Waldorf. Do you want me to find you something else?” It was all right, I said. If I were to pro-rate the cost over the many years I had waited to meet Margo, the room would seem quite reasonable.
Before the year 2004 closed, Larry Laverentz called to say he had found an address for the intelligence operative who told him a rumor about Pete’s killing. I wrote to Mr. O’Connor and asked if he would tell me what he remembered.
I wanted to learn anything I could, so when he called me, I said I had heard the worst of the story by now. I didn’t want him to worry about my reaction to whatever he might tell me.
I said I had heard that the road was well traveled and that an ambush there would have been unusual. “It could happen anywhere,” he said. “On any road.”
I had heard that Pete had started carrying a weapon. I wondered if he had tried to defend himself. “It doesn’t matter if you have a gun on the seat,” he said. “If someone puts a gun to your ear, you’re not going to reach for the gun.
“He was led away. That’s what I heard,” O’Connor said. “He was very highly regarded. That’s what I remember of Pete.”
O’Connor starting talking about an explosion he had barely survived. He had feigned death. He remembered the episode vividly, including the man who put his gun to O’Connor’s chest and the other who said not to bother shooting him because he was obviously dead.
His story was gripping, but I couldn’t get my mind off “He was led away.” If that were true, then Pete had not died instantly. He had experienced terror in his final minutes.
“How would they have stopped Pete?” I asked.
“They could block the road, shoot a tire out, or wave him down,” he said. “He might think they were friendlies. This is all conjecture. An ambush can mean several things. A roadblock was an ambush then: a tree across the road, you move the tree, a mine blows up. All it takes is that somebody stands out in the road with a weapon and he wears jungle greens or ODS, olive drabs, or they could step out with a weapon and Pete could step out of the vehicle — ‘What’s the problem?’ ”
If he had tried to talk to the assailants, wouldn’t speaking Vietnamese have looked suspicious and made the situation more dangerous?
“You speak Vietnamese, you’re a suspect right from the beginning, you’re CIA. He was an effective American. Pete was one of the first of us civilians to go. Civilians were high profile, especially positively effective ones. And damaging to their efforts. You don’t have to carry a weapon to destroy the enemy. He was loved by the Vietnamese.”
After O’Connor was nearly killed, the province chief had mounted an operation to kill the guys that “did” him, he said. “They got all but one. I met him about three years later. I was in the village, and he kept grabbing at my left arm, which was very tender — I had a fourteen-to sixteen-inch gash. He said, ‘I’m so happy to see you’re alive. If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have done it.’ It took a load off that man’s shoulders.”
Was it true that the people who killed Pete were executed?
“If I recall correctly, they went and mounted an operation,” O’Connor said. “They went after them and reported it was successful.”
I asked what the purpose of killing them would have been.
“To say, ‘You can’t do that to those that are helping us.’ To send a message: ‘They shouldn’t have done this to him, and they shouldn’t do it to his successor.’ ” I remembered an IVSer named Roger Hintze, who came after Pete, saying that someone from a nearby village warned him never to drive on the road south of Can Tho.
O’Connor went back to Vietnam after the war. He met General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese army commander. “We talked one on one as old warriors,” he said. “He told me, ‘We were ready to give up, but we saw that the [antiwar protests were growing and] you were going to defeat yourselves if we just waited it out.’ We’re going to get an anti-Iraqi sentiment and defeat ourselves again.”
We returned to the subject of Pete. “I remember the total shock throughout the delta,” he said. “Anger. Sorrow. Pete was a little wild in certain ways, he took certain risks — ‘They can’t hurt me, I’m wearing a white shirt.’ He believed in what he was doing. Better yet, the people believed in him. If he was still alive, Pete would be welcome and people would remember him. They don’t forget.”
Four years later, O’Connor called me again. He had come across my letter from 2004 and couldn’t remember if we had ever spoken.
I reminded him of some of the things he told me — that Pete was “led away,” for example. Now he said he’d heard that Pete resisted, that he wasn’t “agreeable in going.” He added, “A VC hothead would just fire his weapon.”
He mentioned the names of several Vietnam hands I should meet. One was a high-ranking foreign service officer who had lived in the Mekong Delta. I knew the man by reputation. It happened that I was on my way to Washington, D.C., where they both lived. O’Connor suggested the three of us have lunch. Nothing came of it.
Since our initial conversation, I had been told he was “a bit of a talker.” I thought back to something he said the first time we spoke: “This is all conjecture.” Then, and still, I was trying to get at the truth about what happened to Pete, but it wasn’t easy sometimes to separate an opinion from a good guess or the facts. In any case, O’Connor told a good story.
FOURTEEN
Darkening Skies
I
n my hands was Pete’s last letter, the one Margo received a few days after his death.
Written sometime early in November 1965, it began, “This job grows on me, although I
can’t think of any specific reason why.”
An old man had expressed approval of his work with youth, and Pete felt good about it. He had been lending a hand to a high school friendship club from the city of Can Tho. The students were young and new to construction work, but they built a road in the hamlet of An Quoi. Their inspiration and stamina for the job had made the project a resounding success.
The road passed by the home of the old man, an artist named Tay-Do, and his wife. They were grateful that their route to town would no longer be muddy. They served lemonade to the hard-working crew.
During a rest break, Tay-Do overheard Pete deliver a pep talk about the students’ important role in their country’s future:
I was telling them how they were the hope of Vietnam — that they probably didn’t realize it, but they were part of the Cach Man Hoa Binh (Peaceful Revolution) of Vietnamese youth. I pointed out that they didn’t like manual labor, that they were the elite, the rich, but the country is doomed if they don’t have an appreciation for the needs of the general society, etc., etc.
It was the first time they’d heard anything practical and personally relevant to themselves.
Tay-Do was listening. He was with the Viet Minh in his younger days, but dropped it and now hates Communists as “betrayers of the revolution.” He’s really an old Mandarin type.
I felt good all over for two or three days after that morning. First they are surprised because you’re an American and actually working. Second you speak Vietnamese and they start giggling as they try to test your fluency. Then they are triply surprised that you can say such things.
As Pete was about to leave, Tay-Do handed him a sketch, inscribed, “For whom has rendered service for the Vietnamese.”
An Quoi was not the first hamlet where Pete had talked with young people about their country’s future. Six months earlier, just before he left Vietnam for home leave, he had been a guest at a celebration in Ba Thap, where he had installed a windmill.
The date was May 1, a holiday when Vietcong soldiers could return to their homes. Pete drank beer with two young men whom he had never seen before. Several months later, a writer named George Chuljean recounted their conversation:
Pete wrote in recalling the incident:
“As we drank, the two young men (named Chou and An) were very friendly and asked more than the usual amount of pointed questions, wanting to know about my job, my relation to the Vietnamese and American governments, my opinion of province officials, and, as usual, my appraisal of Vietnamese womanhood. I’d never before had such a thorough grilling at the hands of two young Vietnamese peasants.”
When he returned to Ba Thap a few days later Chou and An had gone. Commenting in a report on his activities Pete wrote:
“I’ll never know for whose side Chou and An will give their support in the final crucial struggle, but I will always consider myself lucky to have been able to contribute directly and indirectly to Vietnamese understanding of our U.S. role, and of the issues they themselves must decide upon.”1
Sent to my parents after Pete was killed on November 12, the story stated that Pete’s body had been found “slumped alongside his jeep,” contradicting Mr. O’Connor’s story that he had been walked down the road.
On November 11, Pete drove to Long Xuyen, in An Giang Province, to see how Fred Stone’s work was coming along. Fred was helping farmers increase rice and soybean yields, and demonstrating the use of fertilizer and insecticides.
The life of an IVSer could be lonesome, Pete knew. Part of his new job as a regional team leader was to boost his team members’ morale. Sometimes, a volunteer just needed someone to talk to.
He spent the night at Fred’s place. They stayed up late, talking about IVS, the work other volunteers were doing, and their travels. That night, it rained very hard. “Pete was his usual self,” Fred remembers. “Very enthusiastic, full of energy and ideas.”
The next morning, he left early. He needed to get back to Can Tho, about forty miles away. There, Carey Coulter, another member of Pete’s team, was supposed to show him the place he had just rented in a commercial area near the new bus station. It was big enough for both of them. Pete wanted to have a base in Can Tho because the location would make it easier to get around. Together, they would then drive to Soc Trang, down in Ba Xuyen Province, to see Paul Lukitsch.
Pete had recently helped Paul find a new apartment. Now he was going to arrange for a Vietnamese language teacher for him. He might have had someone in mind — a young lady he had met.
But Carey had a last-minute change of plans. A few evenings earlier, while he was having dinner in a little Chinese restaurant, he overheard some Special Forces men talking about a school they wanted to set up for refugees on Phu Quoc, an island off Vietnam’s southwestern coast. They complained that they weren’t getting anywhere. They needed educational materials. Carey told them he knew the regional education adviser and offered to talk to him. Then, with a USAID man, he went to Saigon and raided a warehouse for school supplies. The USAID man was going to deliver them to the island. But at the eleventh hour, the Special Forces men insisted that Carey come, too.
When Pete reached Can Tho and learned that Carey had gone to the airport, he hurried there to stop him. It was too late. Carey was already on a plane, which was taxiing onto the runway, when he saw Pete pull up in his Scout and get out of the vehicle. He was alone. “I last saw Pete shaking his fist at me,” he recalls.
Carey returned from Phu Quoc and ran into an acquaintance who was relieved to see him alive. The man thought he had left with Pete for Soc Trang and been taken prisoner. In the meantime, Pete’s Scout had been brought back to Can Tho. Carey watched as U.S. personnel examined the vehicle to determine the angle from which every bullet had been fired. Only one was believed to have struck Pete.
Two days later, on November 14, U.S. forces clashed with North Vietnamese units in the Ia Drang Valley, more than three hundred miles away. It was the first major ground battle of the war. On November 19 Time magazine reported, “The toll of Red dead may have reached 600.”2 The number of American casualties in the past four years had just passed the one thousand mark, not counting civilians.
Pete’s last letter concluded with a description of an awesome scene:
I went down to Rach Gia on the far southwest Delta and saw one of the most breathtakingly beautiful scenes in my life. It was as though I’d stepped into a classical Chinese painting come alive.
I was helping our man in Rach Gia distribute cement to a rural hamlet located on the banks of a canal intersection for the construction of pigsties. There was a wooden Y-shaped footbridge connecting the three sections of the hamlet, arched so as to allow boats to pass underneath.
The bank was lined with coconut trees and the houses set back from the trees with their backs to the rice paddies. Looking past the bridge to one end of the hamlet one could see a Khmer temple with a gracefully upward curved spiked roof with coconut trees and cypress trees around the entrance.
Everything was still and dark because heavy black thunderclouds filled the skies. Suddenly there was a flash of lightening and a thunderclap. Three storks or egrets flapped out of the coconut trees on the bank of the canal and flew over the temple. The interpreter with me started shivering and quaking at such omens, but refused to interpret them for me, saying he wasn’t superstitious, yet shuddering and quaking all the time.
Must admit, I shuddered a bit. It was just so beautiful.
From palm readings to subterranean dragons, Pete had come across religious folklore in Vietnam before. He was no stranger to superstition, in fact, having been exposed to it at home. My mother had a predilection for the supernatural. Descended from Puritans and raised in the austerity of New England Congregationalism, she also moved comfortably in their shadow side. She was given to the occasional premonition and would neither kill a white spider, for example, nor allow an umbrella to be opened indoors, because it was bad luck. My father, the son of a Congregation
al minister, placed his faith in reason. Pete probably had a bit of both in him.
Americans and Vietnamese alike drew on folklore and superstition during the war. In Tim O’Brien’s story “Stockings,” in The Things They Carried, an American soldier wears his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck for good luck, even after she breaks up with him.
Major General Edward Lansdale studied Vietnamese proverbs and customs, and applied his understanding of traditional beliefs to counterinsurgency strategy. In 1967, he suggested to American Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker that the U.S. mission compile a list of soothsayers who influenced Vietnamese leaders and whose guidance might run counter to American objectives. He took special note of auspicious dates, religious meanings associated with colors, and jokes and nicknames made up about Americans, and sent memos encouraging others to heed them.3
Developers of psychological warfare also employed traditional beliefs to gain advantage over the enemy. One psyops, or psychological operations, policy advisory prepared by the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office in Saigon stated:
Many Vietnamese, particularly in rural areas, are provoked into a fear response if startled at night by the hoot of an owl or the call of a crow. These are considered death omens. The response will not occur, however, if the sound can be detected in any way as originating from an artificial source, such as a loudspeaker.4
The advisory noted that enemy superstitions could be manipulated “to achieve results favorable to the friendly [South Vietnamese] forces” if “would-be manipulators” were certain the superstitions were real and powerful.5