Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  “Friendly superstitions” were equally important to understand. The same advisory cited a deadly blunder committed by an inexperienced American adviser. Accompanying a South Vietnamese unit on a patrol, he heard sounds that he feared would give away their position. The sounds were coming from stone, wood, and metal amulets worn around the necks of members of the unit. The adviser collected the amulets and had them sent back to the base camp, with tragic consequences. Half of the Vietnamese men were killed. The others were as good as lost, believing it was their time to die because they had lost their protection.6

  Looking for information about the meaning of coconut trees, birds, temples, and darkening skies in Vietnamese tradition, I scoured Internet sites. I was unable to formulate a cohesive interpretation of Pete’s letter. It was then that I turned to a member of the Yale faculty in the Southeast Asia Studies program.

  I asked Van Phu Quang if he could help me understand a scene my brother witnessed in Vietnam. He said he would help if he could. He continued:

  Vietnamese, especially people in the countryside, have observed the signs and patterns of the natural environment in order to know what to think, to make decisions, to predict the future, to interpret events of the past and the present, and to act accordingly.

  Animals such as birds have an important place in observing the signs of nature. Different birds have different meanings (good or bad, or neutral). In Vietnamese folk tales, many stories involve birds.

  Could you elaborate on your question a little, so I can figure out the direction to go?

  I sent Pete’s description of the scene, adding that he had been killed a day or two later.

  After expressing his sympathy, Quang said he would consult a friend whose special interest was Vietnamese folk religion. His own field, he said, was primarily “philosophical questions.” In addition to teaching language and literature, he was a lecturer in Eastern philosophy.

  A few weeks later he apologetically informed me that his friend, and two of that friend’s friends, all agreed that no connection could be made between bad omens and the birds, temple, and storm Pete described. They speculated that the interpreter might have been fearful because of the real danger of violence or the approach of nightfall.

  He then moved from the literal to the philosophical:

  From my perspective, I think it was a personal experience, almost like a religious experience. One is so mindful that one has a sense of awareness of everything, including time and oneself. Everything is so transparent and one can see both life and death. You don’t have to “see” God but you just experience something so “real.”

  Existential philosophers talked about the sense of dread (Kierkegaard, Sartre, for example) — the sense of the present, and it’s very real. That’s my reading.

  C. S. Lewis talked about his conversion experience and something that “overtook” him — some power or spirit. Graham Greene also talked about this conversion experience. It’s like you came down with the flu and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

  Buddhists would use the notion of enlightenment or insight to express this “timelessness of a moment.” One experiences both a sense of the finite (death, danger, fear, dread, sorrow, suffering) and the infinite (solitude, peace, God, joy) at the same time. Perhaps at this moment one also feels “the lightness of being.”

  There are many stories about people who, before they died, experienced or felt things that somehow connected to their death. A Vietnamese man from my church just returned to Vietnam to visit his relatives and children in Saigon. He kept telling them, “This is my last time seeing you.” His relatives told him “not to talk like that.” He died a few days later.

  Vietnamese also believe that if one dreams of losing a tooth (a molar), it’s a sign that some member of the family is going to die.

  Best wishes, and I hope you will make sense of your brother’s omen soon.

  At first I was disappointed. I wondered if Quang was too polite to tell me what a terrible outcome the omens had pointed to. I stubbornly felt that the birds and other details must mean something.

  Then I remembered that I had written the word “premonition” when Margo described the scene to me. I read Pete’s letter again. At first it had seemed to me that he didn’t know what to make of the “breathtakingly beautiful” sight. But now, with Quang’s wider scope, I saw that I had been too focused on a literal answer. I was missing the more important, philosophical perspective. Quang’s interpretation enabled me to relent and understand Pete’s words on another plane.

  As Margo said, and as Pete had written to me, he didn’t want us to worry about his safety. He downplayed the danger he lived with and the risks he took in the performance of his duties. From time to time he expressed the hope that he wouldn’t get shot, and relief after a close call. Death had kept its distance. But after he and Ray Gill narrowly escaped being killed on the road to Soc Trang, they had acknowledged that life was not as certain as it seemed.

  Then at Rach Gia, Pete witnessed something awesome — long-legged birds flying over a temple, a clap of thunder and a shock of light connecting heaven to earth for an instant — that may have given rise to an awareness, even a foreboding, of death. It seems to me now that he was pressing his interpreter for confirmation, not an explanation. He didn’t need to be told what the omens meant. He guessed what they meant.

  With the many plans my brother had, I don’t think at all that he would have resigned himself to death. I do believe, however, that he was prepared to meet it.

  Studying Pete’s letter that day, I took comfort, as I do still, in knowing that the last sentence he wrote was about the awesome beauty of all he had seen.

  A feeling settled in me that Pete had experienced the timelessness of a moment and the oneness of the infinite and the finite. And in feeling this, I laid down the burden of the question I had borne for so long — What happened to Pete? — not with a thud, but gently, as if someone were helping me.

  Pete’s desk, with his typewriter, in Vietnam (date unknown). Photo by Pete Hunting; author’s collection.

  On August 25, 1964, Pete wrote to the author, “You don’t need to worry about my security over here.” Author’s collection.

  Distribution of surplus U.S. bulgur wheat in a Montagnard hamlet, Ninh Thuan Province (date unknown). Photo by Pete Hunting; author’s collection.

  Pete with unidentified Vietnamese volunteers and students in Ninh Thuan Province (December 1964). Pete took visiting Peace Corps volunteer Bob Goodwin, the photographer, to a strategic hamlet where he planned to meet with a youth group. Seeing a man wearing a backpack at the gate, “Pete knew right away that the guard was VC because he had a pack on his back,” Goodwin recalls. “He spun the jeep around and then got out to talk to the guard. He told him that perhaps it was too late in the day for us to be visiting. The guard agreed. Pete had gotten the jeep into position so that we could get out of there fast.” Courtesy of Robert C. Goodwin.

  Ancient Cham towers on Highway 1 near Ba Thap, photographed by Bob Goodwin during a weeklong stay with Pete and his stationmate Jim Hunt (December 1964). From his station in Thailand, Goodwin went to Vietnam for a vacation. To get to Phan Rang from Saigon he was told, “Just go to the airport and find the Aussie captain of the plane that makes the milk run to Phan Rang, Nha Trang, and Dalat.” Courtesy of Robert C. Goodwin.

  In this frame, from one of many eight-millimeter films Pete sent home, his vehicle approaches the Cham towers. The author stopped here in 1991 for a photograph, unaware that Pete had installed a windmill nearby. Ninh Thuan Province (1964). Author’s collection.

  Pete at the wheel of his Land Rover, with a windmill on top, en route to Ba Thap (1964). Author’s collection.

  Pete unkinks a chain for one of the windmills he built for arid Ninh Thuan Province (1964). When the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office published this photograph in 1967, the caption stated, “The Viet Cong killed this man of peace.” Photographer unknown, U.S. Operations Mission;
author’s collection.

  Pete adjusts the mechanism of a windmill. “It looks like the most significant contributions I’ll make as an IVSer will be the things I do on the side while waiting for the Education Program to get moving,” he wrote in June 1964. In 1996, after a trip to Vietnam, former IVS Chief-of-Party Don Luce told the author that the irrigation system Pete introduced was still in use. Photographer unknown, U.S. Operations Mission; author’s collection.

  “Windmill . . . uh. . . ,” Pete, left, wrote of surveying the damage from a windstorm with Jim Hunt, second from left (1964). Later, the pond dried up, “exposing the bare, bleached, and shattered corpse of a once-glorious machine,” Pete said in a letter. “We salvaged the pump and pulleys and retreated to Phan Rang.” Author’s collection.

  IVS hamlet education teammates John Sommer, Pete, Gene Stoltzfus, and Willi Meyers, left to right with unidentified child. Vung Tau, Vietnam (March 1965). Author’s collection.

  Pete with a Cham youth he helped through school. On the back of the photo, Pete described the shirt he was wearing: “Black smock is standard peasant all-duty shirt, known to U.S. military as VC uniform” (February 1965). Author’s collection.

  A sketch of Pete found on the seat of his vehicle after he was killed. It was inscribed “a token of friendship” and signed by the artist, Tay-Do. Author’s collection.

  Pete’s canceled passport. Author’s collection.

  Bottom right: After presenting the medal to the author’s parents, the vice president fastened a bracelet with the seal of his office on the wrists of the author and her two sisters. When Humphrey was criticized for handing out medals instead of positioning himself for the 1968 presidential campaign, Carl T. Rowan defended him in a syndicated column, referring specifically to Pete. Left to right: Humphrey, the author, her mother, and Holly (Cis is not pictured). Photographer unknown; author’s collection.

  Vice President Hubert Humphrey received the author’s family in his office in the White House on April 27, 1966. In a ceremony at the presidential palace in Saigon, South Vietnamese Premier Ky had recently given Humphrey a posthumous medal awarded to Pete. Left to right: Nguyen Phu Duc, minister-consul of the South Vietnamese embassy; Humphrey; and the author’s mother and father. Photo a gift of the vice president; photographer unknown; author’s collection.

  Dedication of the Peter M. Hunting Memorial Library in Phan Rang, Ninh Thuan Province (June 6, 1968). Author’s collection.

  Pete’s “best buddy” on the IVS team, Gene Stoltzfus, and the author meet for the first time (1987). Author’s collection.

  Rice fields, northern Vietnam (1991). Photo by author.

  Former U.S. Congressman Chuck Whalen tries out a rice thresher in northern Vietnam (1991). Photo by author.

  Left to right: Don Luce, Darlene Fairley, Mike Fairley, the author, and Charles Cable on the afternoon after they were held for questioning near Phan Rang (1991). Author’s collection.

  The author shows Ninh Thuan Province officials the location of her home during the meeting in which she proposed that Phan Rang and Sonoma, California, become sister cities. Left to right: Ho Sy Son and Le Van Binh of the People’s Committee; Tran Dinh Song, the author’s guide and interpreter; and the author (2006). Courtesy of James Langworthy.

  The author with the Cham woman whose parents and grandmother knew Pete. One of her sisters is seated at the family loom. My Nghiep hamlet, Ninh Thuan Province (2006). Courtesy of James Langworthy.

  Song and the author honor Pete’s memory near the site where he was killed, Phong Dinh Province (2006). Courtesy of Chuck Theusch.

  FIFTEEN

  “Here Come Blue Eyes!”

  S

  hall we start with champagne?”

  From the moment Margo suggested that we begin our weekend in Manhattan with lunch at Jean Georges, I loved her. The Veuve Clicquot sealed it. When it came to appreciating good wine and food, Margo was more like a sister than my own sisters.

  During long walks and pauses on park benches, we talked more about our families and ourselves. I could see why Pete said she was easy to talk to. I had to restrain my Midwestern impulse to effuse about meeting her at last and the urge to hug her, a practice common in California and now natural even to me.

  We had been exchanging e-mails and letters for several months. In the same period, my sisters began reading Pete’s letters to Mom from time to time, and she enjoyed them. They told her I was in touch with Margo and Sue, and she seemed to recognize their names. Cis, Holly, and I knew she was growing weaker and approaching her life’s end.

  In 2005 my daughter and I went to visit Mom. We pushed her wheelchair through a wooded garden, and she intently watched the birds calling to one another overhead. She cheerfully listened as Cis and I worked on a piano duet we had been trying to master for several years, praising us and enjoying the private concert.

  That July, she passed away. Cis and Holly were at her side. They held the phone to her ear while I told her I loved her. Her eyes were closed and she couldn’t speak any more, but they said she smiled.

  We returned to Connecticut for a service at the cemetery where my father and Pete were buried. An immense yew bush had almost overtaken Pete’s headstone. Grass had long since filled in the rectangle where his grave was once dug, but its outline, slim as a finger, had not gone away.

  My sisters, our children, and I reflected on my mother’s eighty-eight years and her admirable qualities: Her love of beauty. Her easy way with people. Her self-assurance in any social situation. Her depth. Her generosity. Her intellect. Her love for us.

  To be sure, her personality had other facets, and my sisters and I remembered those, too. We asked ourselves why she had kept Pete’s letters from us.

  Did she really think they were destroyed in a basement flood?

  Did she not want to share them, and simply lie?

  Did she not know what condition they were in, and not want to know until the day she felt ready to look at them again?

  We would never know, any more than we would find out how they ended up in my old camp footlocker. What seems most likely is that all three possibilities could have been true at one time or another.

  Sadly, she shouldered her loss largely alone. By withholding Pete’s letters, if that is what she did, she remained isolated but preserved her singular connection with him. The opposite had been true for me. The connection with others who knew my brother had helped me reestablish my connection with him.

  My mother did not pilot our family skillfully through the most difficult of straits, but she ultimately landed me on good ground by doing one thing: she did not throw things away. In the fullness of time I would find a golden lock of her firstborn’s hair, tied with a blue satin ribbon; recipes she clipped, hoping my sisters and I would try them even if she hadn’t taken an interest in cooking; sixty-four letters mailed from Vietnam; and the condolences of people who one day would befriend a sister manquée.

  I forgave my mother and I hope she forgave me.

  When Cis, Holly, and I were making plans to meet in Connecticut, I asked them if they would like to meet Margo. They agreed, but it was only as we were on our way to see her that Cis realized, “This is the person who could have been our sister.”

  We three and Margo, her father, and one of her sisters met for lunch. Mr. Bradley told us about the time when, as a young accountant, he approached my grandfather with some ideas about saving his company money. Not only was Popeye receptive to Mr. Bradley’s ideas, he offered him a job. Some time later, the two of them were on a business trip when my grandfather developed a persistent cough. When they got home, he checked into the hospital and died soon afterward of leukemia.

  The Bradleys remembered my grandfather fondly. They had all been very fond of Pete, too. Margo’s sister recalled his visit when he was home on leave from Vietnam. One morning she, her toddler, and Pete were the only ones up. She remembered Pete following her son around, placing his hand on sharp corners to keep the little one from bu
mping his head.

  Margo showed us the company my grandfather had founded. We drove by the home he had willed to the corporate secretary. Later, when my sisters and I talked about it, we agreed that the “controversy” Pete mentioned in reference to the Bradley name must have derived from my grandmother’s resentment of the other woman. The business had prospered with Mr. Bradley as president; sour grapes also may have contributed to Nana’s judgment.

  After lunch we visited the Bradley home, which my grandfather had originally purchased to lodge clients because there were no hotels close by. The first thing he did was to put in an enormous swimming pool like the one at the farm in Woodbridge.

  When Pete arrived in Connecticut to begin his freshman year at Wesleyan, one of our cousins had called Margo to ask if her cousin from Missouri might stop by to see his grandfather’s old house. The two of them had spent the day by the pool. Our four parents had enjoyed happy afternoons there, too, and Margo and her sister recalled the sound of their laughter.

  It almost seemed to my sisters and me as if we had discovered some long-lost family members. We felt closer to the Bradleys than to some of our own relatives.