Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  I read a passage from the Book of Common Prayer for the consecration of a grave: “O God, whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered: Make us, we beseech thee, deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of life — ”

  Because of the traffic at our backs, my voice is inaudible to Song, Chuck, and Jim, and almost to me. I keep going.

  “ — That, when we shall have served thee in our generation, we may be gathered unto our fathers.”

  I turn to a sentence from the liturgy for the burial of the dead. I will insert my brother’s name. I feel a lump rise in my throat. I read on.

  “And grant that, increasing in knowledge and love of thee, Pete may go from strength to strength in the life of perfect service in thy heavenly kingdom.”

  A forty-two-year-old passerby who has stopped to watch asks Song who I am.

  She is the sister, he says, of a man who was killed near here in 1965.

  The man leads us to the place where there was once a fork in the road. He points to the ground. Song translates. “He says this is where they killed the American. Everyone in the surrounding villages knew about it. His parents told him as a little boy never to come here, because it was very dangerous.”

  Vietnamese believe that a person who dies violently can linger at the place of death. “But Pete is not here,” Song says, “although his spirit seems to be here.”

  I feel that Pete has led me to the place where he was killed, because I needed to see it with my own eyes.

  The man who stopped asks, “Did he come to build a bridge?”

  “He came to teach English,” I say. Pete had done more, but it was the simplest answer.

  He came to teach. And he built a bridge. One measured not by its span, but by what it brought closer: stranger to friend, brother to sister, once to once again, the faraway come near.

  Acknowledgments

  Some people say that to write a book you have to have faith in yourself. I relied instead on my friends’ faith in me. There from the beginning were Robin Kline and Bill Summers, Sandra Day, Antonia Allegra, and others in my “Umbrian family,” along with Lois and Jack Chambers. My mentor Patty Johnston and Bill and Caryn Reading stayed close at every turn. There were many.

  Thank you to these individuals who helped with the book in specific ways:

  My two sisters, who encouraged me to tell our family’s personal story.

  Margo, Sue, and John for permission to use their letters from Pete.

  The International Voluntary Services family, especially Larry Laverentz, Don Luce, Willi Meyers, John Sommer, and Gene Stoltzfus, and dozens of other IVS alumni who answered questions and offered information. Thank you, IVSers, for your service in Vietnam.

  Chuck Theusch, founder of the Library of Vietnam project, for inviting me to join his delegation in 2006; Kaeti Bailie, who having pioneered one sister city for Sonoma, California, inspired me to propose another, in Vietnam.

  The CBS News Archives Division, for locating a transcript of the November 12, 1965, Evening News broadcast; and librarians at Michigan State University, the Library of Michigan, Oberlin College, and UCLA.

  Richard Boylan and Daniel Rooney, archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration, for help in locating military information; Jim Henthorn, whose Web site, http://www.nexus.net/~911gfx/vietnam.html, generated the map with the X; and Miles Brown, Jessica Lightburn at the Pentagon, and Mary Claire Murphy, formerly of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, for leading me to Mike Hunsucker of the U.S. Air Force 14th Weather Squadron, who provided weather data for the Mekong Delta.

  Doctors Paul Austin and Larry Turley (now a winemaker) helped with medical questions. Mark Brokering, my former boss at HarperCollins, offered sage advice on several occasions. Archivist Lynn Downey of Levi Strauss & Co. organized papers when they threatened to take over my office. Steve Graydon prepared slides and photos, scanned images, provided guidance on technical matters, and kept me from losing my sense of humor.

  At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2006, Paul Austin persuaded me to read from my work. I’m grateful that he did, because Julie Barer happened to be in the audience and subsequently signed me. That such an excellent literary agent had confidence in me and this book was immensely encouraging. My thanks to Julie and to my fellow Bread Loafers, the conference staff, and my teachers, in particular Ted Conover and Scott Russell Sanders, who helped me find the path and provided course correction.

  Members of the Wesleyan University Class of 1963 invited me to their forty-fifth reunion and adopted me as an honorary classmate. That same weekend, I met Suzanna Tamminen and felt an immediate rapport with my soft-spoken, smart, tuba-playing editor. With Suzanna, Leslie Starr and Stephanie Elliott at Wesleyan, Ann Brash, and Charlotte Strick formed a dream publishing team.

  Someone special created a writer’s colony for me, which he named Bagel Loaf, and read chapters with an expert eye.

  Other readers on whom I relied were my beloved daughter, May Boeve, who offered many insightful comments, and John Sommer, who brought his knowledge of Vietnam and IVS to the task of vetting the manuscript. George Arack, Jr., Colleen Daly, Larry Laverentz, Caryn and Bill Reading, and Chuck Theusch also read parts or all of the manuscript. Any shortcomings that remain are, however, my doing.

  Echoing the words my parents wrote many years ago to the people who helped them when they needed it, to you my door is always open.

  NOTES

  ONE | The Brunt of It (pages 7 – 17)

  1. “Young City Civilian Slain by Viet Cong,” Oklahoma City Times, November 12, 1965. Used with permission of the Associated Press, copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. Original copy in the author’s collection.

  2. Ibid. Used with permission of the Oklahoma Publishing Company, copyright © 1965. All rights reserved. Original copy in the author’s collection.

  3. The author’s mother was a direct descendant of two Yale founders, Noadiah Russell and James Pierpont.

  4. John Balaban, Remembering Heaven’s Face, p. 69 (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1991).

  5. Paul A. Rodell, “International Voluntary Services in Vietnam: War and the Birth of Activism, 1958 – 1967,” p. 242, n. 8, in Peace & Change, vol. 27, no. 2, April 2002.

  6. Le Ly Hayslip, “Sisters and Brothers,” When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, p. 234 (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

  TWO | “Kiss the Sisses Good-bye” (18 – 34)

  1. John Sommer, “Caught in the Middle,” in Stuart Rawlings, ed., The IVS Experience: From Algeria to Viet Nam, p. 33 (Washington, D.C.: International Voluntary Services, 1992). Author’s collection.

  2. Richard Holbrooke, Foreword to Harvey Neese and John O’Donnell, eds., Prelude to Tragedy: Vietnam, 1960 – 1965, p. viii (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2001).

  Tim Weiner, in Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, p. 182 (New York: Doubleday, 2007), describes Lansdale as a counterinsurgency specialist whose “trade-mark was winning thirdworld hearts and minds with American ingenuity, greenback dollars, and snake oil. He had worked for the CIA and the Pentagon since before the Korean War.”

  3. Rufe Phillips, “Before We Lost in South Vietnam,” in Neese and O’Donnell, eds., Prelude to Tragedy, p. 14.

  4. Author’s interview with Don Luce. Another former IVS volunteer, Willi Meyers, said of Lansdale, “Some of us considered him another CIA/PSYOPS [psychological operations] type.” The author corresponded and spent many hours in conversation with dozens of former IVS volunteers. These communications will not be noted unless for amplification or clarification, such as when a source (for example, Don Luce) has been widely interviewed and/or published.

  5. “IVS Handbook,” p. 7. The publisher and place and year of publication are not listed in part 2 of the handbook that is in the author’s collection. Part 2 includes a table of contents and pages 1 – 35. Part 1 is missing.

  6. Ibid., p. 8.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Don Luce, “IVS Y
esterday and Today,” in Rawlings, ed., The IVS Experience, p. 1. Author’s collection.

  9. The first IVS volunteers in Vietnam were witnesses to the coming of the war. Paul Sutton remembers seeing two American flag–draped coffins being loaded onto an aircraft. It was the summer of 1959, and he and Don Luce were waiting for a flight to the Philippines. The caskets contained the bodies of U.S. military advisers killed by Vietcong. “Had I thought to photograph it,” he said, “it would have been one of the first photographs of casualties in the Vietnam conflict.”

  10. This explanation of the Strategic Hamlet Program draws on the description of Rufus Phillips’s deputy, Bert Fraleigh, in his “Counterinsurgency in South Vietnam,” in Neese and O’Donnell, eds., Prelude to Tragedy, pp. 98 – 103.

  11. Weiner, in Legacy of Ashes, p. 211, refers to Lansdale’s associate as “the CIA’s Rufus Phillips.”

  12. Fraleigh, “Counterinsurgency in South Vietnam,” p. 104.

  13. Luce, “IVS Yesterday and Today,” p. 1.

  14. From John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, January 21, 1961.

  15. Dang Nguyen, in remarks at the 2005 IVS alumni reunion in Santa Fe, New Mexico, attended by the author.

  16. Paul Sutton recalled that, in the late 1950s, American military advisers in Ninh Thuan Province, where he was assigned, kept a low profile. On some occasions they wore khaki pants, T-shirts, and baseball caps while on duty, instead of uniforms.

  17. International Voluntary Services in the Republic of Vietnam, Annual Report, 1963 – 1964: Annual Report of IVS Participation in the Financial Assistance Program (Agriculture, Education, Health Improvement and Development) Sponsored Jointly by the Agricultural, Education and Health Agencies of Vietnam and the United States Agency for International Development, p. 6 (Washington, D.C.: International Voluntary Services, 1964). Author’s collection.

  18. “IVS Handbook,” p. 33.

  THREE | Sand Between My Toes (35 – 47)

  1. Willi Meyers’s appointment was reported in “Friend Takes over Hunting’s Viet Nam Job,” Daily Oklahoman, July 4, 1966. Original copy in the author’s collection. Later, when many college campuses were rife with antiwar protests, some IVS recruiters found themselves heckled or harassed by students and professors who believed that IVS was supporting the U.S. war effort. According to IVS alumnus John Esser, protesters held a former teammate hostage for a day in a college placement office.

  2. “Russell, General William Huntington,” Genealogical and Family History of the State of Connecticut: A Record of the Achievements of Her People in the Making of a Commonwealth and the Founding of a Nation (4 vols.), vol. 1, p. 430, edited by William Richard Cutter, Edward Henry Clement, Samuel Hart, Mary Kingsbury Talcott, Frederick Bostwick, and Ezra Scollay Stearns (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1911). Author’s collection. The Wikipedia entry on General Russell (wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Huntington_Russell, last accessed November 29, 2008) suggests, right or wrong, that the financial hardship story is likely untrue because his cousin, Samuel Russell, was a wealthy opium trader.

  3. Allan Cromley, Washington Bureau, “Medals, Praise Go to City Family,” Oklahoma City Times, April 27, 1966. See also Allan Cromley, “Hubert Charms Away Tears,” Daily Oklahoman, April 28, 1966. Used with permission of the Oklahoma Publishing Company, copyright © 1966. All rights reserved. Original copies in the author’s collection.

  4. Carl T. Rowan, “A Letter to the Vice President,” Washington Star, May 6, 1966. Original copy in the author’s collection.

  FOUR | “Just Heard over the Radio” (48 – 64)

  1. In correspondence with the author, several IVS alumni expressed mistrust of some American journalists who served in Vietnam. Paul Lukitsch, for example, stated, “Some reporters went out into the countryside to gather the news while others stayed in Saigon, enjoying the comforts of the Continental Hotel, etc., and just repeated to their media whatever the daily MACV briefing had told them. When a reporter sent the story back to his or her newspaper or whatever, the editor or subeditors could, and usually would, make changes to suit their own editorial or political slant.”

  2. “IVS Handbook,” pp. 10, 11.

  3. See “Places of Interest,” in Ann Caddell Crawford, Customs and Culture of Vietnam, ch. 11 (www.militaryliving.com/vietnam2/index.html), for a description of Fran-çois’ and its reputation for serving both American and Vietcong clientele.

  If a rumor the author heard from a former IVSer doing business in Vietnam is

  true, François died in 1975. It is said he attempted to cling to the landing gear of one of the last American airplanes to leave South Vietnam.

  4. Chuck Fields and other IVS volunteers were instrumental in carrying out the Pig-Corn Program, a USAID self-help project. According to Harvey Neese, a former IVSer who returned to Vietnam in 1962 as a Rural Affairs employee, the program was “high on the list of counterinsurgency activities to show that the Vietnamese government was interested in helping the rural people in the countryside.” See Neese, “Destination South Vietnam, 1959,” in Neese and O’Donnell, eds., Prelude to Tragedy, p. 258.

  As Neese explains, the program allowed villagers to purchase three Yorkshire piglets and U.S. surplus feed corn on credit. Sheets of metal roofing and bags of cement for constructing a pigsty floor were also provided. Fifteen thousand pigs were distributed.

  5. Holbrooke, Foreword, p. viii.

  6. Phillips, “Before We Lost in South Vietnam,” p. 53.

  7. Ibid., p. 57, n. 6.

  8. Ibid.

  9. “IVS Handbook,” p. 34. Ping-pong and billiards were popular sports, the handbook stated, adding, “If you enjoy these . . . , you will be able to find some real sharp competition among the Vietnamese.”

  10. Neese, “Destination South Vietnam, 1959,” p. 275; on p. 278 is a photo of the occasion.

  11. Don Luce and John Sommer, Viet Nam: The Unheard Voices, p. 44 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969); foreword by Edward M. Kennedy.

  12. Included in a letter from John Hughes in the Washington, D.C., IVS office, dated November 14, 1963. Author’s collection.

  13. Ibid.

  FIVE | “A Peaceful Sleep Forever” (65 – 84)

  1. Author’s collection.

  2. The source of these verses is unknown.

  3. In time, Wisner would attain the highest rank in the U.S. Foreign Service, that of career ambassador.

  4. Jay Turk, “Eulogies Pour in to Parents of Peter Hunting, Extraordinary Ordinary Kid,” Sunday Oklahoman, December 19, 1965. Original copy in the author’s collection.

  5. Pete was the first IVS volunteer to be killed during his term of service. Ten others would die in Southeast Asia either during or soon after their tour. See the dedication in Rawlings, ed., The IVS Experience, pp. 2 – 3.

  6. Beryl Darrah’s account of his work on the Peter M. Hunting Memorial Library and other experiences in Vietnam is posted on his Web site, www.bdarrah.com/VietnamYears, last accessed November 18, 2008.

  7. Ibid. Another former volunteer, Roger Montgomery, echoed Darrah’s sentiments in correspondence with the author: “Both sides thought we were spies for some group or the other, largely because we spoke Vietnamese and walked around without guns. It was just no use telling them that we were not spies; only confirmed their beliefs.”

  8. From “A Library in Phan Rang Was Named After an IVSer,” a Vietnamese newspaper clipping without name or date sent to the author’s parents by Jay Scarborough. English translation courtesy of Kim Nguyen Tang. Author’s collection.

  CORDS, the Office of Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, was formed in 1967 to coordinate U.S. military and civilian pacification programs, including those of the State Department, USAID, U.S. Information Agency, and CIA. The head of CORDS, Robert W. Komer, reported to General William Westmoreland.

  The author’s mother originally sent a check for $1,252.00, representing the combined contributions of family and friends. Additional contributions were made dire
ctly to IVS.

  9. “Survivors of Lost GIs Urge War Step-Up,” Oklahoma City Times, October 19, 1967. Used with permission of the Oklahoma Publishing Company, copyright © 1967. All rights reserved. Original copy in the author’s collection.

  SIX | Mr. Tall American (85 – 100)

  1. International Voluntary Services in the Republic of Vietnam, 1963 – 1964, pp. 50 – 51.

  2. Ibid, p. 49.

  3. Ibid., p. 45.

  4. “Would You Like to Have All of the Fish You Can Eat All of Your Life at No Cost Whatever?” in Helping People Help Themselves: A Guide to Self-Help, page unnumbered (n.p.: Office for Rural Affairs: United States Operations Mission/Vietnam, Publications and Graphics Division, 1963); published in Vietnamese and English. Author’s collection.