Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  A group of U.S. representatives visited Vietnam just before Kennedy’s inauguration to study the use of foreign aid in Southeast Asia. Their subsequent report to Congress noted “the discovery of a group of young American college graduates, living alongside the Vietnamese and teaching basic agriculture.”17 The “discovered” were IVS volunteers. The report contributed to the establishment of the Peace Corps, based in part on the IVS model, by presidential executive order in March 1961.

  Unlike the Peace Corps, however, IVS functioned as a private agency with its own board and staff. The largest volunteer NGO ever to serve in Vietnam, IVS prized and fought for its independence until it finally closed its doors in 2002, after forty years. In hindsight it seems remarkable that an organization so under-funded and altruistic survived for so long.

  Pete and his teammates reached Vietnam on July 5, 1963. The week before, President Kennedy had declared his support for the citizens of a divided Berlin at the infamous Wall, and Henry Cabot Lodge had been appointed U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam.

  The new IVSers settled in at My Tho, a city in the Mekong Delta, for several weeks of language training. Pete quickly rose to the top of his class. He felt that his Chinese studies at Wesleyan had given him an edge.

  On the layover in Hong Kong, he had tried out his Chinese language skills on a boy who knew just enough English to say hello. Pete startled him by answering in Chinese. A crowd gathered to look and listen. “It felt wonderful to be fluent enough to talk with him, show him and the people around us two that there were Americans who were interested enough — young ones, and interested in a positive way — in China,” he wrote in his journal.

  It was Pete’s first trip out of the United States and he saw, for the first time, crowded slums and people sleeping and dying in the streets. But he was not shocked, unlike some members of the team who came from more sheltered backgrounds. One “bird of a girl” fretted about the poverty and her helplessness to do anything about it. “If she was somewhat good-looking,” Pete admitted, “one might be able to forgive that sort of thing.” He admired pretty girls. He was, as one of his closest friends put it, “all male.”

  The next day, he met an American student who spoke Mandarin. They made their way to Hong Kong’s shipyards. Pete inquired about the cost of having a boat built, admired the view of Victoria Harbor from the docks, and imagined the life here of author André Malraux in the 1930s.

  “At last in Vietnam,” Pete wrote from My Tho. His early impressions of the country would become the constants of his letters for the next two and a half years: Vietnam and the Vietnamese were infinitely fascinating. Everything seemed like something out of a novel. Signs of war were everywhere; barbed wire and a pillbox fortified every bridge. Downtown My Tho was a cluster of bicycles and markets and open-air barbershops. Food stalls lined the banks of the muddy river. U.S. advisers had named the place Fruit Juice Row, and Pete composed a song about it: “Went down to My Tho’s Fruit Juice Row / There were lilies in the snow / And every corner had a peddler lad / With a fruit juice stand in tow.” The words seemed to be what the lyrics of an army song should sound like, he thought, even if they didn’t truly express his feelings about the place.

  Mornings were taken up with language class. Afternoons were free, leaving the team to “sit around and sweat at each other, or go bike riding, or sit under the rain spout when it rains, or talk to the neighbors.” In the evenings, Vietnamese dropped by for instruction in English. Pete took on five female students so shy it was “like pulling tusks out of a walrus.”

  Homesick GIs stopped by, along with USOM personnel and the American major in charge. The population of the province was “50 percent vc,” the major claimed. Although the American advisers had arrived in My Tho a year earlier, Pete complained that they still didn’t know what street they lived on.

  Columns of tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbled past in the early morning, sometimes pausing directly in front of the IVS quarters to broadcast their radio commands at high volume. At night the sound of exploding flak interrupted sleep.

  Pete acquired some young friends:

  Kids swarm all around you. I told one that I had a cat in my pocket. At first he couldn’t believe I was speaking Vietnamese. He thought I was speaking English that sounded an awful lot like the Vietnamese equivalent of “I have a cat in my pocket.” Then I pulled out this little cat puppet mounted on a block of wood, with a button underneath that you press here and there to make the cat move. Well, the kid went wild. . . . I gave a little puppet show to the boy and his friends, and they had never seen anything like it. Over here, the children are very creative when they’re little, playing with sticks and spools and things.

  After a few weeks studying Vietnamese, the IVSers received their work assignments. Pete learned he would be pouring cement, teaching English to provincial officials, and giving science demonstrations in connection with the Strategic Hamlet Program. “Supposedly, the government of Vietnam considers it the most important program going,” he wrote.

  Pete’s post would be Phan Rang, a city on South Vietnam’s central coast and the capital of Ninh Thuan Province. It was the country’s most arid region and, because of the paucity of good farmland, one of its poorest. With his “stationmate,” a member of the IVS agricultural team, he would share a house and a cook, a jeep and a driver.

  He earned his first blisters in country when the team took a break from studies to help build a bicycle parking lot in Can Tho, a city in the Mekong Delta. The “primeval” local construction methods shocked him. Workers carried dry cement in tiny buckets and poured it, still dry, into the footing. Then they mixed in the water.

  In the off hours Pete learned to play Vietnamese folk songs on his guitar. He found them melancholy and didn’t understand the words, but he liked the tunes and noticed that the Vietnamese took obvious pride in them. Children heard the singing and yelled their approval: “Hai lam!”

  The “IVS Handbook” cautioned new recruits against using American customs as a rulebook for judging other cultures. “The Vietnamese are very sincere and open-hearted,” the handbook explained. “They love to smile and they will show their affection by telling you how much they like you.”18 Pete’s experience corroborated this. The girls were “the biggest swooners you’ve ever seen. Charming is hardly the word, and it’s not flirting that they’re doing. I don’t know what it is.”

  He figured it out soon enough and took up flirting Vietnamese style. He learned that a boy showed affection for a girl by speaking of pairs — the beauty of the moon and the clouds or the happiness of two doves. To one Vietnamese girl, he pointed out the happiness of identical blisters on his thumbs. Another day, working in his shorts, he asked a girl which one of his two sunburned knees she preferred. It was innocent fun. Some of his new Vietnamese friends thought he and John Sommer were so polite, in fact, they must be rich.

  It was exciting to Pete to be learning new customs and trying to make himself understood in a new tongue. All too soon, to be an American and to be understood by Vietnamese people would become a matter of life and death.

  THREE

  Sand between My Toes

  A

  sk anyone what Oklahoma City is like and the first thing they will say is, it’s flat. If they appreciate the place, they might add that you can see for miles and the sunsets are spectacular.

  The city is situated on a broad plain. It receives only about thirty-two inches of rain a year, making its skies among the sunniest of those in any U.S. city. Flying weather is often ideal. In an average year, Oklahoma City has three hundred fifty good days for flying.

  Although it’s the bright blue skies and intense coral sundowns I picture when I think of my home from the age of ten to eighteen, and again in my late twenties, other people associate it with violent weather. They have good reason. Oklahoma is the most tornado prone of all fifty states. Oklahoma City, the state’s capital and geographical center, is struck by more tornadoes per year than any
other city.

  Tornadoes are violent and unpredictable. They can occur at any time of day and in any month. Typically, they inflict their worst damage between four and eight o’clock in the evening. The month of May is the most unnerving if you’re afraid of extreme weather. In my family, we weren’t.

  When the local TV meteorologists broke into regular programming to report on the movement of funnel clouds, my father and I would stand on the front porch and observe the swift-moving clouds as they traveled past our house in the direction of nearby Lake Hefner. When a tornado watch was upgraded to a warning and the TV set began emitting harsh beeps, my mother would once in a while suggest we come inside. But none of us overreacted, and only once did Mom plead with us to take cover under the dining room table. It was fun to stand outside with Dad, watching the sky turn yellowish-green and black, like an old bruise. He was steady. What most people called a storm, he merely called “weather.” Without being conceited, my father was sure of himself and his knowledge of the air. He didn’t put his confidence into words, but what I observed in him inspired a feeling of security. To this day, if I’m trying to get to sleep, I picture myself beside Dad in the cockpit of a single-engine Cessna enshrouded in clouds and him intently monitoring the instruments.

  He was a pilot’s pilot. He discovered his first love when his future father-in-law took him up in an old Steerman biplane. Dad learned to fly in the army, then became a schoolteacher. During summers off from his job at the Lake Forest Country Day School, Dad dusted crops for Green Giant over the vast farmlands of Illinois. Crop dusters had a high accident rate, but my father was a natural. So suited was he to flying that in 1953 he left his job teaching the heirs to meat-packing fortunes and children of Cook County politicians to instruct cadets at an air base in southeastern Missouri. By then he was a father of four.

  My brother, sisters, and I grew up hearing my dad and his pilot friends tell stories of derring-do around our dinner table. To me they seemed interminable, and it was only after I left home that I realized my father seemed adventurous and colorful to others. His flying students, whom I remember as handsome and charming to a man, all visited our house at least once, when they had finished their flight training and my parents gave a party for them. Dad would make a big batch of spaghetti or pizzas from scratch, entertaining us by flamboyantly spinning the dough in the air. Many of the young men were of other nationalities or races, so my siblings and I were exposed to interesting people from all over the world. My parents invited all of Dad’s students, including non-whites, and raised some eyebrows for it.

  Our house outside of Dexter, Missouri, sat on a hill surrounded by twelve acres of woods. When the new road was being cleared and I was about four, I was sitting on a felled tree and watching the grown-ups while I chewed on a piece of what I thought was white meat. Pete asked what I was doing. I pointed to the stringy, beige, exposed insides of the tree, which looked and tasted just like my mother’s roast turkey. Dad was the cook in the family.

  He had a good voice and directed the choir at the air base chapel, which meant that we had to get to church on time. One Sunday morning, Holly and I were playing outside in our church dresses when we saw a snake. Our property had a lot of snakes, including copperheads. There wasn’t time that morning for Dad to do anything but stuff the creature into a gallon peanut butter jar, screw the metal lid on, and poke air holes in the top. As he backed the station wagon out of the carport, I eyed the jar on a shelf. The snake flicked its tongue at us, its dark, patterned skin pressed fat and fleshy against the glass. I knew my father would take it deep into the woods later and release it. Where and how he did that, on his own and out of sight, he didn’t say.

  It was from this home in Dexter that Pete went to Wesleyan. Cis followed him east a year later when she left for Swarthmore. Then the air base closed and my father took the job in Oklahoma City with the FAA. Holly and I were sad to leave our house in the woods. When my mother told us we were going to move, she said we should not tell anyone. Without comprehending what it would be like to leave our home and friends, or knowing whether we would like where we were going, we did as were told. In those days it was not unusual for parents to make major decisions irrespective of their children’s feelings. My mother and father assumed that Holly and I would adjust, and we did.

  Runways and airport control towers had been a part of my life ever since early childhood. As a little girl, I had slept in the air base tower under layers of signal flags. I had grown up waiting in airports while my father filed flight plans or the weather improved. But on the day we left Oklahoma City for Pete’s memorial service in Connecticut, not even the familiarity of an airport offered solace.

  We took off from the FAA Aeronautical Center adjacent to Will Rogers Airport. Our flight path might have taken us over the Canadian River, where Pete had worked on a bridge construction crew one summer during college. Beneath the bridge a band of pink sand separates the river from its banks, which are lined with cottonwoods and willows, ashes and elms, and bur, shumard, and chinkapin oaks. The Canadian is not for swimming. Not only is it shallow, but the riverbed is full of quicksand.

  Pete’s job on the bridge-building crew had paid well, but the work was sweaty and backbreaking. I can still picture him when he came home at the end of the day, utterly exhausted and his clothes covered with red mud. When he first arrived in Vietnam and helped build a bicycle parking lot in Can Tho, he said he hadn’t worked so hard since that summer in Oklahoma. “Lots of good, tough calluses to show the hamlet chiefs,” he wrote.

  My family, except for Cis, who traveled to Connecticut from her home in St. Louis, flew on a government-owned cargo plane. How we packed and got to the airport is a complete blank in my memory, like many other details of those first days of shock and grief. Someone Dad worked with had gotten permission for us to fly at taxpayers’ expense. We were the only passengers.

  Mom and Dad sat up front, where they could talk with the pilots. Holly and I sat at the back of the airplane. Our seats faced aft and looked directly onto pinups of nude women. We had been in the air for some time when one of the crew-men came over and pulled down the pictures, looking terribly embarrassed. I remember his apology because the long flight was otherwise quiet and lonely.

  It was evening when we landed in New Haven. Uncle Jim met us and took us to Mory’s, the Yale restaurant named in the Whiffenpoof Song. The room was dark and the anonymity was comfortable. After dinner we drove out to the farm.

  The next day, my parents went to Bradley Airport to meet the plane that was bringing Pete’s body. After a few hours, they returned. Pete had not been on the airplane. They made one or even two more trips to the airport before enduring the awful grief of watching their son arrive in a coffin.

  In 1994, when I was in Connecticut on a business trip, I went to the farm to visit my aunt and uncle, who lived next door to one another. Living in California, I didn’t get back East very often, so I had arranged to have dinner with them and spend the night. We talked about old times. We chuckled at their memories of Pete as a young boy learning to ski, gathering the courage to push off and glide down the gentle slope in front of my grandmother’s house. Pete had spent his first twelve years on the farm, when my parents lived in the little house that was now Uncle Jim’s. My aunt and uncle had watched him grow up and had grown close to him again during his college years.

  Perhaps it was triggered by a story they told me or the easiness of our conversation, or I may have realized I would not have this opportunity again. In any case, when a question popped into my head, I blurted it out: Who had identified Pete’s body? I had wondered for many years if or how my parents knew it was really Pete we had buried.

  Uncle Jim’s face turned gray. He was reserved, but he was also a loving uncle. He could have conveniently evaded my question, but instead he answered, “Your mother did.” She had insisted on going alone to the funeral home, he said. She had refused to let him go, or even my father.

  I wonder
ed if she could not bear to have anyone witness her grief. Or had she thought they were not as strong as she was? Could she have been angry with them? Did she believe that Pete was somehow hers?

  While my parents were planning the memorial service in Woodbridge, the subject of Vietnam was fomenting discussion just a few miles south, on the Yale campus. On November 16 the Yale Daily News published a graduate’s account of his recent encounter with the Vietcong. He had been a passenger in the vehicle of two French students when they were stopped. The two students did all the talking except for one word the young man uttered in response to a question: Oui. He thought it had saved his life. Two days later, the News reported that a group of Yale students were forming a delegation to attend the March on Washington for Peace, nine days away. Among the speakers would be Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dr. Benjamin Spock, two outspoken opponents of the war.

  On November 19, a formal service for Pete was held at the Congregational church in Woodbridge. There, in the small town where my brother had spent his boyhood and that had been his second home during college, the minister gave thanks for the qualities we loved in him, including “the way he carried his vision of a better world . . . into effective action,” his “freedom from vanity and self-importance, and his glad, easy way, and for the example of his love and courage, and of his work.”