Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  It was autumn, and in a letter to Sue, Pete described how he imagined Wesleyan coming back to life as the students returned to fix up their rooms.

  Around this time, a young Brown University graduate named Richard Holbrooke had just volunteered for a sensitive assignment. Holbrooke was a new foreign service officer and had arrived in Vietnam only a few months earlier. Learning that a province chief in the Lower Mekong Delta required handling with kid gloves and did not get along with the Rural Affairs man, Holbrooke offered to take the prov rep’s place. “Like I said,” he would say years later of his youthful confidence, “I was twenty-two.”5 The prov rep Holbrooke replaced, Bob Friedman, moved to Phan Rang.

  On September 9, at the urging of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and with the backing of President Kennedy, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge informed President Diem that his brother Nhu should make himself scarce for a few months. Nhu had been criticized on the floor of Congress and at the United Nations for his harsh handling of the Buddhist opposition. Diem was told that, unless Nhu was restrained, Congress might not vote favorably on appropriations to South Vietnam. Diem objected, and eventually Lodge adopted a position of silence.6

  A different approach from that of Lodge — who, according to Rural Affairs Director Rufus Phillips, could not help “his inbred, imperious manner” and had no personal rapport with Diem7 — was put forward late in the summer of 1963. Edward Lansdale, now a major general, suggested to Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith that the two Ngo brothers could be separated. Such a move was bound to make Diem more cooperative if it were done without either Diem or Nhu losing face. Lansdale suggested that Galbraith use his influence to obtain Nhu a teaching position. Incensed, Galbraith replied, “We don’t do that at Harvard.”8

  Also in the fall of 1963 President Kennedy sent his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, and General Maxwell Taylor to South Vietnam on a fact-finding mission. Pete noted in his journal that they had come through the province for an inspection. They returned to Washington optimistic about the Strategic Hamlet Program and the military outlook, but pessimistic about the Diem government.

  By the end of September, after almost three months in Vietnam, Pete had received no mail from home. He wondered if his letters were being censored.

  IVSers were expected to try to fit in and make friends wherever they were stationed. The “IVS Handbook” explained that a volunteer’s location and attitude would determine the kind of recreation available to him or her. “In many situations, you will have to find new ways to entertain yourself,” the handbook said, “but this is usually not much of a problem once you have become acclimated and involved in the community life.”9

  Pete was adapting and enjoying his new surroundings, but he admitted that he missed American desserts. On September 22, he asked in a letter home:

  Say, how do you make pie crust, and what’s the basic formula for making the filling using berries or fruits, or lemon meringue? Could you send over a recipe or two on how to make a cake when you don’t have instant cake mix, also? And a recipe for cookies of some sort? All we have for dessert over here is fruit, fruit, fruit.

  He and Chuck attempted to cook a “bachelor cake.” It was the same as an ordinary cake, but it contained the additional ingredients of cigarette ashes, fly specs, and charcoal and was noticeably lopsided, with a fallen center. Their oven had been too hot and burned the outside of the cake after only three minutes. Desserts were better at the home of an American missionary couple who lived nearby, where the wife made cakes and cookies. Pete and Chuck sometimes played Scrabble or Monopoly with them. Other evenings, they watched movies at the MAAG compound, or Pete studied Chinese or traded English for Vietnamese lessons with the hamlet education chief.

  On free days, he sometimes made the fifty-mile drive up the coast for lobster at François’. The American major in Nha Trang was more affable than his counter part in Phan Rang. Pete guessed it was because his wife had come with him. She wore tight clothes and complained with affected naïveté about the uproar of frogs mating in her fishpond. “Ah,” Pete speculated, “the nightly orgies that must go on behind the walls of that home.”

  The drive home from Nha Trang was beautiful, he wrote in his journal:

  The low-flying fleecy clouds stood out against the black overcast of the higher storm clouds. . . . Looking at the ridgeline we could see the fleecy fingers of these clouds spilling over the top and down our side. Wind was coming at us. Then it began raining. A very thick-falling rain, everything half covered in the mist. . . . At one bridge we had to stop and wait for a bicyclist to pass. He smiled and said in very distinct though fractured English, “I’m sorry.” Such wonderful, friendly people.

  He drove to the mountain resort city of Dalat to visit John Sommer. The road ascended through villages of the Montagnard — French for “mountain people,” a name Westerners applied to several different indigenous groups. The Montagnard men wore loincloths. The women went bare breasted, Pete told Sue after she asked what women in Vietnam were like. The girls were uninhibited in some ways, he said, but looking at a topless Montagnard woman was “like seeing the back of somebody’s head. As much erotic appeal, I mean. Anyway,” he added graphically, “their breasts are always soft and lopsided and uneven and sagging, with big ugly nipples.”

  Next door to the IVS house in Dalat was a villa owned by Madame Nhu, the powerful sister-in-law of President Diem. The previous Christmas, the IVS team had gathered in Dalat and were roasting hot dogs when someone joked that they should ask their glamorous neighbor to join them. She happened to be in residence and, after being told she was invited, sent word that she would attend. Thirty minutes later she appeared, wearing long evening gloves with her traditional Vietnamese-style gown, an ao dai. As she roasted her hot dog, she asked the young Americans what they called this activity. “She did not seem to have the word ‘barbecue’ in her vocabulary at that time,” volunteer Harvey Neese remembed.10Not long afterward, Madame Nhu made headlines around the world by referring to the Buddhist self-immolations as “barbecues.”

  The horrifying suicide protests continued, and the young men and women of IVS were not spared the horror. On October 27, 1963, an IVSer in Saigon was returning from church when she saw policemen hosing away the ashes of a Buddhist monk.11

  Several of Pete’s teammates visited him that fall in Phan Rang. He showed them the market, a Cham temple outside of town, and the beach at Ninh Chu. He took Vaughn Stapleton, a team leader, to meet the bombastic Major Cook and discuss with him the need for irrigation windmills in the province. In this most arid region of Vietnam, farmers needed water for their parched crops. The Rural Affairs manual contained plans for building a windmill to drive a water pump, but before the project could be undertaken, Major Cook’s consent was required. Stapleton suggested trying it and Cook agreed.

  Another team leader, Mike Chilton, and the IVS executive director, Dr. Stevenson, also stopped in when they were checking on the organization’s stations throughout South Vietnam. Pete introduced them to the assistant province chief, who received them nervously. Mr. Phuong had trained as an actor and spoke slightly dramatic broken English. He produced a bottle of champagne and gave it to a servant to pour for his guests. When the cork exploded loudly and half of the wine spilled onto the floor, Phuong aimed a torrent of anger at the servant. Mike “split his gut laughing.”

  When Pete wasn’t entertaining his teammates or launching self-help projects in villages, he was building his air conditioner and getting acquainted with the local barber. For a quarter he could have his hair cut and his forehead, nose, ears, and upper back shaved; to finish things off, the barber would give him a massage and apply “plenty of perfume.” He bought a pair of trousers from the local tailor and asked him to sew a V-shaped insert into the crotch “to correct for wrinkles and tightness when walking or squatting.” Hearing of this, Pete’s Vietnamese male friends thought it was very funny. They were slender, with thin legs, and didn’t need the extra room.<
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  By now, everyone knew Pete’s name, which they pronounced “Ong Peck.” He called one boy Chattanooga. The young man wore the nickname with pride.

  Pete finally had begun to receive mail. He replied to a letter from Holly and me, assuring us that, no, bombs were not dropping around him. Most of the trouble in Vietnam was concocted, he told us, in the minds of newspaper reporters:

  You never see them outside a bar as far as I know. The Vietnamese are doing well, but from the sounds of things in the States, you wouldn’t know it. Myself, I’m in the safest province of Vietnam. No worse and a lot better than a person’s odds who drives in the U.S.

  On November 1, 1963, Pete wrapped Christmas presents and recovered from an evening with Don Luce and the local Rural Affairs man, Bob Friedman. The chief of the fishing village had presented Don with a gift of smoked fish after a smokehouse project there had been successfully completed. The three had washed down the fish with five bottles of wine. A cool breeze had brought the hint, and later the relief, of rain.

  Pete packed up a few weavings he had bought from a Cham family in a nearby hamlet, explaining in a note that the Cham were a semi-tribal minority group. The beautiful, brightly colored blankets were dry-clean-only, he warned — anticipating that my mother would launder one in the washing machine and ruin it.

  He turned on a radio he had recently picked up second-hand. The first time he had tried it out, he’d had to repair it with scraps of wire. He had just tuned in a broadcast of music from Saigon when suddenly the radio went silent. Broken again, he thought.

  Half an hour later, former IVSers Harvey Neese and Jim Green, now USAID employees, rushed into the house. There had been a coup d’état in Saigon. They turned on the radio again and heard BBC reporting heavy fighting and artillery fire in the center of the city. Troops loyal to Diem had surrounded the presidential palace and were awaiting an attack by his rivals.

  Chuck arrived with word that three machine guns were mounted on the local army compound wall. The entrance gates were closed.

  They waited for more news, eating dinner with the radio positioned in the center of the table. An army captain hurried in to recommend that everyone remain indoors. He said that Dalat had been placed under curfew and Diem’s brother Nhu had taken charge of Phan Rang.

  In fact, Diem and Nhu had been captured. South Vietnamese military officers had taken control of the government, and troops supporting them had surrounded the palace.

  Throughout the evening Pete and the others absorbed the unfolding events. At 7:30 P.M., civil servants were ordered to return to work as usual. By eight o’clock, all ministers of the Diem government were being “invited” to register with the new government within twenty-four hours. In truth, they were being rounded up.

  As Pete listened, he reflected on a recent visit to Dalat when he had shot an arrow from a Montagnard bow into “the Queen Bee’s” flower garden. He couldn’t resist punning that he had “gotten his barb in.”

  By morning the palace had been taken, and eventually it was learned that Diem and Nhu had been executed. Within days, Diem’s picture had been torn down in Phan Rang. Otherwise, the only noticeable effects of the coup “besides enthusiasm,” Pete noted, were that gasoline was being rationed and a nine o’clock curfew had been imposed.

  Two weeks after the coup, the IVS office in Washington sent a report to the parents of team members in Vietnam. It included eyewitness accounts of two volunteers. Gloria Johnson described the tension on the day of the coup and the present mood:

  I was caught at the military airport at 1 P.M. . . . We heard shooting, saw planes dipping and rolling in the air drawing fire from below, but didn’t know for sure what was happening until an hour later. Turned out that they took the airport first, then moved downtown.

  Returned to IVS about 6:30 P.M. . . . I was glad to be in Saigon, to have the experience of witnessing the coup. It’s frightening, and a little exciting too.

  On Saturday, Saigon was a shambles. The coup was over and it was obvious that the battle was a tough one. Several government buildings were badly damaged by fire and shelling [including] downtown establishments owned by Mme. Nhu.

  . . . Of course there has been a lot of excitement. No one has talked of anything else; rumors are a dime a dozen — you wouldn’t believe how many rumors there are! Dancing has resumed in the nightclubs downtown. Vietnamese people are jubilant and are 100 percent friendlier to Americans. Americans are happy, too, to say the least.

  As I write this, we’re not sure what will happen, but we’re expecting things to be brighter in the future than they have been in the past. The feeling in the air is not one of tension, but a controlled release of the accumulated tensions of months, and people are smiling, singing, and laughing. There’s really more of a festive, holiday feeling than six Christmases could produce.12

  Forest Gerdes managed to keep two dental appointments during the overthrow:

  The Independence Day holiday had begun Monday, so I was in the capital taking advantage of it to have dental work done. . . .

  I was still at the dentist’s office about 3:00 when the first messages from the newly captured radio station were broadcast by the revolutionary council. During the first day of broadcasts, we didn’t know how much reporting about the coup’s progress we dared believe, but it became obvious by early Saturday morning that success was probable. We were almost afraid to cheer it, lest our cheers prove premature.

  By seven o’clock Friday night, all previously captured students and monks had been released from prison. At 6:05 A.M. the President capitulated.

  Of course Americans were asked to stay off the streets during the coup, but I managed to sneak out to keep another dental appointment on Saturday and look along the way. The people were gathered around radios in shops along the streets, smiling hopefully, smugly, jubilantly. . . .

  I have never seen the Vietnamese people in a more spontaneously gay mood than downtown after the coup. Old women were scurrying to bring the soldiers food and water, the children climbed all over the tanks on street corners, and younger ladies gave away cigarettes. The Buddhists are still collecting money to buy gifts for the soldiers and the pagodas are jammed with praying thankful. The prestige of an Army uniform has risen fifty per cent and the sight of an American has never brought more friendly smiles. (Many Vietnamese believe we sponsored the coup.) . . .

  When night fell, and the noise continued, we tuned into the Voice of America. Once again, we knew its value, as the hours-old news of what was happening five miles away was reported to us from Washington, D.C., relayed through the Philippines!13

  The young volunteers’ optimism must have quelled parental anxieties. A few days after the letter from IVS headquarters reached my parents in Oklahoma City, my mother used the back of the envelope to jot a prosaic note: “Hair. 10 A.M. Thursday.”

  It was late autumn, and Pete’s thoughts traveled occasionally to Wesleyan. He recalled the lengthening nights in Middletown, and the falling leaves and cold gusts of wind. He listened to Sinatra love songs on the radio and told Sue he wished they could be together.

  She wanted to start a hope chest. He replied that there was a reason they were called “hope” and not “certainty” chests, but agreed to help her with one if she didn’t make him nervous by talking about it too much. He seemed different, she said. He wondered why.

  Sometime in November 1963, Pete abandoned his plans for building a light airplane. Though he had found a company in Oregon that would sell him a seventy-two-horsepower aircraft engine, he thought it cost too much.

  He turned to a new scheme: he had found a boatyard that would build him a sailboat for about 170 dollars. He hoped that after his two years with IVS were up, one of his teammates would help him sail it to Europe.

  He asked my mother to organize a fund-raiser to build classrooms in his province — classrooms in addition to those jointly funded by USAID and the South Vietnamese government. Adding a room to one of the old and overcrow
ded schools would cost only 274 dollars. The province could use nineteen more classrooms, but Pete would be happy with three or four. With Diem gone, he hoped that Americans would have more confidence in the work of IVS. If Mom would put on a Vietnamese dinner, he offered to send all the nuoc mam she needed. Nothing came of these suggestions. Pete had always been full of ideas. Perhaps my mother had grown used to his enthusiasms. She may not have known how to begin organizing a fund-raiser, and she had never been much of a cook.

  Late that month, Pete began a letter to Margo. The radio was playing in the background. What came next was almost too shocking to put into words:

  My God. Just heard over the radio about President Kennedy’s assassination. Not very much news. How terrible. Just a sick, angry feeling.

  As if the news had disoriented him, he turned to other subjects. He reflected on life in the States: gas stations on every corner, restaurants that sold pie and ice cream, Thanksgiving coming. The IVS office in Saigon had sent a turkey and suggested that he and Chuck invite Vietnamese guests for dinner and explain the American holiday and its traditions. The turkey was so small, he said, that he could eat it all by himself.

  He apparently took a break and then resumed his letter. He returned to the subject of the assassination: