Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  For my birthday that year, I received a travel alarm clock and two drain covers meant to prevent roaches from crawling up the pipes and into my hotel room. The next day, Veterans’ Day, I sowed wildflowers in a community peace garden. On November 12, the anniversary of Pete’s death, I ate a chocolate éclair, one of his favorite desserts.

  Getting the immunizations for my trip proved harder than I expected. A war with Iraq was looming, and American soldiers being deployed to the Persian Gulf had top priority for medicines. The shot hardest to come by was for the plague. Eventually I skipped it. My doctor preferred not to treat a case of the plague but said ordinary antibiotics would suffice if he had to.

  The more significant preparation for my trip was emotional. I didn’t do it well.

  Sometime that summer, I told my sisters that I was planning to go to Vietnam. Holly and I spoke by phone about it, and afterward she wrote to me. She had been going over our conversation in her mind ever since.

  She explained that she had been feeling frustrated and anxious about our parents, who were declining mentally and physically. She and Cis, who both lived much closer to them than I did, were intervening in one crisis after another. Holly had just watched a television program about Vietnam before our phone call. Thoughts of Pete had been on the surface, she said.

  Her feelings about him were complicated. She had repressed a good deal of the period following his death. She found herself drawn to male friends who invariably turned out to have been born the same year as Pete. “It is as though I am still trying at times to fill the hole he left,” she said. “I think sometimes that time hasn’t filled the hole, but merely reshaped it.”

  She missed the brother who would have been a marvelous uncle to her three children, and who would have answered her questions about growing up and rebelling against her parents. She felt deprived of tangible evidence of his life. “Mom’s hoarding, or privacy, grief, or whatever cut us off from not only a healthy family grief — that sounds strange, doesn’t it — but also from a ‘normal’ cycle of individual grief,” she said. “The suppression of even the utterance of his name for so many years enshrined him rather than loosening the unhealthy hold his death had on all of us.” Lamentably, Pete had left “so few ‘documents’ in his legacy to his little sisters.”

  And now I was going to Vietnam. I had kept to myself what I was learning about Pete, and about meeting his former teammates and corresponding with them. Holly felt excluded: “It was like being on the outside again, unable to get close, to get comfort, to understand better the facts and feelings of an experience that altered all our lives.” If she had been in my position, she said, she would have told me, and Cis, and maybe our parents. She reassured me that I had always been one of the most significant people in her life and that she loved me. She was happy I was going to Vietnam. She hoped I would share with her my impressions when I returned. She hoped I would write about them someday.

  I’m ashamed to admit that I balked at Holly’s letter. It was honest, gentle, and reasonable, but I felt the old discomfort of being confronted with someone’s intense emotion. I emphatically did not want that emotion foisted upon me. Still reenacting my fifteen-year-old self’s apprehension of my mother, I could not empathize even with the sister I was so close to. I could not let down my guard. I wanted distance.

  I did not handle all of my trip preparations as badly.

  My daughter, May, had heard me talk about Vietnam and the uncle she had never known. She had also heard me wake in the night from a dream about him. Before I left for Vietnam, I dreamed that Pete’s body was being taken to a mortuary. I was holding a slip of paper with the time and cause of his death. I begged the mortician not to take him away. My crying woke my husband and then my daughter before it woke me. She came into our bedroom and asked, “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

  With my somewhat arch feminist leanings, I had held off buying May a Barbie doll. Playing at the houses of her friends, whose mothers were more accepting of Barbies than I, she loved to dress the dolls. When I sensed that she was uneasy about my going away, I thought I should buy a present that she could look forward to opening when I left. There was nothing she wanted more than a Barbie doll, so I promised her one.

  I asked her first-grade teacher if I could bring a map of Vietnam to her classroom and talk about my trip. I thought it might help May if Mrs. Olrich and her students occasionally looked at the map and talked about where May’s mom was that day. She agreed to do everything I asked.

  On the first page of a notebook I bought to take along, I wrote down May’s measurements. Don had said that his partner, Mark, knew of a good shop for kimonos, and I planned to buy one, or an ao dai, and matching shoes for my daughter. In my notebook, I outlined her bare foot — seven inches long from heel to big toe — as she stood on one leg, balancing with her hand on my shoulder.

  “How much longer will it be dark?” May called out from the back seat. She had opened her present and was straining to see the shoes and other accessories that came with her Barbie doll. We had left home early. In another fifteen minutes it would be light and we would be in San Francisco.

  It was New Year’s Day, 1991. I was flying to Seattle, where I would meet up with the others in Don’s group. Everything went fine until I landed at Sea-Tac Airport but my suitcase didn’t. This was the first sign that my trip to Vietnam would be about emotional baggage.

  Calls to the airline produced no results. Because of the national holiday they were short-staffed. Stores in Seattle were closed, but that evening, I got a ride to a Safeway and bought aspirin, Pepto Bismol, soap, band-aids, and a razor. If worse came to worst, I could pick up new clothing in Thailand. I was more worried than I knew. I didn’t sleep on the long flight to Tokyo.

  In Bangkok, I watched my traveling companions pull their suitcases off the carousel. When mine didn’t arrive, an airline employee led me to a lost-luggage room the size of a high school gymnasium. Suitcases covered the floor and I surveyed them hopelessly. Just as I was catching up with my group on their way out of the terminal, there was my suitcase off to the side on the floor.

  I walked outside into the humid night. Under a streetlight a few yards away, a middle-aged, brown-haired, gray-eyed Don and his dark-haired, slender Mark were greeting everyone. Don and I shook hands and exchanged a look that said we had a lot to talk about.

  Only three members of the group had been IVS volunteers. Some were with universities or humanitarian groups. One couple was looking for soldiers who had gone missing in action. Chuck Whalen was a retired U.S. congressman from Ohio who sponsored a bill that had cut funding of the war. Darlene Cook Fair-ley, who would later be elected a Washington state senator, had worked as a medic with Catholic Relief Services in Vietnam. Her husband, Mike, was an IVS alumnus.

  We arrived at our hotel in Bangkok to find scaffolding covering the entrance. A couple of prostitutes slouched near the lobby. The air conditioning was off. It was good preparation for Vietnam, Don told us.

  I shared a room with one of the other single women. In the morning, the high-frequency hum of a mosquito awoke me, or was it the hammering? Carol and I opened the curtains to behold a small jungle, complete with calling birds and scampering monkeys. It was early and the palm trees were black. When the sun rose, their bark turned to dusty green.

  We went sightseeing in groups of four and five. Through a fence, we peered at the U.S. Embassy’s private tennis courts, saw the vast produce market on the river by boat, ogled enviously the luxurious Oriental Hotel, and toured the Temple of the Golden Buddha. Don and Mark, meanwhile, spent the day filling out forms to obtain our visas for Vietnam. That evening, they invited us to visit the red-light district with a friend from Empower, an organization whose volunteers rehabilitate sex workers. The Vietnam War had created an enormous sex trade in Thailand, Don told us. Some in our group went with him, while jet-lagged others like me crashed after dinner.

  Tomorrow, Hanoi.

  We flew out of Bangkok in t
wo shifts. The first group’s reception was less than hospitable. Airport officials in Hanoi informed Linda James that she did not have the right travel documents. She was sent to wait on a bench and was ruing her decision to come to Vietnam when Mr. Phuong elbowed his way past the authorities, took her in hand, and herded the group into a van.1

  Things went easier for the rest of us. The grosgrain ribbons I had tied on my bag for identification were gone and the airport personnel were on edge, but I breezed through customs.

  We registered at an old French colonial hotel whose walls badly needed a coat of paint. I settled into my room. A half-used bar of soap and an orange comb with a few strands of black hair lay on the sink. I covered the drain on the bathroom floor. An empty light fixture dangled from the ceiling. I lowered the mosquito net over the bed.

  Outside, a motorcycle backfired. I thought back to the summer when Pete was home for the last time, in 1965. The same sound had sent him diving to the street. Afterward, my mother laughed when she told the story. It seemed odd that a dramatic illustration of the danger he lived with in Vietnam struck her as funny.

  Car horns honked, but bicycles far outnumbered automobiles. I met up with a few of our group and we ambled down a shady street. January was the wedding season, and we took pictures of car windshields covered with brightly colored crepe paper streamers. Driving seemed unsafe but the cars looked festive.

  I saw my first water buffalo on a city street. I was surprised that its hide was not tough looking, like that of a rhinoceros, but soft and mink brown, and that it moved gracefully.

  Back in my hotel room, I climbed into the nest I had made. I pulled close a flashlight, book, alarm clock, and heaps of Kleenex for the head cold I had picked up. For some reason, I felt afraid.

  I wasn’t as well informed as others in the group. Some had learned Vietnamese as IVSers. Some had picked up key words and phrases before our trip. I found that I had no ear at all for the language. Without cognates, which were common in the Romance languages I had studied, I could find no way in.

  After a couple of days, I started feeling homesick. A good friend who was a nurse and hospice director had warned me before I left home that I might feel more emotional than usual. A wound that wasn’t completely cleaned out would heal only superficially, she had told me. Over time it would fester. She said I was going to the source of a deep wound, and it would hurt to open it. “Don’t be surprised if you feel a little crazy at times,” she had said.

  I suspected the cold medicines I was taking were the cause, but I began feeling weepy. My fellow travelers seemed to accept my condition better than I did. It must have been obvious to them that journeying to a land where one’s sibling had been killed would be difficult. But in my family we had been expected to bear up, so I felt self-conscious and embarrassed to be letting loose — which actually amounted only to tears occasionally rolling down my cheeks.

  One day we traveled to a Hmong village far from Hanoi by way of the winding road to Dien Bien Phu, where in 1954 the Vietminh dealt the decisive blow to French colonial control of Vietnam. The road into the mountains took us past an old French tank and a monument to the Vietnamese soldier who had disabled it with a grenade. When we got to the village, children crowded around us. Tom, a professor from New York, had brought a box of crayons and doled them out one per child. Chuck Whalen tried threshing rice by hand with a low-tech bucket-and-rope system.

  That night, we slept in thatched-roof houses built on stilts. The rooms smelled strongly of lacquer, as if our lodging had been readied hastily. Beyond the houses, the peridot rice fields and distant blue-gray mountains beneath a paler gray sky composed a picture of utmost serenity.

  We returned to Hanoi for a briefing with the deputy foreign minister. The meeting room was furnished but the decor was jarring. The floor was covered with a large red and gold carpet. The chairs were upholstered in orange velvet and topped with white antimacassars. Blue curtains puddled twelve inches deep or more onto the floor. A cabinet at one end of the room was missing half its drawer pulls. Two immense, exquisite floral arrangements almost harmonized the scene.

  We were seated in a U around a table. Chuck Whalen, the ranking member of our group, sat at the closed end beside the deputy minister, who had strikingly long ears. He told us that Vietnam was eager to improve its relationship with our country. After the meeting, he shook everyone’s hand.

  The following day we saw the modest home where Ho Chi Minh had lived. Security police watched us carefully. As the group moved along, I lagged behind to find a better camera angle on the house. A young man in uniform gestured to me, apparently urging me to catch up with the others. Then his unfriendly expression broke and he asked, “Are you American?” Usually, Vietnamese people thought we were Lien Xo — Russian. I nodded. He said earnestly, “I love Americans.”

  Security was stricter when we arrived at Ho Chi Minh’s tomb. We were instructed to leave our purses and all other belongings, except for our camera equipment, in the van. Mr. Phuong then collected our cameras, which we were not allowed to use. We were forbidden from talking. We queued up in pairs and marched in silence up the steps of the tomb, around corners, and into the room where Ho’s body lies. He was lit in an unearthly yellowish white, neither smiling nor frowning.

  A guard pointed abruptly to a man with us, ordering him to remove his hat. With a swat, a woman was instructed to take her hands out of her pockets. They wanted more than reverence from us; they meant to exact obeisance. I couldn’t help thinking how different is the experience of visiting the Lincoln Memorial, a tribute to freedom in an atmosphere of freedom.

  We were also watched closely when we visited a museum. A man in a black jacket followed us into every room, studying our reactions to the anti-American propaganda.

  That evening, I lay down on my bed and watched a gecko on the wall. If this were a hotel in the United States, I thought, you would ask yourself how you had arrived at such a sorry state as to be staying in a place so shabby. Here, you just said, “This is Vietnam.” Mark had told us in Bangkok that we wouldn’t be staying in anything less than a Holiday Inn. What holiday? Where?

  Linda had seen a dog butchered the day before. Darlene, who had worked in Vietnam in the 1960s, had once been fed a rat. Grotesquely large snails had been brought to our lunch table. The meat was ingeniously wrapped with a strip of green onion, so that with one little pull it slipped out easily. Still, it was so foreign. It was all so foreign.

  Negativity had, I knew, stolen into my attitude. I had a bad cold, didn’t like being stared at, and was homesick. The high point of my trip, visiting Phan Rang, where my brother had lived, was several days away. We had not received official permission yet to go there.

  What was bothering me was not really the run-down hotel or the food or the strangeness of Vietnam, but the fact that I was in a country that for years I had associated with death. My brother had believed in the future of Vietnam. The country I saw was in tatters. I wanted to find something to love about this place, something to make it all right that Pete’s life had ended here. The countryside and parts of Hanoi were lovely. For the rest, I sympathized with the Vietnamese, working so hard to advance, but the place didn’t speak to me.

  On our last morning in Hanoi, we took strong coffee with sweetened condensed milk and ate anise-seeded baguettes. Mr. Phuong showed us the monument to the defenders of Hanoi who shot down then-Lieutenant John McCain’s airplane. Tom, the professor in our group, said that when the North Vietnamese found out they had captured the son of the admiral in command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, they considered their prisoner a real prize. We were in central Hanoi beside a lake.

  I asked Mr. Phuong to tell us more about Senator McCain’s capture. He seemed reluctant, so I pressed him. McCain had parachuted into the lake, he said. The people all around were excited and got into their boats “to go out for him.” Looking at where it had happened, I tried to imagine how terrifying that sight must have been for McCain. Seeing the look o
n my face, Mr. Phuong assured me, “He was a good swimmer.” But hadn’t he been injured? I asked. “Oh, no,” he said, smiling. I persisted: “How deep is the lake?” “Only one and a half meters deep, and very muddy,” he said dismissively.

  In fact, McCain suffered two broken arms and a broken leg when he ejected from his aircraft. Then, as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi “Hilton,” which we would visit next, he was held in solitary confinement, beaten, and tortured.

  We learned that McCain had recently been in Hanoi to discuss normalizing U.S.–Vietnam relations. When he visited the prison and asked to see his old cell, he is said to have told the Vietnamese with him, “Just don’t close the door.”

  Apart from my own emotions, the impending Persian Gulf War added a sustained bass note while we traveled in Vietnam.

  The preceding August, Saddam Hussein had sent Iraqi troops into Kuwait. The United Nations responded by issuing an ultimatum to withdraw the occupying forces. UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar traveled to Baghdad to meet personally with Saddam, and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker went to Geneva for talks with the Iraqi foreign minister. When the talks broke down, Baker went to Saudi Arabia to discuss U.S. plans for war in the event that negotiations failed altogether.

  The UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the use of force. Iraq was given a deadline of January 15 to leave Kuwait. After that date, UN member states could use all necessary means to force compliance with the resolution.

  When our group left for Asia, many Americans still hoped that Saddam Hussein would back down. War was possible but not inevitable, it was believed.

  One member of our group had brought along a shortwave radio. He followed the news and kept us informed of developments.

  As efforts to avert war seemed less promising with each day, our mealtime conversations turned to speculation about what might happen next. We sought Chuck Whalen’s opinion as Congress debated authorizing President George H. W. Bush to use force. So far from home, it was hard to gauge the situation based on the scant news we had.