Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  USOM brought in “a technician here and a power saw there” but missed the big picture. The country needed factories and foreign workers who could train Vietnamese to take over their jobs. “So far, USOM has the belly buttons and assholes,” Pete said, “but hasn’t got the backbone of an aid program.”

  Vietnam’s great challenge was to modernize itself. But to oppose the Vietcong was to eliminate an efficient and profitable path to modernization, he wrote.

  They’d revolutionize, build up industry, all right, after a breathing spell. While, if we win, we’ve got to buck Vietnam’s Tammany Hall, the rich vested interests, etc. . . . If we take this war seriously, we have a moral right to prosecute an equally vigorous and well-planned economic development program in this country after the war.

  Not one to dwell on abstractions, Pete changed subjects and recorded the latest antic involving neighborhood children. After a period of their yelling “Ong My,” Mr. American, at him through the windows of the Tuong Nguyen eating club, he went outside and plotted his attack on the ringleader:

  I laid in wait for a good fifteen minutes, finally caught the rascal, carried him in to the kitchen, saying “Uhm, biftec [beefsteak] of young child should taste pretty good,” in Vietnamese of course; asked the cook what he thought; he agreed, brought up a perfectly horrid butcher knife to do the meat cutting with. Well, that kid was in a definite panic. I let go of him with one hand to direct the waiter to hold a pan to catch the blood, and the child fairly shot through the doorway, which was full of interested children waiting for the knife to fall. God, they’re a sanguine lot.

  Three days later, the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Brigade landed at Danang — the first U.S. combat troops to arrive in Vietnam. They joined the 23,000 American military advisers already in country.

  Earlier that week, a bombing campaign named Operation Rolling Thunder began in North Vietnam. Nearly 70 percent of all American prisoners of war eventually released by the North were pilots downed on Rolling Thunder missions, which continued through October 1968. That same month, American B-57 bombers struck South Vietnam for the first time.

  Back home The Sound of Music, a movie about a family who resists and eventually flees an invading army, opened in theaters across the country. Film critic Pauline Kael called it “a sugar-coated lie people seem to want to eat.”3

  On the same day that the first marines arrived in Danang, Pete wrote home that he had decided to extend his service with IVS. Instead of staying two more years, however, he would sign an eighteen-month contract. “Personally, when Johnson brings in American combat troops for the big battles, I don’t think we’ll be here very long,” he said.4

  Otherwise, not much was new. Phan Rang was “very peaceful and serene,” but farther north things were much worse. One hundred fifty miles — the distance to Phu Yen Province, where the fighting was — didn’t sound like much, but in Vietnam it was like another world.

  In less than a month, the peace and serenity evaporated. As part of their strategy to take Pleiku, Qui Nhon, and Danang, the Vietcong tried to seize Phan Rang. Pete was unaware of the attack scare until he went out to see a hamlet schoolteacher, whose reaction was, “My God! What are you doing out here?” Pete hurried back to town. Then he joked about going out to see a second teacher:

  But I never made it because the vc threw an ambush and I got shot full of holes and they killed me. Nope, just kidding. I missed falling into it by about five minutes. They captured a guardsman and I met the guard company as it was retreating. I shudder to think what might have happened if I’d gone to the second hamlet first, instead of vice versa.

  Now with a definite plan to accept a promotion with IVS, Pete’s thoughts turned to his two months of home leave. He considered traveling by ship so he could take his motorcycle. He thought it would be fun to surprise Mom by just riding up to the house one day.

  He considered flying by way of Europe with Gene Stoltzfus. Then they learned it was cheaper to buy a round-the-world ticket, traveling west to east. He could sightsee in Europe on his return to Vietnam.

  He discouraged my mother from making elaborate plans, such as agreeing to Nana’s suggestion that the family rent cottages on Cape Cod. He didn’t want any uncomfortable, tear-filled reunions, he told Cis. He was going to need gradual reorientation. “I don’t know how I’ll react to getting back to the Land of the Big PX, as they call it. Maybe I’ll write an ode to the Family Thing With Outdoor Grill in Backyard; maybe I’ll explode; maybe I’ll cower hunched down in a corner and giggle at the plate glass window. Maybe I’ll die of an overdose of McDonald’s hamburgers.”

  After spending time with the family in Oklahoma City, he would go to Washington to see John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. He also wanted to visit our great-aunt in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and look in on Bob Friedman and Colonel Kosta, two friends he had made in Vietnam. The IVS orientation was scheduled for the same time, and he wanted to check out the new team. He wondered if he should look into a job with the State Department.

  From Washington he would go up to Connecticut. He would visit relatives there and see what possibilities existed at Yale for doing graduate work in law, political science, or economics. Then he would head to Wesleyan to see some friends graduate. He might also do some recruiting for IVS on campus, although the news coming from the States made him doubt he would be successful. He may have heard that a group called Students for a Democratic Society had staged its first antiwar protest on April 17 in Washington.

  On the way home from Vietnam, he would lay over in Honolulu for four days. While there, he would look into the master’s program at the East-West Center.

  He would reach Oklahoma City on May 22. He was glad his home leave would start there. It would be too much of a shock — for himself and, he may have thought, for Margo — to start on the East Coast. “I didn’t realize how immersed I’d become in my work and in the almost entirely masculine environment of MAC-V compounds, military airports, and work associates around the province headquarters and hamlets,” he admitted to her. “Coming back to Saigon I feel very rough and countryish. Meeting some of the IVS girls in Saigon, or USOM secretaries, or visiting Peace Corps girls, all of them my own age or perhaps younger, I feel sort of awkward.” He would see Margo in New York City at the end of his trip.

  Although he had nailed down his next eighteen months, he still had the problem of choosing what to do when his contract was up. It was a decisive time not only for him, but for IVS. The organization was not up to full strength because of the trouble recruiting volunteers for Vietnam. USOM was threatening to terminate contracts with IVS and to bring in Peace Corps volunteers. It wasn’t such a bad idea, Pete thought.

  Vietnam was also at a critical juncture. “The vc are going to have to reassert themselves and make a comeback soon, or they’ve had it,” he said. “They were blocked at Danang by the Marines, have been blocked at Vung Tao just recently by the Airborne, and must do something quick.5 Rumor has it they’ll try to take and hold Kontum or Ban Me Thuot, which are mountainous areas. Supposedly, they’ll be aided by the rainy season now beginning.”

  Pete would return from home leave a regional team leader, which would mean moving to the Mekong Delta. “Thank goodness,” he wrote to Nana. “It’s safer down there.”

  Meanwhile, wrapping things up in Phan Rang brought a “final flurry of activity.” Pete was working on another windmill. “I’d promised the people of one hamlet; as an IVS–Vietnamese project it didn’t measure up to all the standards of a good program, because there won’t be any follow up, but a promise is a promise and the people should be able to handle the rest of the work,” he said. “Cost a lot of money, too, which I paid out of my own pocket. Next year I don’t think I’ll be so philanthropic.”

  He had hoped to bring home ao dais from Saigon for Holly and me, but when he went downtown to look into it, he “found that a prohibitive set of esoteric statistics” was needed, including detailed measurements. When he
was home, we could make shadow drawings and life-size paper cutouts, he suggested. On second thought, however, “Flexing muscles, jumping over chairs, racing dogs, tripping over rugs, driving compact cars, and playing golf” — of these, only driving applied to Holly — “are all activities for which an ao-dai is poorly suited. Ao-dais enforce inactivity, come to think of it, so I suppose I should wait and see how receptive the sisters are to such a useless thing. Boy! I was trying to imagine what everybody looks like, the other day.”

  I saw Pete for what would be the last time in the summer of 1965.

  I remember his homecoming clearly. It was a warm afternoon and I was returning from school. As I walked across the lawn, I saw him step outside onto the front porch. He had been watching for me. I cast my armload of books onto the grass and ran to hug him with both arms.

  My father recorded the moment with an eight-millimeter camera. Time has since eaten away at the film, and blotchy blues, yellows, and pinks spread from one frame to another. Some of the images, crackled and pale, resemble a hydrangea blossom, or a brain.

  Still, I can make out Pete in a long-sleeved white shirt. He embraces me, at six feet almost a foot taller than I, and my head rests on his chest. A few frames later, we are standing side by side. With one arm around me, he draws me close and, head cocked downward, looks into my eyes, smiling. I smile back at him.

  Another film, of the day Pete soloed for his pilot’s license, held up better. My father was rushing him through flight training in a single-engine airplane. While Pete was still in Vietnam, Dad had sent him the FAA “Student Pilot Guide” and a prep booklet for the private pilot test so he could begin studying there. When he got home, he started building cockpit time right away.

  As a former schoolteacher, my father believed in the primacy of knowledge. He taught his students to understand the weather, one’s aircraft, and its instruments. (Two years later, the FAA would publish the “Instrument Flying Handbook” that he wrote.) What to do in an emergency was equally important.

  Pete’s flight training would have included a lot of practice in touch-and-gos. For a touch-and-go, the pilot briefly sets his wheels down on the runway and immediately takes off again. My father stressed taking off and landing because they were, of course, essential and prime occasions for pilot error. By comparison, a thunderstorm was less hazardous. I was once about to board a small plane during a storm when my father told me not to worry. If lightning struck, he said, it wasn’t dangerous unless it hit the gas tank.

  Scott Robinson, whose parents and mine were very good friends, described a day he practiced touch-and-gos when my father was his flight instructor:

  We were following behind a pilot who happened to be doing touch-and-gos, too. It was working out fine, for as we touched down and then took off again, this fellow was above and opposite us. When we were in the downwind part of the pattern we could look down and see him doing his touch-and-go on the strip.

  Suddenly our “shadow” pilot was nowhere to be found. I remember your dad quickly looking around, and suddenly he grabbed the mike and called to the officials at our base, the larger airport a half-hour away, Wiley Post Airport, blurting out, “I have an emergency, a pilot is down at El Reno.” He tilted the wing, pointing downward for me to see in the plowed farm field below the small twisted clump of metal and fabric at the end of the runway. Tragically, this pilot had pulled up too steeply after his last touch-and-go and had stalled, nose-diving into the earth.

  After five hours of instruction, Pete soloed. “That would normally be considered quite fast,” he told Margo, “but in my case not so amazing because of family tradition and vast experience in the model airplane production field.” Dad had all the ratings a pilot could earn, he explained, including a hot-air-balloon license. In his off time, he took on an occasional student “in order to refamiliarize himself with the fear of God so necessary in bolstering the hard-nosed vigilance over flight standards and procedures” for his line of work.

  In the home movie of Pete’s first solo flight, he first performs a walk-around, a visual inspection of the Cessna 150. He takes off, and several frames later the camera is fixed on what looks like an empty sky. Then the little plane comes into view. Pete lands and taxis toward the camera, then turns away, shuts down the engine, and climbs out. Next, although this ritual was not captured on film, Dad would have torn a large section from the back of Pete’s shirt and signed and dated it. The day a pilot solos is a day never forgotten.

  Pete was glad to be home. He kidded Margo, “No bicycles in the road. Everybody speaks English. Flying lessons. Short shorts. Big healthy robust, bosomy girls.”

  Driving in the States took some getting used to. At high speeds, he clutched the steering wheel nervously. He zoomed off highways and onto exit ramps without realizing it, careening at full speed through gas stations alongside the road. He slammed on the brakes at intersections when a car approached, certain the driver would shoot forward, as in Vietnam, regardless of who had the right-of-way.

  My parents were proud of Pete. Mom was prone to launch into a “this is my son newly returned from Vietnam spiel,” as on the day the two of them met up with one of her friends and her child. “A Little League type opened fire on me the day after I arrived, with an imitation carbine that shoots paper explosives all too realistically,” Pete told Margo. For a split second he was all nerves. He retreated to a quiet place, “whereupon junior attacked from an unexpected quarter.”

  Otherwise, Pete’s only concerns were a cat that pounced and a pair of Dalmatians. “The male thinks it’s a lap dog and likes to perch atop my knees and lick my face with bovine eye. As a member of the Great Society, I suppose I must submit to this sort of thing and consider the cat and dog as half-human, as everybody else seems to do.”

  One evening my family went to a steak house for dinner. Pete told story after story about Vietnam. When my mother remarked that he was eating slowly, he said he’d gotten used to unhurried meals. When my father paid the bill, Pete commented that for the same amount of money, he could have built a classroom in Vietnam. He wasn’t bitter. It was just an observation.

  We went to the Robinsons’ one evening. Scott Robinson, who was nine years old at the time, later recalled the visit:

  When Pete shook my hand, he winced a little in pain. He showed me the wound on his palm. He then showed me the round scab . . . perfectly round. The rough, oozing, blackened scab took up most of the skin in the center of his palm. He explained to me how the blade of a windmill to bring fresh water was being hoisted up to him in a rural village. A gust of wind came before the bolt could be screwed on, and his palm had to hold the blade on the shaft or it might have been blown off and destroyed, falling to the ground far below, also possibly hurting not only himself, but those Vietnamese workers helping him.

  The news of his death not long after gripped me, and it has done so all this time, as firmly as did his handshake.

  Pete turned twenty-four that summer. I gave him a birthday card and wrote inside, “You really are a cool brother. It’s been great having you home. I wish you weren’t going back.”

  Just before leaving for Washington and New York, Pete passed his pilot’s check ride. The FAA examiner had been kind, or at least had looked the other way at some things that were questionable. Pete claimed to have heard the man’s brain grinding when he examined logbook entries that showed how quickly this student had learned to fly.

  Pete performed some sloppy takeoffs, recoveries from engine stalls, and turns around a fixed point. On a short-field landing, he was rattled by the sight of gullies, trees, and cows close to the runway. “To hell with cows!” the examiner had shouted. The check ride was just about over when, taxiing back to the hangar, Pete nearly collided with a parked Commander jet.

  When he related these details to my father, he may have exaggerated. He was probably a good student with a good aptitude for flying. But Dad must have wanted very much to give his son the one thing he had asked for that summer �
�� namely, help in getting his pilot’s license — or he would never have hurried a student through flight training.

  A few years after Pete was gone, Scott Robinson told my father that he wished he could go beyond merely flying, to understand the principles of aerodynamics. After pondering this awhile, Dad said, “Understanding the principles behind things is what life is all about, and that’s what my son, Pete, comprehended.”

  ELEVEN

  “An Open Question”

  I

  don’t know if you remember me,” the voice on the phone began, “but I knew your brother, Pete.” It was August 2000. The woman had just asked if she was speaking with Jill.

  Her name had been Sue Patterson, she said. I hadn’t seen Sue since I was twelve years old, but of course I remembered the pretty nursing student my brother dated during his Wesleyan years. She visited my family one summer at Round Hill Farm. The next year, she came to Pete’s graduation wearing a blue suit that matched her big, clear eyes.

  I liked Sue. She made an effort to get to know Holly and me, and even corresponded with us. “I don’t know how you manage to stay in one piece with all the laughing you do,” one of her letters said. When she graduated from nursing school, she sent us a picture of herself in her stiff white cap and starched uniform.

  Now Sue was living in Massachusetts. Recently, after interviewing for a job in Middletown, Connecticut, she had stopped at Pete’s alma mater. A librarian led her to a newspaper clipping about Pete that included the names John Sommer and Gene Stoltzfus. She had located Gene on the Internet. He gave her my address, from which she found my phone number.

  Our conversation moved over the years like stones skipping across a pond. We told each other about our marriages and divorces and children. She asked about my parents, and my sisters by name. My mother and my sisters and their families all lived in Arkansas, I told her. Dad had passed away in 1997.