Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  He went on to distinguish between the youth corps, which he called “cadres,” and government “cadre teams.” The government units lived in province or district capitals, making daily visits out to hamlets. Their objective was to show the government’s benign face and undertake short-term improvements, such as digging wells, repairing fences, showing movies, and distributing educational materials. The NVS cadres lived in the hamlets for six months or a year, in teams of five, and adopted the local standard of living. An NVS agriculture volunteer could work with farmers for an entire crop cycle. A health volunteer could “follow a rat poisoning campaign from beginning to grisly end.”

  The students were constructive and idealistic, Pete explained, yet realistic about their country’s social, economic, and political conditions. They were critical of the American presence at times, he acknowledged, but they grasped the stakes of the war. NVSers would “balance, soften, cushion, augment and explain the government’s activity in the countryside,” he stated. “This is a very reassuring thought as new American military transports drive by one’s window from dawn to dusk.”

  In addition to keeping tabs on the Summer Youth Program, Pete’s new job entailed no end of waiting in airports, flying here and there to check on team members, answering and asking innumerable questions, and placating, assisting, and smoothing the ruffled feathers of disgruntled volunteers. It didn’t have the “glamour,” he wrote home, of daily contact with teachers and farmers, as his hamlet education job in Phan Rang did. He had less time to write letters, except when he was waiting for an airplane.

  Not only were in-country military transports free for IVSers, but by this time flying could be a safer way to get around the Mekong Delta than driving. The procedure for volunteers was to go to the airport, put their name on a passenger list, and wait for a flight. As IVS alumnus Ray Gill, a member of Pete’s new team, recalled:

  You went out and talked to the army guy who controlled the flights on Air America or on a military spotter plane — which was a Piper Cub-type plane — or got a place on a helicopter. Helicopter was the preferred way of going in and out. On a Piper Cub there was only canvas between you and bullets. Air America planes were obvious targets. Helicopters were, too, but they were very maneuverable and had door gunners. You got the fresh air, too.6

  Pete carried his Vietnamese textbook with him for such lulls, but keeping up his language studies was a challenge. “I sure wish Vietnamese was closer to Chinese than it is,” a letter home said. “Every day or two I study some Vietnamese. Every time I pick up the book I wish I could have the time to study the Chinese, too.” The pressure to study Vietnamese was “very great,” he told Margo. “When I study one language or the other, I feel guilty about not spending enough time on the other. And there’s the French to study, too. Impossible situation.”

  Now that he was a certified private pilot, he also needed to keep his license current. He obtained a U.S. Army aeronautical map of his new region — which comprised all of the area designated by the military as iv Corps, in the southernmost part of the country, plus Bien Hoa and Vung Tau, which were closer to Saigon. On a Mobilgas road map, on which the oil company’s Pegasus trademark indicated the locations of Mobil gas stations, he plotted a triangular cross-country flight between Dalat, Nha Trang, and Pleiku.

  There was a French flying club in Saigon, and he planned to make contact with them on his next trip to the IVS house. The club’s aircraft were old Piper Cubs, he had heard, single-engine airplanes with “band-aids patching up the holes” in the yellow fabric covering. “I shudder to think of the crates they’re flying,” he said, “or where they fly them.”

  He had planned to set up his regional headquarters in the city of Can Tho, but the influx of American servicemen had created a housing shortage and inflated prices. Over a six-month period, rents for many of the good houses in the most secure areas of Can Tho tripled.7 New housing construction could not keep pace with the demand. Pete was forced temporarily to live out of his suitcase during the week and return to Saigon on weekends. Eventually he settled in Vinh Long, a city about twenty-one miles away.

  Despite the minor frustrations, Pete liked the job, he told Margo on August 2. Even a vexing experience that began when his motorcycle blew a tire had turned out all right. The flat tire surprised him because

  (1) Honda is the perfect motorcycle; (2) I’m the perfect motorcyclist; ergo (3) this sort of thing is just not supposed to happen. Then, at the tire repair shop, two students started a fight with a fruit vendor. I became worried when one of the students disappeared from the mêlée. A cyclo driver and I backed against a wall near a door, waiting and watching the crowd and bystanders, expecting a grenade to be tossed my way. Cyclo driver was a good man. One situation where speaking Vietnamese made all the difference. Tense moment.

  The same afternoon, after taking a shower, he caught his bath towel in the ceiling fan, putting enough of a load on the voltage regulator to shut down the system. “I was trying to perfect an overhand towel snap as opposed to the common underhanded snap known in locker rooms throughout the world,” he explained. “If successful in developing this new method, I may well shoot into international prominence.”

  Later the same month, as Pete was giving a friend a lift on his Honda, the bike slipped on a turn. “I made contact with a taxi, with mostly my nose,” he told Margo. “I caught a fast glimpse of my friend sliding down the middle of a mud puddle backwards, trying to lift himself out of it all the while. We had our laughs. Picked up the machine and off we went.”

  Pete found his moments of levity, but conditions had grown very serious. Three months earlier, fifteen thousand Vietnamese had left a Vietcong-held area in Kien Tuong Province and were squatting around the district capital of Cai Be. The refugees were “literally eating grass,” Ray Gill recalls. The people had been forced from their homes by a program of bombing and artillery fire intended to drive out the population and thus deprive the Vietcong of sustenance. “It’s not so much people trying to escape the VC,” Pete wrote to Margo, “but the possibility of being bombed, though [they are] glad to be rid of both and expecting relief support from the government.”

  He took the head of National Voluntary Services to Cai Be to show him the situation. NVS was sending a team there to start up a self-help organization among the refugees. Pete hoped NVS would also help build houses. IVS agriculture volunteers would teach intensive gardening.

  On another occasion, Pete and Ray asked some of the refugees, who were too afraid to return to their homes, what they knew how to do so they could help them do it at Cai Be. They said they knew how to make rice “wine,” really a whiskey. Pete went to Saigon and scrounged around for copper tubing and other supplies to get them started. “We used to go to the compound,” Ray remembers, “and they would hold a glass right under the drip and fill it. They wanted us to taste it. It burned all the way down. We tried to keep a straight face, but we always turned down second helpings.”

  Pete described a visit to a rice wine distillery in Ba Xuyen Province — most likely a research trip for the refugee project — in a letter to Margo:

  I’ll never again enjoy rice wine unless I drink it far from Ba Xuyen. The water they use to make the mash is dipped out of a murky looking canal instead of a mountain spring. The boilers are made of galvanized tin painted over with aluminum paint! Have you ever heard of such a thing? As if that wasn’t enough, there were all these diseased inebriates standing around. To my horror I was told they were the workers. It’s a wonder people around here are still alive. Me, for instance.

  She would have enjoyed the previous day’s drive to Ba Xuyen, he told her. Some people didn’t like roads with potholes and bumps, but he did. It tested his skill. He described the route:

  The road winds alongside one of the Delta’s primary canals. On one side are banana trees or palm trees hanging over the bank with water buffaloes tethered beneath them, kids climbing all over their backsides. The sun was bright and casting
long shadows, and there was a slight breeze in the treetops, blowing the palms. On the other side of the road were some hamlets — thatch houses with kids and pigs running all over the place. Maybe I’ll shoot a roll of film for you on the way back.

  Two months and twelve days later, with fateful consequences, Pete would take the same road.

  Recent news from home took Pete by surprise. It wasn’t the race riots that August in southern California that startled him, but the fact that Cis had gotten married without his knowing it. She had been engaged and planned a September wedding, but when it appeared that her fiancé, Frank, might be drafted, they moved up the date.

  “Didn’t she like Europe?” he asked in a letter home. “Did Frank look sort of pale?” Pete sent a large Cham weaving as a wedding gift. It was blue, and he wondered if she might take the hint and “have a boy type baby, which seems a helluva thing to say about one’s sister. . . . Staggering thought, one of my own sisters hauling off and doing such a thing.”

  He reckoned that the two “young monsters” — to our faces, he called Holly and me his “favorite youngest sisters” — were “making daily raids on the city’s clothing stores in anticipation of school. What a pair of beauts.”

  He regretted he’d had only two months of home leave instead of three, so he could have seen more friends and relatives. One of the friends he hadn’t seen was Sue Patterson. “Figured it best that way, sort of having come to a mutual prior understanding through correspondence,” he said. “I was surprised to get back and see a letter from her.”

  Pete had learned that his Chinese professor from Wesleyan was going to pass through Oklahoma City with his wife and children, and he hoped we would see them and give them his love. The Wus stayed with us. I remember the two little children as being alarmingly energetic.

  Mr. Wu was one of the only faculty members whom Pete said he missed and would like to see again. My father recorded his and his wife’s greetings to Pete on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and subsequently sent the tape to him. They said they were proud of him. When they drove away in their station wagon, my mother fretted that they would never make it to their destination, somewhere farther west. Mr. Wu had learned to drive only days before taking his family on this cross-country adventure, and his uncontrolled, nervous mien at the wheel convinced them that trouble lay ahead.

  Along with soldiers, American correspondents were pouring into South Vietnam. Most were men. One notable exception was Rose Wilder Lane, the only child of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Lane was seventy-eight when Woman’s Day magazine sent her to Vietnam on assignment.

  In her early life, she had been a best-selling author, a highly paid magazine writer, a personal friend of the king of Albania, and, in her thirties, a communist. After World War I, while traveling in Russia, she was arrested by the secret police and claimed later that her knowledge of Marxism had been useful. In time she repudiated communism and became an outspoken critic of the New Deal. She opposed Social Security, claiming that the hundreds of jars of put-up food, grown in her own garden and stocked in her pantry, were her social security.8

  Woman’s Day editor Ellen Tighe asked Lane to report on the conditions of women and children in war-torn South Vietnam. In June 1965, the day before she was to leave, the Defense Department tried to pull the plug on her trip. There could be trouble if anything were to happen to this intrepid septuagenarian. But Lane prevailed.

  From the top of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, she observed mortar fire flashing in the distance. Unlike the reporters Pete complained about, who were either lazy or afraid to leave the bars, Lane traveled beyond the capital, even flying on helicopter missions.

  For her long piece, “August in Vietnam,” she interviewed a young man whose home, like hers, had once been the Midwest:

  Peter Hunting from Dexter, Missouri, . . . complains that there’s too much talk about danger. It’s keeping young men from volunteering for IVS in Viet Nam, he says; and IVS needs volunteers. There are only 40 IVS men in the whole country, and opportunity for ten times as many. . . .

  The Viet Cong’s no bother, Peter Hunting says, unless maybe they’d hit our village in the night, but how safe are you on American highways? No IVS man has had any trouble with the Viet Cong; all you need is ordinary good sense. Any time they start moving someone tells you right

  away. They wreck schools and they may kill teachers, so you help get her out of the way and hide books and so on; then you just go in the other direction. And come back when they’re gone.

  The peasants are fine folks, you have the time of your life. . . . The food is good; a little rice, plenty of fish and fruit and delicious vegetables of all kinds that haven’t even a name in English. You feel fine. There’s not much sanitation but the people are healthy because they eat right; Americans eat too much. . . .

  What’s important, Peter Hunting says, is the progress. It’s wonderful. The people keep on going right ahead. The standards of every village in his district are higher than they were two years ago. That’s something to see. Peter Hunting’s only complaint is the publicity about danger; it’s exaggerated, and it’s keeping men from volunteering for IVS in Viet Nam.9

  By the time the December 1965 issue, with Lane’s article, entered circulation, Pete was dead.

  In early September, during the same week that the casualty figure for American forces in Vietnam — 650 deaths since 1961 — was released, Pete wrote a long letter to Margo. It was an invitation to enter into his world and share his fascination with Vietnamese folkways, his frustration with a member of his team who was six months behind with his monthly reports, and his analysis of where American foreign aid was failing and how to correct it.

  He had observed an ingenious method of making fertilizer:

  The people make a huge, tall tower out of bamboo, with a palm frond roof. Instead of a floor, they hang about 50 bundles of palm fronds tied at the end, like drying tobacco. After a few days, thousands of bats will appear — big ones six inches to a foot from wing tip to wing tip — sleeping up in the tower during the day. In the evening, the people come out and broom the guano to the side. It makes excellent fertilizer. No kidding. It’s amazing how these people have picked up these methods. Just goes to show you what people can do without science and industry.

  He wished his job were more challenging and gave him more responsibility for administering foreign aid. Perhaps he was impatient, he granted, but the system badly needed improvement. At present, resources were allocated by American technicians working in cooperation with Vietnamese officials. They spent too much on baseball stadiums and strips of superhighway, office complexes and air conditioners, and cars and housing. Too little money went to the provinces for developing schools, hospitals, roads, and bridges and training teachers. The lack of time devoted to development was even worse. “It’s amazing our foreign aid has worked as well as it has,” he concluded.

  He credited President Kennedy with having chosen thinkers for foreign aid advisers and for having placed American representatives in every province of South Vietnam. The problem with the prov reps was that they necessarily spent all their time with Vietnamese officials, and only the good ones made time to “follow a program down to the last brick being laid in place,” he said. “They’re the exception and not the rule.”

  The missing element was the “cadre concept” — the grassroots, team approach IVS was taking in Vietnam and Laos. The Peace Corps projects in Asia were, he believed, too individual oriented and lacked continuity unless a volunteer possessed “an enlightened personal feeling of responsibility.”

  What he found most frustrating was that the U.S. Operations Mission appreciated IVS but looked upon it as a “freak organization.” The solution, he felt strongly, was to form cadres that would integrate the volunteers with the administration of foreign aid.

  Acting on his analysis of the problem, Pete wrote a letter to friends and family, hoping to enlist their support for the solution he be
lieved in. He explained his new assignment as an IVS regional supervisor with a team of twelve volunteers stationed in the Delta. He praised his team’s efforts in assisting refugees, teaching English, and serving as liaisons between Vietnamese youth, the government, and Catholic Relief Services. “The problem,” he stated, “is that we simply do not have enough recruits.” IVS still needed education and agriculture technicians, but the volunteers would now also work with refugees.

  He appealed to everyone reading his letter to encourage people they knew to apply to IVS. He asked them to urge their congressional representative and senators to plug IVS-Vietnam in their public appearances. The Washington IVS office could provide members of Congress with the names of volunteers they represented.

  Late in October, a few days before 25,000 war supporters marched on Washington, D.C., Pete struck a wistful note in a letter home. He had spent a Sunday morning at the Saigon zoo with a group of students. He had seen a goldfish “about a half a yard long with a mouth the size of a milk pail” spring for a piece of bread held by a Vietnamese soldier, and had helped pull the man to safety by his belt and pant legs. In other countries, zoos were virtual geography lessons and parents taught their children about the world by showing them exotic animals, he noted, whereas in Vietnam three-quarters of the animals were from their own country. Seeing the families together left Pete feeling homesick.

  He’d had another close call that he didn’t write home about. He and Ray Gill had driven the road from Cai Be to My Tho, a distance of some twenty-five miles, through Vietcong-penetrated country. Pete was at the wheel, driving fast — his standard practice, according to Ray, to outrun danger.