Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

by Jill Hunting

  Since studying Pete’s letters and meeting his friends, I was more curious than ever about the places he had mentioned. Vietnam began to exert a pull on me.

  My opportunity to return came in 2006, after I read about an American veteran whose organization had built or was supporting sixteen libraries in Vietnam. I wrote to Chuck Theusch about the library that my parents had helped to establish. I didn’t know if it still existed, and Chuck became as curious about it as I was. From the start of our friendship, he accepted me as a sister who was, as he said in one letter, “as much a member of the fraternity of Vietnam veterans as we who wore the olive drab.”

  He invited me to join his next Library of Vietnam delegation, and I accepted. Two weeks later, he and his wife were my houseguests in California. Three months after that, in August 2006, Chuck and I met again in Hanoi.

  Ever since my first trip to Vietnam, I had dreamed of someday linking my home, in Sonoma Valley, with Phan Rang as official sister cities. Sonoma already had this kind of relationship with wine-producing villages in France and Italy. In 1991, I had seen vineyards in Ninh Thuan Province. By now I knew that Vietnam’s only commercial grape-growing region was located there.

  I proposed to the Sonoma City Council that I explore the possibility of a sister-city relationship when I was in Vietnam. They authorized my doing so and provided me with letters of introduction. I didn’t mention it to the council members, but I hoped that these letters of plenipotentiary would discourage any bad actors from confiscating my passport and visa, as on my previous trip. Just to be sure, I asked the city manager to affix his largest, most official-looking sticker to the letters, and he obliged.

  My meeting with province authorities in Ninh Thuan was to fall near the end of our trip. Chuck and I began in northern Vietnam and worked our way south, picking up another delegate, Jim Langworthy, and our guide and interpreter, Tran Dinh Song, midway along the journey.

  One library was in a village an hour outside of Hanoi. In the car, on the way there, I sat beside our interpreter for the day, Mr. Cuong. At one point he pulled up his pants leg to show me his battle-scarred leg. As a soldier with the North Vietnamese army, he had walked hundreds of miles south to the Mekong Delta. When Chuck told him my brother was a humanitarian volunteer who lost his life there in an ambush, Mr. Cuong brushed off his words and, smiling at me, said, “Blue eyes. All same.”

  At our destination, we met with a librarian, teachers, and local officials. Afterward, an elaborate lunch was served in the one-room school. Before I had left home, a nurse at the county health department had warned me about avian flu and other health hazards. “You won’t be going into the countryside, will you?” she had asked. Avoid contact with animals, especially monkeys, she cautioned. Don’t drink anything unless it’s in a bottle and you have opened it yourself. If you eat poultry, make sure it has been well cooked.

  I stared, I hoped impassively, as a platter of pink-fleshed chicken was placed squarely before me. I watched as my glass was filled with fruit juice and ice cubes. To refuse such hospitality would have been unthinkable.

  After lunch Mr. Cuong asked if we would like to meet his aunt and uncle. Understanding the honor his invitation accorded us, we quickly agreed. We left the village, parked the car on a one-lane road, and walked the rest of the way, crossing a dike that separated two ponds. In one, a water buffalo languished near the edge. Chuck insisted I pet it for the camera.

  Our hosts showed us their small home, including the family altar and the hardwood bed with no mattress or pillows. They offered us chairs around a tiny table and served us tea. The uncle asked if we would like to smoke from the water pipe in the corner. What would my mother have done?

  A photograph of the uncle wearing many medals hung high on the wall. Seeing our interest in it, they led us to another room, where we saw the aunt’s picture; she, too, had been a highly decorated Vietminh warrior in the struggle against the French.

  As we said our good-byes in the hot afternoon sunshine, the old man told Chuck that he was the first American man ever to visit their home. Then, taking my hand, his wife said that I was the first American woman they had ever seen.

  One day we traveled to an orphanage where Chuck was to deliver a donation from an American sponsor. The place was located on a small river and gave new meaning to the word “remote.” We parked the car, rode on the back of motorcycles down a path, and traveled the rest of the way in a dugout canoe powered by a small motor. It rode low with our weight, and muddy water lapped at the gunwales. As Chuck and Jim twisted right and left to photograph curious children and women washing clothes along the banks, the vessel rocked precariously. I clung to the rails and studied the water, watching for the snakes I imagined I would be swimming with at any moment. “Pete would be proud of you,” Chuck shouted cheerily.

  I had not entirely shed the cautiousness of my youth, but I had learned to go ahead and do it anyway, whatever “it” might be.

  Another library was located on an island not far from where Pete spent his last night talking with Fred Stone. A motorboat carried us along a waterway bordered by marsh grasses. Song looked intently at them. “VC used to hide in grass like this,” he said. “They would breathe under water through bamboo. They could wait there for hours.”

  He looked uneasy. When I caught his eye, I asked how long after the war he had thought about something like this. “For many years,” he said. “And even today I think of it.”

  The day before we were due in Phan Rang, Chuck, Song, and I mapped out the presentation we would make to the province officials. I would introduce my sister-city proposal in the context of my long-standing interest in Vietnam, dating back to my brother’s years as an IVS volunteer. I would show them photographs of Pete working on a windmill and of the library. We would inquire about the library’s condition and ask to see it. Chuck would offer his organization’s help if it were needed.

  At the conclusion of the meeting, I would present the gifts I had brought from home, including maps of California and Sonoma Valley, books about Sonoma, and several products made from locally grown lavender. From some research I had done, I knew that growing conditions in Ninh Thuan were in some ways similar to those of Sonoma and Napa valleys. I thought lavender might be a suitable crop for Vietnam. My interest in the prospect led one friend, a former IVS agriculture volunteer, to quip that I was really an IVSer at heart.

  The day before our scheduled meeting, I had given away one of the other gifts I brought for the province officials. It was a good bottle of California wine. But we had unexpectedly driven past a viticultural and agricultural research institute that I had read about. My experience in 1991 had made me wary of acting on impulse in Vietnam, but Song said it would be all right to stop and ask if anyone was available for a meeting. A young scientist received us. When he told me that he liked a good Bordeaux, I went to the car, removed the bottle of cabernet sauvignon from my suitcase, and gave it to him. A couple of weeks later, when I was home again, I discovered that the institute’s location was the old IVS agriculture station at Nha Ho.

  It was not the first or the last coincidence, if you’d call it that.

  On the way to Phan Rang, we passed two ancient Cham towers directly beside the main road. They were covered with scaffolding, and laborers were patching the crumbling masonry. We stopped to photograph them. There was something magnetic about the towers. I had also felt drawn to them in 1991, when our breakaway group stopped here and took pictures. At that time, the towers stood isolated like sentinels over the plain. No more: commerce along the highway today requires one to watch for them.

  What was striking about the towers was not that shops and houses now encroached on them or that, upgraded to a tourist attraction, they were under renovation, but that I now knew Pete had also stopped at this very place to be photographed. He had been headed in the opposite direction on the day in 1964 when a home movie recorded him delivering a windmill. While someone else held the camera, the Land Rover, with
the windmill tied on top, came into view from a distance. Then Pete slowed by the Cham towers and a sign that said Ba Thap, the name of the hamlet he was going to. It was the same hamlet where he had drunk beer with Chou and An, the Vietcong soldiers come home for May Day. Pete wrote about Ba Thap and the windmill installation in a letter:

  Province officials considered the hamlet full of Vietcong sympathizers, since it had been moved from a vc-controlled area, and the Vietcong had entered the hamlet unopposed several times. On one such occasion, the rebels had shot holes in the school roof and shot the teacher’s wife in both knees. . . .

  If the people of the hamlet had not been sympathetic to the vc before relocation, there was good reason for resentment on their part toward the government following their removal to Ba Thap. The new hamlet was set in the middle of a wasteland. The province chief who had determined the site was one of the most hateful and pompous henchmen of Ngo Dinh Nhu that I’d ever seen or heard of. Following the overthrow of Diem, several Vietnamese and Americans with whom I worked in the province agreed to lend support to projects at Ba Thap, hoping to win back the good will of those people. . . .

  [I asked several people] to help set up an irrigation windmill in order to grow small gardens within the confines of the hamlet. They agreed.

  The project turned out to be more than I bargained for. Available windmills couldn’t lift the water to the height required, nor provide enough water. . . . I originally designed it to fit over the top of an open well, but it was placed beside a duck pond. . . .

  A short time thereafter, the duck pond dried up, exposing the bare, bleached, and shattered corpse of a once-glorious machine. We salvaged the pump and pulleys and retreated to Phan Rang, the province capital, for another try. . . .

  The big day arrived as my Land Rover truck limped into Ba Thap, sagging on the right side under the weight of the wooden beam. It took all afternoon and into the evening to jimmy the beam upright and into the socket in an effort rivaling even the more complicated Cecil B. DeMille productions. Approximately thirty people were pulling on two ropes in the final seconds as the beam swayed and tottered on the lip of the hole; they didn’t know whether to drop the ropes and run, risking being caught inside the arc of the falling pole, or whether to hold the rope and gamble that the pole wouldn’t fall. Of course, there was never any doubt in my mind; a forceful ramming of the beam by the Land Rover did the trick, resulting in joyous ovations from the much-relieved spectators.

  I didn’t realize in 1991 how close I had come to Pete at the Cham towers. Now I was about to come even closer.

  “Ready for the big meeting?” Chuck asked when I found him in the restaurant of our hotel in Phan Rang. It was first light. The previous evening, he and Jim had dared me to try one of the local specialties, sand lizard. After all, they prodded, I had eaten porcupine in Dalat, and if I was proposing a sister city here, I should familiarize myself with the cuisine. On this morning I took just coffee and a bowl of pho.

  Our driver pulled past a guardhouse and through gates surrounding a large building — the offices of the People’s Committee of Phan Rang. A smiling man in his mid-twenties ushered us into a room with a long table and thirty chairs, and half as many microphones. A few minutes later a tall man in his forties entered the room, a high-ranking member of the People’s Committee.

  I laid out my proposal for the sister-city relationship. I explained what Pete had come here to do as an IVS volunteer. When I finished speaking, the official offered his sympathy for my loss. He opened the gifts I had brought and thanked me for them. He promised to convey my proposal to the next level of decision makers. He offered his young assistant as a guide for anything we wanted to see.

  We learned that the old library building was gone but that Phan Rang had a new facility. We drove there and met the librarian. She thought some books from the original building might be in their collections. There were no old people in the library, and no one to ask about the old days.

  Outside, we were waiting for our driver and van when I saw across the street a yellow French colonial – style building with dozens of bicycles parked in front. Pete must have come to this school, I realized. Song approached the only elderly person we saw and asked if Phan Rang was his home. The man had come south in 1975 with the liberation, he said. We didn’t see anyone else old enough to have remembered a tall, blond American who used to live here. Vietnam is young: in 2007, 57 percent of the population was under the age of thirty.

  I had brought along two addresses from Pete’s letters. We found that one of the streets had disappeared altogether. The other address was now a shop. The old house was long gone.

  A question had been on my mind for two days, ever since we drove down the mountain from Dalat on a road Pete had described vividly. The question was not original, but the one the angel asked Mary Magdalene when she went to the tomb looking for the body of Jesus: Why do you look for the living among the dead? I was looking for Pete, but I had found no library, no house, no tangible evidence whatever of his life in Phan Rang.

  Still, my sister-city proposal had been well received, and I felt I had accomplished something worthwhile. Sonoma would get its sister city, even though I would always think of it as a sister-and-brother city.

  We had a long day of driving ahead of us, and it was time to leave. But the others had agreed to let me make one more stop in this province. We headed south looking for a hamlet I had read about online, whose Cham women were especially good weavers. I hoped to buy some blankets there and sell them to raise money for the sister-city project. The hamlet’s name was My Nghiep.

  One of Pete’s letters mentioned a Cham woman whose blankets and tablecloths he was helping to sell. She had offered her daughter in marriage, but Pete didn’t realize she was serious until she introduced the girl and said she wanted to send him to a palm reader and astrologer.

  There were many Cham hamlets in this area. John Sommer had come down from his station, Dalat, to visit Pete, and both of them had filmed a weaver at her loom. I had no way of knowing, however, which hamlet was the home of the “old ‘Ba’ ” and her daughter.

  We stopped several times for directions to My Nghiep, turning onto smaller and smaller roads. As we pulled into the sun-baked hamlet, we stopped at a house whose ground floor was open to the street. We could see red, orange, green, and blue weavings draped on dowels lining the walls. A large loom sat out front.

  Two young women who appeared to be sisters invited us inside. They began pulling weavings down and unfolding them for our inspection. It was Jim’s practice to buy something everywhere we stopped, and though he and the sisters had a limited common vocabulary, a friendly banter commenced. Meanwhile, I admired the weavings one at a time, finding each one lovelier than the last.

  Suddenly Chuck realized that he had left a suitcase behind at our hotel in Phan Rang, some twenty minutes back. There was no time to waste, and in an instant he was in the van and the driver was pulling away.

  I bought several weavings, and Song and I meandered across the road to the home of another weaver. I purchased a silk runner and took a picture of the woman warping the thread. For no apparent reason, it was much hotter on this side of the road, so Song suggested we go back to the first place and wait there for Chuck. We rejoined Jim to find that the sisters were negotiating a marriage proposal. They had offered him a dowry of five water buffalos. I thought he was worth six, maybe seven.

  It was blazing hot and I glanced around for a chair. By now a third, older sister had arrived, who spoke better English. She motioned to a low cot in the shade and offered me a seat. We sat down together. If Chuck had been with us, he would have been in a hurry and what came next would never have happened. But he would not return for a good half hour, and there was nothing to do but bide the time.

  Looking toward the weavings inside, I told the young woman that my brother had bought blankets like these forty years ago. I had one at home. He had helped a woman sell her weavings. He had lived in
Phan Rang.

  She said her mother and grandmother had a good American friend a long time ago. Before the soldiers came. “My mother say he speak our Cham language,” she said.

  I knew Pete spoke some Cham. My antenna went up.

  He was tall, she said, and the way her mother described the color of his hair, it was just like mine. She said he had a “high” nose. Song was standing nearby. She meant a “straight” nose, not flat like some Cham and Vietnamese people’s, he corrected. I thought he was too polite to let me think she meant a “big” nose.

  He had come here on his motorcycle, she continued. One day he told her mother to put all of the weavings into the biggest basket she had. Then he took her to a Cham temple to sell them. She was afraid to go, but he told her it would be all right. “You come with me,” he told her. They rode to Po Klong Garai temple, which Song had shown us the previous day. She sold everything in her basket.

  The young woman, whose name I now knew was Cam, told me, “Sometimes my mother say, ‘It too dangerous for you.’ But he say, ‘I don’t care. I take you. Come with me.’ ”

  I turned to Song. “Are you listening to this?” Yes, he nodded, clearly amazed.

  Cam remembered more of her mother’s stories about Pete. Sometimes he brought a live chicken or two with him. When he first started coming to the hamlet, she said, “He very thin!” I thought of his first months when he missed American desserts and McDonald’s hamburgers.

  When Cam’s father saw Pete coming on his motorcycle, he would call out, “Here come blue eyes!”

  Then, she said, “He go away, and he never come back.” Hearing the question in her voice, I told her Pete had moved to the Mekong Delta and been killed there. She raised her hand to cover her open mouth.