Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam Read online

  Finding Pete

  Finding Pete

  Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam

  Jill Hunting

  Published by Wesleyan University Press,

  Middletown, CT 06459

  www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

  © 2009 by Jill Hunting

  All rights reserved

  Printed in United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hunting, Jill, 1950 –

  Finding Pete: rediscovering the brother I lost in Vietnam / Jill Hunting.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8195-6923-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

  1. Hunting, Peter, 1941–1965 — Death and burial. 2. Hunting, Peter,

  1941–1965 — Correspondence. 3. Hunting, Jill, 1950 — Family.

  4. Brothers and sisters — United States — Case studies. 5. Loss

  (Psychology) — Case studies. 6. Civilians in war — Vietnam —

  Biography. 7. International Voluntary Services — Biography. 8. Vietnam

  War, 1961–1975 — Biography. 9. Vietnam War, 1961–1975 — Casualties.

  10. Vietnam War, 1961–1975 — United States. I. Title.

  CT275.H75568h86 2009

  959.704'30922 — dc22

  [B] 2009018233

  Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative.

  The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for

  recycled paper.

  For Cis and Hol

  Sea of Clouds

  The time has come to brave the sea of clouds,

  To bear away though aching young and hardly made,

  Rolled down in dark and brooding seas.

  Soon gone from sight, our faces lost in waves,

  Our cries no longer heard,

  We finally slip into a wind-blurred far away.

  Till we are gone — a small and slanted line

  To bravely cut that endless edge,

  Where dark and boiling clouds wedge down

  To meet the sea.

  — Kirtland Mead, 1965

  Composed by a college friend of Pete Hunting and enclosed

  with a sympathy letter to his parents. Used with permission

  of Kirtland Mead.

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Map of South Vietnam

  PROLOGUE

  ONE | The Brunt of It

  TWO | “Kiss the Sisses Good-bye”

  THREE | Sand between My Toes

  FOUR | “Just Heard over the Radio”

  FIVE | “A Peaceful Sleep Forever”

  SIX | Mr. Tall American

  SEVEN | “Never Very Good at the ‘Why’ ”

  EIGHT | “At War in Another Year”

  NINE | Trip to Vietnam

  TEN | “A Promise Is a Promise”

  ELEVEN | “An Open Question”

  TWELVE | “Too Much Talk about Danger”

  THIRTEEN | Pete’s Long-Lost Letters Surface

  FOURTEEN | Darkening Skies

  FIFTEEN | “Here Come Blue Eyes!”

  SIXTEEN | “A Wind-Blurred Far Away”

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Illustrations follow pages 80 and 224

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  On November 12, 1965, two days before one of the first major battles of the war in Vietnam, my only brother, Pete, was killed there. I had just turned fifteen.

  Pete’s death was widely reported, but it so traumatized my family that we didn’t discuss what had happened to him. Before long, we stopped talking about him at all.

  Between July 1963 — when my brother arrived in Southeast Asia as a civilian volunteer with a little-known nongovernmental organization called International Voluntary Services, or IVS — and November 1965, he wrote dozens of letters home. As a teenager, I didn’t pay close attention to them, but I was aware that Pete routinely mentioned names I heard on the news, such as Diem, Lodge, Rusk, Ky, Westmoreland, and McNamara.

  Pete was twenty-four when he was killed. When I reached that age, I longed to learn more about the young man I had known only from the vantage point of a little sister. I asked my mother if I could read his letters again. She told me they had all been destroyed in a basement flood. My connection with Pete was lost forever — or so I thought.

  In 2004, sixty-four letters surfaced. Those letters led me to others, and eventually I had 175. Only by reading them and talking with many kind, generous individuals who remembered Pete did I come to know once again my wonderful big brother. I know him better now, in fact, than when he was alive.

  Many people have suffered a loss like mine: someone we loved died in a war zone. Thousands, perhaps millions, of us waited for someone who did not return from a faraway land. We have struggled, with various degrees of success, to integrate our loss. Life has not stopped for us, even if we went forward with a chamber deep within sealed up. Some of us have not told our closest friends or spouse about a person we once mourned, or still mourn.

  In my case, thirteen years passed between Pete’s death and the weekend my sisters and I got together for the first time just to talk about him. It was twenty years before I met his closest friends in IVS, and twenty-five years before I went with one of them to Vietnam. Thirty-two years went by before my family helped create a memorial to Pete in the form of a trail that winds through the Connecticut woods he explored as a boy.

  None of these turning points, meaningful as they were, matched the significance of discovering my brother’s letters. What they meant to me, where they led me, and how they changed me is the substance of Finding Pete. Two days into my fifteenth year, I lost my brother and the freedom to talk about him. This is the story of what I found and how I found it.

  Finding Pete is a work of nonfiction. Real names are used for all but four individuals, who have been given another name to protect their privacy. No characters or conversations have been invented, with one exception: In the final chapter, I reconstructed Pete’s last day on the basis of data gathered from many sources. Because certain facts are lost to time, however, I filled in some details, consistent with what I learned.

  Minor changes of spelling, grammar, and punctuation have been made to some letters quoted in the book.

  In some quarters, “Vietnam War” is considered U.S.-centric, while elsewhere it is accepted as standard usage. The term is used in this book.

  In the narrative, the spelling of Vietnamese place names conforms to those in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition. In quoted material, Viet-Nam and Viet Nam are sometimes used instead of Vietnam.

  The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, is a foreign assistance agency of the U.S. government, situated within the State Department. In its field mission in Vietnam, USAID was known as USOM. In his letters and journal, Pete did not always distinguish between USAID and USOM, and for this reason “U.S. Agency for International Development,” “USAID,” “AID,” “U.S. Operations Mission,” and “USOM” are used interchangeably.

  Usage of “Vietcong” and “VC” (referring to Vietnamese insurgents and considered by some to be derogatory) and “National Liberation Front” and “NLF” (the organization of the insurgency) follows that of my brother and his peers.

  “MAAG” and “MACV” were the designations for U.S. military commands in Vietnam. MAAG, the Military Assistance Advisory Group, was formed in 1955 and later subsumed under the Military Assistance Command–Vietnam, or MACV. My brother’s
correspondence made no clear-cut distinction between the terms, and his usage of the acronyms has been preserved.

  On second reference to Pete’s friends whom I know personally, I have used their first names except when it is clearer to use surnames.

  I have not included a list of my conversations and correspondence that informed the writing of this book. I am indebted to the many people who spoke with me about my brother and Vietnam.

  Portions of the book first appeared in different form in “A Lost Brother’s Lost Words,” published by the Washington Post Magazine.

  Finding Pete

  Prologue

  “This is a good map,” my Vietnamese guide says. “We can find this place. We will make a ceremony.”

  I have just shown him a map with an X where Pete, my brother, was killed.

  Before I left home I had exchanged e-mails with a Vietnam veteran whose Web site included old maps of Southeast Asia. He had helped me pinpoint the military coordinates I obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration: Vietnam ws 820 036. One map of the Lower Mekong Delta was a clutter of hatch marks, village names, and small blue squares inside larger black ones, so I asked for help finding the coordinates. He sent me a map with a big red X. It was a mile and a quarter south of Cai Rang on National Highway 4.

  I had stared at the map. So that’s where it happened.

  Now it is September of 2006 and I’m traveling in Vietnam with four men. Two are Americans. One of them founded an organization that builds libraries in Southeast Asia, and the other is a donor. The two Vietnamese are a driver and our guide and interpreter, whose name is Song. His dignified bearing and formal manners, and the way he sits with his legs crossed knee-upon-knee, remind me of European men. He owns a tour company and has taken many returning GIs to the places where they fought or their buddies died.

  We stop at a little shop and buy a package of fifty incense sticks, a plastic cigarette lighter, and a long bouquet of white freesia wrapped in newspaper and cellophane.

  Nine o’clock in the morning and it’s already hot. Our minivan crosses the Lower Mekong on a ferry and bumps off the ramp onto a two-lane road lined with concrete houses and shops. Most have a tin-roofed porch and one or two white plastic chairs in the shade. We pass a Tiger Beer sign and a small table covered with sunglasses in neat rows. Internet Game Online. Aquafina. Petimex Gas. Pepsi. Massage. Mobilfone.

  The road is dusty and our windows are closed. Where the shops bunch up, the road narrows, and truck and car traffic slows. Bicycles and mopeds overtake us. Beside our van a man stands on his porch, holding a coppery rooster by its legs. With his free hand, he dips a paper towel into a bucket of water and carefully wipes the bird. It squawks and wriggles free. After a few seconds’ chase, the man catches the rooster by the feet and places it in a cage.

  “At night, the Vietcong dug holes in the road,” Song says. “Maybe they buried a land mine, or maybe they only dug a hole. You didn’t know if there was a mine, so you had to stop.”

  I think about the duty officer’s log I had obtained. It said there were no skid marks, indicating that Pete’s vehicle had slowed to a stop.

  “Forty years ago there were no shops here. Only rice fields and bushes and family tombs.”

  Signs for Tay Long coffee and Vitaly, the bottled water, vie for space with thickets of twelve-foot-tall bamboo and coconut palms, their green globes hanging high overhead in clusters. This would be an ideal place for vc to hide, Song says. “When someone stops, a sniper shoots him. TOK-koooo. That’s the sound an AK-47 makes. TOK-koooo. I remember this sound.”

  My mind travels to the army medical officer’s report I had found. It didn’t mention a type of gun or bullets, only “multiple GSW.” Multiple gunshot wounds.

  I write in my notebook: Banana trees with clusters of green fruit. Bamboo. Coconut. High grass. An ideal place for an ambush.

  We’ve picked up speed again and the asphalt has widened to about sixty feet. The road would have been half as wide back then, Song says. “We are close to the place.”

  My eyes sweep the road. I have imagined this scene for so many years, I’m hyperalert to colors and shapes and sounds. Pete has only a few minutes left.

  Song says that even when he was armed, he feared places like this. “After I left the air force, I was still afraid I would be shot by vc. A few miles from a place like this and you are in the middle of nowhere.”

  He asks what year my brother was born.

  “Nineteen forty-one.”

  “The year of the snake,” he says. “My brother was born the same year. He spent seven and a half years in a reeducation camp.”

  He asks about Pete’s and my birth order, and I tell him Pete was the eldest and I was the youngest, of four children. He says there is an old Vietnamese saying that parents make their best effort at the beginning and the end. The first and last are the most brilliant, he says. For the first time today, I laugh.

  Song gestures to the driver and we pull over. I step down from the van, balancing my notebook, the freesia, the Book of Common Prayer I’ve brought along, and a yellow rose from the vase in my Saigon hotel room. Song has chosen a stopping place with a twenty-foot expanse of vegetation — hard to find on this commercial thoroughfare. We could be ten feet from where Pete was killed, or fifty, or a hundred yards.

  The passing traffic rumbles. Horns squeak loudly and nasally. Although Song says there is no road rage in Vietnam, drivers here honk in a constant conversation. “Meeeep! Meep-meep!”

  We will pay our respects to Pete the Vietnamese way. Song explains that first we will light the incense. Then we will place the flowers and incense on the ground. He will say something in the Buddhist tradition, then I will say something in mine.

  I unwrap the flowers and hand the lighter and newspaper to Song. He rolls the paper tight, clicks once, holds flame to paper until it catches, and lights the incense. With his shoe he presses the last of the burning newspaper into the earth. He hands me half of the sticks. Smoke blows across my face.

  “We hold the incense like this,” he says. We clasp the bundles between our palms, touch our ten fingertips and the heels of our hands together, and pull them toward our chest. “To your heart,” he says. With our backs to the road we bow slowly, three times. In my peripheral vision I see that a few Vietnamese have stopped to watch. They observe us for a minute or two before continuing on foot or riding away on their bikes.

  The flowers I’m holding are almost three feet long and I’m balancing them in an ungainly elbow tuck under one arm, while also clutching the incense and holding my hands to my heart. Am I doing this right? Even though I’m not big on rituals I want to observe this custom respectfully, knowing that Vietnamese venerate their dead with profound devotion. And while I have honored Pete in my heart for forty years, I’m ready to remember him with this new, more outward form of expression.

  Sweet smoke drifts into my nostrils and eyes. Song nods to me, a silent signal that we will now give half of our incense to Chuck and Jim.

  I lay the flowers in the weeds. Song kneels beside me and we plant our smoking incense sticks in the ground. Chuck and Jim plant theirs. We step back up to the roadside and bow. Cars, trucks, bicycle taxis, and motorcycles are passing within a few feet of us. I can feel the rush of air on my neck as they go by. Song speaks.

  “You were a good man, Pete Hunting. You came here to help. I came here to pay respect to your soul. I understand that you came to Vietnam with a good purpose, to help the people. There was a misunderstanding and you died. I deeply regret that. We came to see the place where you were killed. You have done many good things. May you rest in peace, wherever and forever.”

  No one can hear me over the din of the traffic, but I read aloud from the prayer book, about God’s unnumbered mercies and the shortness and uncertainty of life.

  Three men are standing very close to us, looking from the incense and flowers to our faces. They can tell that we are honoring someone, or, as Song s
ays, they see our reverence. Two continue on their way. One man lingers. His face and arms are the color of a hazelnut. After we have stood in silence for a few minutes, he asks who we are. Song tells him, then translates what the man has said: An American was killed down the road. His mother told him about it many times when he was a little boy.

  With his lit cigarette the man points to a sign with the word “COM.” There was a fork in the road, he tells Song. A long time ago. That’s where they killed the American, right there.

  I search Song’s face. Can we really have found the very place?

  We walk to the sign, about fifty yards away.

  The man is forty-two. In 1965, he was one year old. His mother always warned him not to go where the American was killed. Everyone in the surrounding villages knew about it.

  “Ghe lam.”

  “Very dangerous,” Song translates. “His father told him this place was very, very dangerous.”

  The man gestures to indicate the area around us. “The American was killed here,” he says. “There used to be a fork in the road.”

  Looking at me, he asks, “Did he come to build a bridge?”

  “He came to teach English,” I say. It was the simplest answer. Pete had also dug wells, laid brick, built windmills, and translated hygiene pamphlets into Vietnamese.

  I slip my pen into my pants pocket and walk a few steps down a footpath that leads to a two-story turquoise house. The path bends left and continues around the house, then disappears. In a clearing, a little boy in a red T-shirt watches me from beside a clothesline pinned with pants and tops. Where the turquoise house now sits, a narrow road concealed by elephant grass and bamboo once led to a village, and death lay in wait for Pete.