A Lost Brother's Lost Words

Pete was an affectionate brother without being soppy. I loved just hanging out with him, and even with the nine-year age difference between us, I can't recall a single time that he told me to get lost. I can still see him as a teenager diligently tinkering with his red motor scooter, the greasy parts lying in pieces on the carport floor, while I looked on. Finally, when he got the old Cushman running, we took it out for a spin. I remember how I clung to his waist and the wind blew my hair as we sped down the hill by our house.

He turned 24 while he was back from Vietnam. 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."

HOLLY AND I WERE IN THE BATHROOM PUTTING ON OUR MAKEUP and fixing our hair when the phone rang around 7 a.m. on November 12, 1965. We were dressed in our Pep Club uniforms for a football game that night. (Carol was married and living out of state.) The only telephone in our house was in the hallway outside the bathroom. My father came out of his bedroom to take the call and must have signaled for us to go into my room. From a few feet away, behind the closed door, we stood listening to the grave tone of his voice. He spoke so quietly, we couldn't hear what he was saying. He hung up the phone and returned in silence to his bedroom. Holly and I could tell that someone had died. But who? My grandmother? Carol? It didn't occur to me that it was Pete. Then we heard a terrifying, high-pitched shriek coming from the bedroom. It was my mother.

We waited for what seemed like a long time before Dad returned. He quietly told us that Pete had been killed in a land mine explosion. I had never heard of a land mine, but I understood it was some kind of a bomb, and Pete had driven over it. I don't remember what happened next, but I do know that there wasn't a moment when the four of us came together to share our shock and grief.

Instead, a stream of my parents' friends began to arrive at the house. There were phone calls to and from our relatives, many in Connecticut and a few in New York, Illinois and Indiana. Casseroles and desserts appeared and were set out on a large table at the end of the living room. I looked at the food but didn't feel hungry. Some of it went into a freezer in the garage. A pineapple upside-down cake wrapped loosely in foil remained there for months, maybe years.

Someone turned on the radio, and we heard a man announce our personal tragedy to the world. Driving in the Mekong Delta, the voice said, Peter Morse Hunting, a 24-year-old civilian with International Voluntary Services, had been killed when his vehicle hit a land mine. "Thank God he died instantly," someone said. Within an hour or two, the report was corrected to say that Pete had been shot five times in the head. Another 10 rounds had been fired into his body. I found it impossible to take in the brutality of his death.

My parents maintained their composure as people came and went. Neighbors and friends stood in the kitchen or sat in the living room. At one point, to avoid their stares, I lay my head in Holly's lap and cried. My parents did not try to comfort us. Holly and I were on our own to figure out how to behave or to fill the long hours of that day, and I suppose my parents were, too.

It was many years later that I learned how widely Pete's death had been reported. In 1965, U.S. casualties in Vietnam were just beginning to mount, and the murder of a noncombatant who, as The Post reported, "had spent more than two years helping Vietnamese civilians," seemed particularly shocking. My great-aunt and great-uncle learned the news from Walter Cronkite. "In the Mekong Delta, a 24-year-old American civilian aid worker, Peter Hunting of Oklahoma City, was killed in a guerrilla ambush today," Cronkite somberly told viewers of the "CBS Evening News." "Officials said that Hunting was led to his death by two Vietnamese, apparently Viet Cong agents, who had posed as his friends."

I wondered, Why would anyone betray him?

We flew to Connecticut for services and stayed at my mother's family farm near New Haven. Pete's remains were flown to Hartford. Years later, I would learn from my uncle that my mother had insisted on being the one to identify Pete's bullet-riddled body. "She wouldn't let any of us go with her, not even your father," he said.

There was a memorial service for Pete in Saigon at the International Protestant Church, where Vietnamese friends sang folk songs Pete had learned to play on his guitar and the IVS director for Vietnam, Don Luce, eulogized him as someone who "came to help and felt deeply the problems of the Vietnamese people."

Months later, Vice President Hubert Humphrey returned from a trip to South Vietnam with a medal awarded posthumously to Pete by the Vietnamese government. Humphrey invited our family to Washington and presented the silver medal to my parents at his office at the Capitol. His eyes brimmed with tears when he described Pete as a man who "represented the best that this country has to offer."