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The Search In his letters home, Richard had often mentioned his youngest brother and asked him to write. Rob – busy with his own life – had written only twice. After Richard died, it began to haunt him. "I started feeling guilt by the time I was 15. You start realizing the person is not there, and they're not coming back. It ate at me through college, and it was compounded when Daddy died the week after I graduated from Officer Candidate School." Rob, too, had become a Marine. Dan and Nita weren't happy with the decision, but by then it was the summer of 1973 and too late for him to go to Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords, signed that January, ended direct U.S. involvement in the war. Rob served in Japan and South Korea, then in the reserves until 1985. Like his father, he went into insurance – Richard had planned to join Dan's firm, too – though with a special twist: Drawing on military tactics, Rob's "On Target" sales consultancy teaches that "taking an account from an entrenched competitor is no different than taking a hill from a determined enemy." Today, Robert J. Sutter is the picture of upper-middle-class American success – tall with dark hair and a mustache, a charming accent and a cheerful, forthright manner. He has a lovely wife, three delightful children, a large home in the exurbs, a summer place. And a knot in his soul.
One day, before he'd left the reserves, Rob was in a bookstore leafing through J. Robert Moskin's "The U.S. Marine Corps Story" when he saw a picture of an exhausted Marine sitting in a church just south of the Demilitarized Zone in Vietnam. "At first I paid it only cursory attention and turned the page," he wrote a cousin last year. Then "it felt as though someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Turn back a page and look again.' I did, and realized the Marine in the photo was my brother Richard." "Marines find momentary refuge in church at An Hoa during enemy mortar attack in 1967," the caption said; it identified the photographer as Frank Johnston. Rob showed the picture to Ellen. "Do you think this is Richard?" he asked. "I hope it's not him," she replied. But deep down, "I knew it was. It's a break-your-heart picture." Rob's quest intensified after he'd left the Marines and felt more comfortable quizzing senior officers about Richard's service. He tracked down the photographer, too, and Johnston told him how he'd taken the picture of Richard at Nha Tho An Hoa ("Peace Church") decades earlier. They became friends. On business trips to Washington, Rob began stopping by the Marine Corps archives in the Navy Yard to dig through the old mimeographed "Command Chronologies" and "After Action Reports" of the Vietnam era, piecing together an idea of what Richard's combat tour had been like. Once when he was making photocopies in the archives, Rob noticed a book on the shelf – "Lima-6: A Marine Company Commander in Vietnam," by Richard D. Camp. Camp had been in 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines, and Rob realized he'd served with his brother. At the time of his death, Richard Sutter had been a corporal in Mike Company. Looking through the book, Rob saw that a man named Carl E. Mundy Jr. had been Richard's battalion executive officer at Khe Sanh. Mundy, he knew, was still on active duty as a major general. Rob called Mundy's aide and "asked if I might interview the general to learn more about Khe Sanh at that time frame. I thought I would get about 15 minutes of his time, but instead we talked for nearly two hours." In "Lima-6," Camp recalls how Mundy – "one of those perfectly squared-away Marines" who somehow maintained sartorial spiffiness even in the muddy turmoil of Khe Sanh – had showed up one day with jagged holes in his freshly laundered fatigues. He'd hung them in his tent, and they'd been shredded by shrapnel in a rocket attack that night. Richard, Rob realized, had been wounded in the same attack. ("Dear Mamma and Daddy," he'd written, "If you get a notice that I've been wounded in action, don't give it a second thought. Last night I received minor shrapnel wounds in the left hand.") A few years after Rob met him, Mundy became the 30th Commandant of the Marine Corps. He'd provided Rob with an address for Andrew D. DeBona, Richard's last company commander, and DeBona sent Rob a detailed letter – based on notes he'd kept at the time – describing his brother's last patrol. When they eventually met for lunch, Rob learned that Mike Company – with an authorized strength of 220 – had suffered 264 wounded and 36 killed in the 10 months DeBona commanded it. It was understandable that he hadn't known Richard personally. Rob also discovered another name – Frank D. Fulford Jr. – who'd been Richard's commander before DeBona, but he hadn't been able to locate Fulford. The archives had a tape Fulford made in 1967, an "After Action Debriefing" describing parts of the battle around Peace Church the day Richard's picture was taken there. As Rob listened to it, "I was struck by his accent. I went to the kitchen, opened the Atlanta phone book and looked up the name." Fulford was practically a neighbor. When they met, he filled Rob in on many details of Richard's life in Vietnam, recalling what a "gregarious and engaging personality" he'd been; it also turned out that Rob's nephew was in an Army ROTC unit commanded by Fulford's son. "Twists of fate" were at work, Rob felt, "or the guiding hands of angels."
"It was an extremely moving ceremony," Rob wrote his cousin, "punctuated by one of the best speeches I have ever heard." In the oration, retired Marine Col. Anthony V. Latorre declared that Richard "looked death in the eye and did not blink. [He] stood his ground and won the battle against evil on this earth: the evil that makes quitters out of ordinarily good people. "Richard Sutter was a true hero."
 Chronology | Resources | Peace Church
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company |
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