Dress Whites

Rob's next step seemed ordained.

Late last year, he told his family and friends that he was going to Vietnam – a unified communist nation governed by Hanoi since the collapse of the South in April 1975 – with a group of Marines who'd fought there, some of them in Richard's battalion.

He wanted to stand on the ground near Khe Sanh where his brother died, and visit the little country church at An Hoa where – on May 16, 1967 – Johnston had taken that picture of Richard, an image so haunting and emblematic of the war that it's still widely reproduced.

Johnston was going on the trip, too.

As he and a reporter arrived in Atlanta to interview the Sutters beforehand, Rob – sporting an Aussie bush hat and piloting a forest green Chevy Tahoe – greeted him warmly. Their friendship, which seemed to offer the younger man a direct and visceral connection with his brother's life, had deepened since 1988, when Rob had first called to learn about the photograph.

What was it like for his brother in that church?

It had been Hell on Earth, Johnston had told him. In photographing 47 combat operations during the war, he'd never spent a worse night than the one with Richard in the besieged parish church: Wounded Marines were dying in pews and on the floor around them as the North Vietnamese Army pressed the attack outside. Richard, Johnston assured Rob, had been a "brave and gallant Marine."

White-haired and affable at 57, Johnston had been a Marine himself before joining United Press International in Vietnam, where, of the six UPI photographers he'd known, only he and one other survived.

"You're talking about 31 years of baggage," he told Rob. "It's something you carry within you that builds up over the goddamn years, and you don't realize what effect it has on you until you're faced with the reality that you're going to go back."

Now, as he drives the photographer and reporter from one family interview to the next, Rob sticks a cassette in the tape deck and Richard's voice fills the vehicle. It's a "tape letter" from Vietnam, Christmas 1966. Richard sounds weary, his voice a deep, slow monotone:

"Robert, I understand that in school you're doing real well as far as activities and athletics, and the presidential election really was great. I was very, very much impressed. ... I'd like to hear from you occasionally if you get a chance. I know you're busy. I really didn't write too many people when I was your age, either, but I didn't know too many people over here then."

"That's the only thing I regret," Rob says.

As he guides the newsmen, a prickly side of his personality emerges: "I don't want the story to be a morose tragedy," he orders the reporter. "It's not. ... If you're looking for hand-wringing and weeping – no! ... We seek not grieving, but understanding."

He sounds angry.

"I just want the tone to be: 'We're happy he's in our family. He never left our family.' ... It's not a damn crying shame!

"If so, there were 58,000 damn crying shames."

Robert visits his brother's grave in an Atlanta cemetery in 1998. (By Frank Johnston – The Washington Post)

At Arlington Memorial Park in northeast Atlanta, where Richard is buried, a misting rain falls as Rob bends over the flat gravestone, brushing away pine needles. He doesn't linger. "I never visit cemeteries, I don't believe in them," he insists. "He's not in the ground."

The old house on Stovall Boulevard, where Rob and Richard grew up in the splendid sprawl of their big family, is a pretty colonial in a sylvan setting. Inside, Rob's cousin Kathryn Smith, 43, works in the kitchen as her 8-year-old son, Dan, plays on the floor with a toy military fort and camouflaged tank.

"It came with no men," the lad laments. "If it was really an Army base, it would have them."

Rob wanders the familiar spaces – the upstairs bedroom where the boys bunked, the back room where Grandma lived, the patio they'd sweated to complete in time for Hannah's wedding, the fireplace where Richard – looking none too cheerful – had posed for pictures the night before he left for the war.

Kathryn remembers when she was little (they'd lived nearby then) and Richard came over one day with his girlfriend. "He was so excited. He sat us all down and said he had an announcement, and we thought they were getting engaged. He said, 'I've enlisted in the Marines!' and he had this great big smile. Daddy was crestfallen, and I remember the look on the girl's face. ...

"After he went, we sent care packages – brownies and Kool-Aid. He wrote, 'Send lots of Kool-Aid and tapes.' I remember, as a family, passing the microphone around."

She's leaning on the kitchen counter. A note on the fridge says: "Get plain bagels." Rob hands her a copy of Richard's picture in the church.

"God," Kathryn breathes, gazing at it, "he looks so much older. ..."

Her son comes over to look.

"That's your cousin Richard, who grew up here," his mother says gently. "He was 7 years old in this house, too, and he used to get his mom all upset and excited, and she'd send him to bed early."

Then, very softly: "This place where he is, this is on the other side of the world, in a place called Vietnam."

Johnston, stunned by the sudden power of the scene, instinctively slips into a crouch, his Leica clicking.

"Richard was a very brave person," he tells the boy, explaining how the picture was taken under enemy mortar fire.

Rob, joining in, elaborates on mortars – how the rounds arc high, coming almost straight down on your position.

Baby Richard and his mother, Nita. (Family Photo)

Later, at Ellen's house, she and Rob probe decades-old family dynamics, as people tend to do now that there's a popular vocabulary for this sort of thing: the "dysfunction," the facade of ice-cold gentility and resolute perfectionism with its small unspoken secrets and hidden anguish, the "rage-aholism" of their Proper Southern Mother, the fear-based, Depression-bred exactitude of their commanding father.

"I don't miss my mother," Rob admits. "I don't really miss my father. Because I didn't really have a relationship with them. I feel I was raised by wolves.

"Nice wolves, but I never felt that parental bond."

His bond had been with Richard.

Leading the way upstairs to look for mementos, Ellen predicts – Rob is out of earshot – that the Vietnam trip will affect him deeply. "I'm worried about him," she confesses. "I don't know what he's looking for. ... I hope it brings closure for him."

Sister Ellen shows the christening gown, in the Sutter family for a century, in which Richard and Robert were baptized. (By Frank Johnston – The Post)

Going through her desk for Richard's letters, she predicts that "at some point it will hit him – the whole meaning of what he's looking for. He's on a journey ... searching for that older brother he never knew. He sees Richard as a hero.

"I see him as an unfortunate young person who got killed in Vietnam, who joined the Marines because he didn't know what to do with his life."

She enters a bedroom. There's a picture of Richard on the dresser and, beside it, a tiny pair of booties and a baby bonnet. Ellen opens a drawer and removes a white christening gown.

Carefully, she spreads it on the bed – a long, delicate garment crocheted by her great-grandmother. Over a century, it's been worn by countless members of the family.

Richard was christened in it.

So was Rob.

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