Semper Fi: A Brother's Search

By Phil McCombs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 20, 1998; Page A01

Second of three articles

ATLANTA—Rob Sutter was nearly 14 when his brother Richard was killed in Vietnam in 1967. The funeral was held the day after his birthday, and Rob came home to find a letter in the mailbox from his dead brother.

His hero.

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY," Richard had scrawled on stationery embossed with the U.S. Marine Corps emblem and a small military map of Southeast Asia. "Judy [a girlfriend] told me she saw you awhile back and that you were just like me -- how lucky can a guy be?

". . . Well, the real purpose of this letter is to wish you a very happy 14th birthday. I know I'm early, but I don't know when I'll have another chance to write."

Two days later -- July 21, 1967 -- Cpl. Richard F. Sutter was shot through the head in a battle with North Vietnamese troops near Khe Sanh. He died instantly, leaving his parents, five brothers and sisters and innumerable friends back in Atlanta to deal with their grief.

For Rob, the pain and anger would only grow.

"Remember you're in my daily thoughts and prayers," Richard had closed that last letter. "Oh yeah! Save a few good-looking blondes for me."

It was still early in a war that would deeply divide and change the nation. Enthusiasm for the fight against communism was strong, and most of the 700 mourners at Richard's funeral in the Cathedral of Christ the King hadn't known him -- they were there to support the family of a 21-year-old Marine who'd sacrificed his life in his country's effort to preserve freedom in South Vietnam.

This was a bitter, angry time in America -- the '60s of song and fable, of My Lai and Woodstock, political assassinations, troops blocking citizens at the gates of the Pentagon. The day Richard died, Time's cover featured a Newark cabby under a banner that read "Anatomy of a Race Riot." Carl Sandburg's death was reported two days later, and his great antiwar poem "Grass" appeared on the front page of this newspaper:

   Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

   Shovel them under and let me work --
   I am the grass: I cover all.
   And pile them high at Gettysburg
   And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun . . .
   Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
   What place is this?
   Where are we now?

"I opened that letter," recalls Rob, now a successful businessman of 44. "I don't know if I cried then, but I'll tell you this: Since then I haven't. . . . I haven't released in tears about anything.

"It's been gnawing in my gut."

A Government Check

The immensity of the family's pain, the raw sudden shock of that death, its fantastic battlefield violence, and the vast emptiness where once stood -- Richard! -- exuberant talkative charismatic utterly fearless broad-shouldered handsome car-crashing troublemaking Richard with his confident smile . . .

It took 10 days for the body to reach Atlanta.

"HIS REMAINS WILL BE PREPARED, ENCASED AND SHIPPED AT NO EXPENSE TO YOU," the telegram had informed Dan and Nita Sutter, "ACCOMPANIED BY AN ESCORT EITHER TO A FUNERAL HOME OR TO A NATIONAL CEMETERY SELECTED BY YOU. IN ADDITION YOU WILL BE REIMBURSED AN AMOUNT NOT TO EXCEED $300 TOWARD FUNERAL AND INTERMENT EXPENSES IF INTERMENT IS IN A PRIVATE CEMETERY, $150 IF REMAINS ARE CONSIGNED TO A FUNERAL HOME PRIOR TO INTERMENT IN A NATIONAL CEMETERY, OR $75 IF REMAINS ARE CONSIGNED DIRECTLY TO A NATIONAL CEMETERY."

Later, there was a letter from the White House assuring the Sutters they were "in the prayers of Mrs. Johnson and myself at this time of sadness"; another from Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, promising "to do our utmost to bring eventual victory so that your son's sacrifice will not have been in vain"; and a check from the treasurer of the United States for the money recovered from Richard's personal belongings.

It was for 90 cents. Dan Sutter never cashed it.

Eventually a letter found on Richard's corpse at Khe Sanh made its way back to Atlanta, too. Wrinkled and dirty, it was from his sister and closest pal, Ellen: "Won't be long now for you! Do you leave the 21st of July still?"

The stamp was canceled with a single word punched across George Washington's face:

"P E A C E"

As was customary, news of the death was to be personally delivered to the parents by military officers. They went first to Christ the King, where a priest volunteered to precede them to the family home on Stovall Boulevard to find Nita, then to Dan's insurance office to bring him home.

Ellen Kappel, now 54, remembers she was with her children (Richard was their godfather) when her sister Hannah called and said, "Richard has been killed, and we're sending someone over to pick you up."

"They took me home, and as we came up the street where I'd grown up, and turned into the drive -- where Mr. Pittman, the next-door neighbor, had almost killed Richard one day when Richard was on his bike . . ."

"There were a jillion cars parked there," prompts Rob, who's been listening intently, filling gaps in his memory of the personalities and events that still grip him. "I came home from [summer] school and all these people were there . . ."

"Everything began to hit me," his sister continues, tears welling as she retells the story three decades later. "It just hit me, I could see us as children, playing in our yard. I fainted."

Dan and Nita didn't cry at the funeral. They declined to look at Richard in the casket, and asked their children not to, either. Rob obeyed, but Ellen recalls seeing the "whole body. He was in his military uniform. His head looked fine, he had a very short haircut."

"We were raised to be stoic," Rob explains.

Richard had been the rebel -- an immense, glamorous and protecting figure on the landscape of Rob's young life: At the family place on the lake, he'd always made sure his little brother wasn't left behind when the big guys went boating; and when he'd crashed the car one time, Rob remembers, Richard's first thought was to see that his little brother was safe.

Then, he'd joined the Marines.

"He was escaping" a tense household ruled by a domineering father and remote mother, explains Ellen, a psychotherapist. "It was a little nerve-racking in Dodge."

It was in Khe Sanh, too, as Richard would learn -- too late.

"He was due home, we were planning a big old keg party," recalls Beverly Amos, 51, who worked summers with Richard at a drugstore soda fountain. "We were all young and innocent and there was this awful war going on, but no one thought it would be your friend who got killed: 'Not Richard! He's tough and strange and interesting -- like James Dean -- and he's gotta come home!' "

"Richard was the best friend I ever had," Doug Dromey, 52, recently wrote Rob, who had contacted him in his continuing search for information about his brother's life and death. "We had a lot of wild and crazy times together chasing ladies and tipping some of North Georgia's best mountain dew.

"To this day, it is still hard for me to realize that Richard has passed on. I can only imagine what you as his brother must have felt."

What Rob felt -- and continued to feel -- worries his only remaining brother, Lloyd, 58, an attorney. (David, another brother, was killed by a drunk driver in 1981.)

"Rob was 13 and I was almost 30 when Richard died," Lloyd says. "I was old enough to cope. He wasn't.

"Everybody descended on our family, and you can't imagine how bad it was to wait 10 days for the body. My folks' friends came by, and my friends in their thirties, [but Rob was] an early teenager, and death's not in their basket . . . so his friends didn't come."

At the same time, antiwar protesters were phoning the house to tell Dan and Nita they deserved what they got for sending their son to Vietnam.

"Rob was a 13-year-old having to deal with violent death in a house where the whole split in America is raging -- the antiwar people on the outside, the friends on the inside -- with the [antiwar] telephone calls coming in like hot rounds . . . vicious calls. It was awful.

"And there's a 13-year-old standing there in grief.

"And nobody notices."

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.

"Hero worship," he'd written a friend, led him to "chase [Richard's] shadow, wanting to follow in his path. . . . At age 25, as a junior captain in the Marines, it dawned on me that there was no shadow left to chase . . . yet I have often wanted to know what kind of Marine Richard was."

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."

On Veterans Day 1992, the Atlanta Vietnam Veterans Business Association dedicated a plaque in Richard's honor at the Underground Atlanta mall on Peachtree Street.

"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."

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."

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.

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."

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.

Family Man

Parking the Tahoe in the garage of his pristine suburban tract mansion, Rob greets his family. "Dad!" cries Emily, 10, "I sold 144 Girl Scout cookies!" Rob soon busies himself cooking a shrimp feast, while his wife, Laura -- her father is a retired Army general -- supervises. They've been married 18 years.

Preston, the 14-year-old, declares happily that when a friend told him he looks like Richard, "I was, like, 'All riiight!'" Mitchell, 12, recalls how his teacher, reading from one of Rob's letters to a relative about Richard, which Mitchell had brought in to share, "started crying halfway through."

"I'd like to go to college and go to OCS," Preston says. "I'm not thinking of a military career, though."

"Just a taste of it," Rob prompts.

"All my friends talk about what they're going to do when they grow up," Preston continues. "I say I'm going into the military to get a taste of it and they all look at me like I'm nuts. . . . Kids say they're afraid of dying, but the world would be a better place because of the teamwork and leadership skills they'd learn in the military."

Rob looks at his son with pleasure.

In his basement office, he has Johnston's Nha Tho An Hoa picture on the wall along with Richard's medals, mementos of his own service -- crossed ceremonial swords, his captain's bars -- and framed quotes from James Webb's Vietnam novel "Fields of Fire" ("Do not stand at my grave and cry./ I am not there, I did not die") and John Stuart Mill ("A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight . . . is a miserable creature").

Rob's quest, Laura explains -- again, he's out of earshot -- "has unfolded in a way that has opened doors and healed him . . . and it feels right.

"In the beginning, he was just trying to find out what happened. . . . It was an obsessive thing then, [but] now he's mellowed out. He was very angry because of his brother's death, and angry he wasn't able to go to Vietnam -- for revenge or whatever. He was trained, and not invited to the party."

Then: "It's been a very long and drawn-out grieving process for him."

Vietnam

The big jet, lumbering southwest, enters Vietnamese airspace.

Rob, passing the time, has started a journal. "Family and friends have had some varied reactions to my taking this trip," he writes.

They range from, "This sounds like a great experience" to "Why in the hell do you want to go there?" I think their perception is that I am continuing to deal with some sort of grief that won't settle. I see it much differently.

Of all my family, I am the only one, other than Richard, who served as a Marine. The tactics we were taught were those from Vietnam. The Marines we served with were veterans of Vietnam. The dominant concern of males my age, throughout high school and college, was Vietnam. [It] defined my era. It took a great toll on our country, my family and me.

I want to stand on the ground of this little country that had such a profound effect on us all. I want to smell it, taste it and feel it.

He's not going alone, but with a large group of retired Marines who saw heavy combat in the war and from whom he hopes to learn what his brother's life and death had been like. As he listens intently, sensing their anguish and enjoying the camaraderie, he begins to realize that their experiences -- taken as a whole -- are the story of America's continuing struggle with Vietnam, his own personal quest writ large.

While Rob had watched the conflict from afar, these men have been here before. Some, like Richard, had gone by ship -- but many had flown like this, on a commercial airliner.

There they'd sat, young trained killers in camouflage fatigues, being asked by stewardesses if they took cream and sugar. Then, minutes later, they'd stepped out into the oven-hot sunblaze.

This is not a trip about death, loss and grief. It is a trip about respect, gratitude and life. It is a "debt of honor." . . . More than anything else, [it] has to do with simply being a Marine. Perhaps this is what my siblings have never been able to comprehend, for being a Marine holds a special magic . . .

The jet lets down over a familiar tan-and-green symmetry of rice paddy, dike and tree line.

Rob peers out the window. "It's like Kansas," he murmurs.

Hanoi looms into view.

From the air, as we approached, there is still very visible evidence of the heavy bombing that took place during the war. Large craters pockmark the ground near the runway. The entire left side of the runway is lined with Russian-made MiG-21 fighter planes. . . . This is not your typical civilian airport.

The plane lands and Rob, with the others, hefts his carry-on and waits. The door opens.

He steps out.

Next: Peace – Return to Khe Sanh