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AUT H OR’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 xii | AUTHOR’S NOTE 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...

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