Forthcoming This Fall in Paperback

This fall, Blue Ear Books is publishing the revised and first paperback edition of Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam.

The revised edition includes a new Author’s Note. Also published for the first time since 1967 is the full text of the protest letter to President Lyndon Johnson signed by 44 members of International Voluntary Services in Vietnam. The letter describes in detail the horrific impact of the war on the volunteers’ Vietnamese friends and colleagues and their traditional way of life. News of the letter was first reported on the front page of the New York Times, ending with an urgent plea: “End this war.” Eight years later, in April of 1975, thousands of U.S. personnel and Vietnamese allies were evacuated as North Vietnamese tanks entered Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.

When Jill decided to write Finding Pete, she was working as a food and wine journalist. While on a writing retreat in Umbria, she was moved by the tranquility and beauty of the Italian countryside to set aside a book about the mysterious delicacy truffles. Instead, she resolved to explore the mystery of her brother’s death as an aid and development volunteer in wartime Vietnam.

The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War features Pete in Episode 2.

Praise for Finding Pete

One of the most compelling personal narratives of a survivor of someone lost in the U.S.–Viet Nam War! Never descending to bathos, but peeling back the layers of pain and anguish that an entire family felt when their beloved son and brother, Peter Hunting, an aid and development volunteer, was lost with no closure. Jill Hunting recounts her heroic efforts to find out what happened to her brother and to come to terms with loss under such difficult circumstances. This is a must-read for anyone, knowledgeable or not, about the conflict that divided both countries and many families for so many years. —Dr. Mark Bonacci, Professor of Human Services, State University of New York, Niagara

Finding Pete is such a wonderful tribute to one of my dearest friends and colleagues during my service with International Voluntary Services (IVS) in Viet Nam. We were on a 1963 team that was recruited to teach English, but a few of us were converted to hamlet school volunteers to help the USAID rural school building program. I was on the campus of Pete’s alma mater, Wesleyan University, recruiting for IVS on 12 November 1965 when the shattering news arrived of his death by ambush while driving to visit a member of his team. It was a great personal loss. I was asked to join a group from D.C. to meet the family and attend the funeral in Connecticut. Also, IVS asked me to take Pete’s place as team leader in the Mekong Delta, though I could never replace him. Finding Pete is the story of a very big-hearted person with an abundance of practical skills. He served so many different Vietnamese people of different ages in different places, and in the midst of a war that was ripping them apart. While exploring Pete’s exemplary service in Viet Nam and the mysteries around his death, this book also reveals the complicated, controversial situations and feelings confronted by both Americans and Vietnamese during that tragic war. —William H. Meyers, Professor Emeritus, Agricultural & Applied Economics, University of Missouri, IVS–Viet Nam and IVS–Washington, DC, 1963–68 

With enormous empathy, Jill Hunting has created complicated and vital characters. She takes us with her from a quiet American life in the Midwest to war-torn, grieving cities, uncovering the secret of her brother’s death and giving Pete’s history to all of us as she recovers it for herself. Finding Pete is a beautifully written history—of loss, love, and redemption. It is the story not only of one family’s private tragedy, but also of the larger heartbreak of war. Hunting shows us that if we look carefully and lovingly enough, we can find not only what we’ve lost, but also ourselves—often in the most unexpected places. —Rachel DeWoskin, award-winning author of five novels (including Big Girl Small, Foreign Babes in Beijing, and Someday We Will Fly), poet (absolute animal), and actress.  

Jill Hunting’s story seized my heart. Her narrative of her lost brother is so urgent and compelling—a peacemaker sacrificed in an obscure corner of a terrible war; the mystery surrounding his death; the vacuum created in the life of his surviving sister, who grew up, a journalist, to explore that loss as no one else could; her courageous and dogged quest, which has produced this eloquent and unforgettable book. —David Haward Bain, author of Empress Express and Aftershocks

Part memoir, part history, part biography, part travelogue, Jill Hunting’s Finding Pete provides a fascinating view into the early years of America’s war in Vietnam, and a reminder of how deeply this war and its losses continue to reverberate in the American psyche. —Laura Flynn, author of Swallow the Ocean