About:
Jill Hunting was born and raised in the Midwest and spent her childhood summers in Connecticut. She attended Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where sJill Hunting was born and raised in the Midwest and spent her childhood summers in Connecticut. She attended Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she majored in American Studies.
She has edited several books and written about food and wine for The Napa Valley Reserve, Vine Napa Valley and Appellation: Wine Country Living magazines, and the Los Angeles Times.
In 2003, Jill decided to take up a more personal subject: the story of the brother she lost and the family that didn’t talk about it. Finding Pete is the book that resulted.
Pete was Jill’s eldest sibling and only brother, and one of the first civilian casualties of the war in Vietnam. When he graduated from Wesleyan University, in 1963, he went to Vietnam with a little-known organization called International Voluntary Services. IVS was a model for the Peace Corps.
In 1965, at age 24, Pete was killed in an ambush. Although his death was widely reported as a murder, behind closed doors her parents did not discuss what had happened.
Jill, the youngest of three sisters, wanted to know if it was true that friends had led Pete to his death. And if it was true, why? The mystery haunted her until 64 letters — supposedly lost in a basement flood — surfaced in 2004, ushering in a series of remarkable discoveries.
Finding Pete became for Jill a bridge from the past to the present and future. She has made two trips to Vietnam and met many people who knew her brother. She launched a lavender-farming project in Vietnam and initiated a sister-city relationship between Pete’s home of Phan Rang, Vietnam, and hers, of Sonoma, California. She was recently interviewed for the forthcoming documentary Letters from Long Binh.
Jill proposed the Book of Remembrance, a sculpture in memory of civilians killed in wars, for the headquarters of the United States Institute of Peace, currently under construction in Washington, D.C., facing the National Mall and the Lincoln Memorial....more
