Jill is about my age and is originally from 
Putnam City High and giving a talk on FINDING PETE at Full Circle Sunday, 
October 11, 2. p.m. and signing books.
 
  Check her out:     http://www.jillhunting.com/
 
Kay Bishop---Read below!
 
Jill Hunting spent her childhood summers in 
Connecticut. She attended Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she majored in 
American Studies. For her master’s degree, in Values, she wrote a thesis about 
contemporary prophets, with a case study of the artist Nancy Chinn. 
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, The Wine Journal, Bark, Sonoma 
Business, and the Los Angeles Times. 
  
In 2003, Jill was on a writing retreat in Italy to map 
out a book about truffles when she 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. At Wesleyan University, he studied government, Chinese, 
and French. When he graduated, 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.