Peter....A man who turned his back on fortune, the family Hathaway shirt business, and went of into the jungles of Viet Nam to fight
in freedoms name as a green beret officer, an American special forces soldier,
P.H.C. was a SFGB officer ?...what rank and what period did he serve in Nam?
Peter did things other people would never do. He killed two Cape buffalo with a spear.
Once to do it, and once again to prove it wasn’t a fluke.
What other people would never do?
African natives had been killing herds of buffalo with soft iron spears for generations already, well before Capstick was even born.
I could not believe that Peter had left us. I could not accept that someone who was so vibrant and dynamic and full of life was gone.
From given accounts, he was no longer the vibrant,dynamic or full of life person as claimed.
For someone who spent his life severely abusing himself through alcohol, its not hard to believe he might just die at 56.
and while we both know you would have liked to go out in a tangle with a bull elephant..
Possible to achieve that, but PHC preferred directing his fate through the bottle rather than sober against a bull better than he.
Id rather accept PHC real life warts and all, than some posthumous superficially embellished version of him.
You were a man’s man, a man that women lionized, and you did America proud. You showed Africa just what could do when the chips were down.
You took care of your clients, and hunted like a sportsman, with ethics and true responsibility.
If I may quote Allen Day:
"In 1995, when I first hunted in Tanzania, we had a Emmy Award winning video cameraman with us. He was hired him for the full season to film hunts,
and as it turns out, this man was also one of the video photographers who filmed Peter Capstick's African hunting series of videos.
In a nutshell, he told me, under no uncertain terms, that Capstick was a physical wreck and a chronic alcoholic who had the DTs so bad that they had to
prop him up with beer or two at the start of every morning, and that Capstick fumbled around in the bush, and did not demonstrate anything that would
even remotely demonstrate familiarity, expertise or competence."
