4-30-2010 liberation day in saigon

Liberation day in saigon, april 30, 2010


I am sitting in my air conditioned hotel room watching as the huge Liberation Day parade just 6 blocks away takes place. It is the expected communist spectacle and I would like to have been there in person. But that meant getting on the bus at 5 A.m. and sitting still for 4-5-6 hours and I just could not face it. We didn’t get in until after 1 a.m. last night and I slept soundly until 6:30; I would have been no good without that sleep.

I went out just now hoping I might be able to get within a block or so to see the parade, but I had already been warned about the extra tight security. There are barricades across all the streets and no pedestrians are allowed through.

Only four or five old hacks went through the government red tape to get into the parade…..again, I wish I could have been there; but glad I’m not sitting there in the heat.

Our next event is a boat cruise on the Saigon River, boarding at noon at the dock in front of the old navy headquarters, just down from 19 Ngo Duc Khe where UPI offices were located.

Yet another amazing day yesterday only this time Carl tried to pack too many events into a scant 12 hours. Three buses took us out to the Cu Chi Tunnels---a major major tourist attraction now, with a huge reception center and tours of the area still pockmarked from the b-52 raids. The jungle growth has come back now, but at the time, it was an absolutely barren landscape, completely seared off by all the intensive bombing. The tunnels were located a few klicks from the US 25th division headquarters near the center of the town of Cu Chi. At one time, the tunnels extended for 250 kilometers and housed up to 12,000 people at a time.

We were ushered into a conference hall and seated at tables, under the obligatory portraits of Marx, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh. Capt. Huynh Van Chia stood with his interpreter and welcomed us. He had only one arm, the result of being hit by an American APC 113 in 1967. He said: “I wish you health and happiness and success….and those as old as me, I wish you to live to 100 years and I hope I will live 100 years so I can meet you again.”

Guides in uniforms led us through the compound; at one place, the guide challenged us to find the entrance to one of the tunnels….when an old hack stepped into it a firecracker like explosive went off and scared hell out of all of us. The real tunnels were dug into dirt and were barely wide enough for these tiny VC to get through them. Our guide showed up where the opening was and he slipped in, then jumped out behind us and said, “I’ve got you covered.”

However, wouldn’t you know, for the American tourists, they have widened the tunnels and reinforced them with Concrete. We all crawled down in there and even with an occasional light, it was difficult to imagine the life they led there in the heat and under such intensive bombing.

At a thatch roofed building outfitted with maps and movie screen, a guide explained how they built the tunnels with hand scoops and small shovels; working at night. There was a mock-up of the tunnel system showing where the hospital room was located and also where a well provided water for the complete…..iron pipes brought in the only ventilation they had.

The guide was brutally honest about the tunnels effectiveness….they could withstand the smaller bombs, but people were always killed when the bigger bombs hit. The documentary film told the stories of various “American killer heroes,” and how they had suffered and how they had stood up to the Americans. The voice over was provided by a sweet-voiced woman speaking clearly enunciated English. I had to wonder how ex-G.I.’s must feel as they sit through this: “Like a crazy bunch of devils they fired into women and children; they fired into houses, they fired into greenery; they fired into our kitchens….”

The guide showed us a deep “punji pit,” as we called them in 68, loosely covered with leaves, it opened to hundreds of poisoned sharp bamboo stakes. He explained that the idea was not to kill just one person, but to wound several, which would take out several troops caring for them…..same same American cluster bombs which were designed with the same purpose.

We finally got back on the bus, running an hour or two late by then, and went up to the Cao Dai Cathedral at Tay Ninh. We were scheduled to ride the cable car to the top of Nui Ba Din mountain where, as Carl said, the Americans had a communications tower on top but the VC were dug into the mountain sides with artillery and rocket emplacements.

It was obvious we weren’t going to make it for our big 7:30 banquet, so we cut the tour short, only to get stuck in a monumental traffic jam back in Saigon……some of us evacuated the bus and grabbed taxis only to learn later that the bus managed to make the turn and get on into the city.

The banquet on the 3rd floor of the very elegant Caravelle Hotel was the high point of the week. Several old hacks had spread out photos on tables, the most interesting of course were Neal Ulevich’s Polaroid portraits of 100 young reporters, now returning as old hacks….a very handsome Matt Franjola, Peter Arnett with hair, and Horst Faas with a [relatively] slim waist line. And there was I: hair down to my shoulder, thick mustache, bags under my eyes. I was 31 years old [this was in Dec. 1972 when I came back to write my book] but I looked impossibly young, my own waist still 28”!

It was, of course, the best food we’d been served all week, a buffet spread all the way around the edge of two sides of the huge room. I sat at a table with Mau and Page and George and Ralph and Al Rockoff, who’d brought along two more copies of my book for me to sign. I was very touched by that and told him so.

At one point, Carl passed around the microphone a dozen or so old hacks said a few words-well, some had more than a few words. Tim Page was his usual eloquent self, speaking poetry quite naturally from the heart. He paused at the mention of his brother Flynn, genuine feelings of loss we all felt. He told about the tacky intrusion into our reunion by the two Aussie bounty hunters and about his own search of nearly 40 years looking for the remains of his beloved friend.

There were some wonderfully funny lines, some awkward attempts at humor. It was all heavily weighted towards the AP because they were the ones who first started having these reunions and have been the most stalwart in keeping them going. Ulevich had a terrific black and white film of the press conference during the Christmas bombing in 1972. I was here then, supposedly on assignment for Rolling stone, but really just getting stoned and not knowing what the fuck I was up to….how innocent ulevich’s picture makes me look, until you notice the bags under my eyes. The point of the five o clock follies during the Christmas bombing was that they would hold the briefings as scheduled but would say nothing. I said the briefing had become what it always was, not a forum for disclosing information, but a ruse for withholding it. I wrote a piece about it never published in Rolling Stone, but eventually in Quill magazine.

Second day in old Saigon

April 28, 2010

Home again in old Saigon [what’s left of it] and New Ho Chi Minh City. We got in from Phnom Penh by road late yesterday afternoon and after long showers, went straight to the old hacks at the rooftop bar of the Rex Hotel. Once headquarters of the mighty US information operations, it has been refurbished into a piss elegant hotel.

A sweat-soaked Carl was there to greet us and to introduce us to a young VN information officer and a terrific fellow who was a cameraman with the north Vietnamese during the war. He’s 60 but looks 30 and he and Ralph had some nice talk about cameras and how we might be able to film here.

Meanwhile, the guys who claim to have found Flynn’s bones made their appearance and just would not leave. We had several confrontations, and Mau was in tears. We just cannot let these guys spoil our party.

I just finished a walk around our old haunts. There is an enormous Sheraton Hotel skyscraper covering the block where our apartment was located, a fancy Gucci shop on the first floor. The name “brodard,” is still across the street, but it’s no longer a French coffee shop. The old UPI building at 19 Ngo Duc Khe is still there, most recently used as a restaurant. But it appears to be abandoned. When Ralph and I walked by later, the restaurant was open, but not exactly a place where I’d risk eating. Walked around the corner to the old Majestic. It was a wonderfully seedy old colonial haunt when I stayed there my first night in Saigon in January 1968, but just in time for its 85th anniversary, it has been transformed into yet another very elegant hotel, with rooms at $300 and $400 a night. I went up to the rooftop bar where our event will be tonight and have never seen such a sumptuous breakfast buffet set out anywhere.




April 27….the trip over yesterday was remarkable for how it recalled those wonderful times when we all used to pal around together, not worrying about time or deadlines, stopping along the way to shop for scarves and hats and just to look at the people in the markets. Hamilton turns out to be the same kind of shopper Flynn and Page always were; we stopped at a market to buy some of the scarves page wears all the time…looks to me like they’d make you hotter in this heat, but the look is cool, I reckon.

It was an odd moment for the three of us who had been so close to Flynn and Stone when we got to the town of Chi Pou. Page showed us where the little café was where they sat arguing over whether to take that last ride out past the roadblock. An old lady [83] was there and our man Nit talked with her, but she didn’t remember any foreigners getting captured, didn’t remember two guys on a motorcycle; but she said there was an old man near the temple and he would….and so we followed a kid on a motorcycle down the street a ways. A Chinese ancestor shrine was set up in an impeccably neat room behind us as this wonderful old man came out to answer our questions. He was 81 and had been stationed in Saigon in the French army. He did not know about any westerners being captured there, except for 3 black men; he didn’t remember seeing any Americans with cameras or on motorbikes; he was refreshingly honest. Another fellow [57] said he had heard stories, but didn’t know if they were true and so wouldn’t repeat them.
And so we rode on down Highway 1 to the border crossing, where our bags were loaded into a man-drawn cart or wheelbarrow for the long walk across the line into Vietnam. We passed from the more lackadaisical Cambodia into a rigidly military country, everything neat and strict, no smiles here, officially at least. It was only a couple hours into Saigon; when I lived here it seemed like the border must be hundreds of miles away….and, of course, with a war going on, it might as well have been.


3 p.m. April 28, 2010

Just finished an interview with a delightful young Vietnamese reporter-- Lam Phan Phuong. She seems so young and really tough, competitive….carl had told me she wanted to cover the demonstrations in Thailand but she was not senior enough, so she got assigned to cover the old hacks reunion.

Our first official function tonight at the rooftop bar of the Majestic. Cu Chi Tunnels and Nui Ba Din mountain and the Cao Dai cathedral tomorrow; Friday a luncheon cruise on the river and then Friday night one final dinner at Maxim’s.

I walked with Ralph down to the Majestic and we had lunch there…..a bus boy came up to Ralph while I was in the john and he was talking about how horrible it was here in Saigon when the Communists took over. The communists have no rich and no poor, so if you have house and car, they take….. He said his father had worked with the Americans and so lost everything. He asked Ralph where he was from in America and Ralph told him California, and his eyes glazed over at the thought of that wonderful place he’d only heard about.

It must have been a historic moment worth studying when the Vietnamese communists realized it wasn’t working and decided to compromise with capitalism. Whatever it is, it works. The rest of the world is in economic collapse; ho chi minh city appears to be a boom town with skyscrapers going up every way you look. I guess the 1950s Soviet image of communists allowing only a sterile utilitarian place was too strong in my mind, but the hotels here are truly grand, with all the decadent capitalist details we all know and love…..and there is about the place a busy prosperous air…..

missing blogs from the weekend

April 25, 2010

It is 4:30 a.m. and we are up in attempt to possibly see Angkor the way Sean Flynn saw it when he was here in 1969…without the tourists. Two problems we may encounter; we can’t get into the Angkor park until after sunset; and there will still be thousands of tourists.

It is an amazing thing to see here in Siem Reap that ruins 700 and 800 years old are supporting a whole city, a whole area. There is an international airport, and literally dozens and dozens of luxury hotels every way you look, even a couple of fancy golf courses! Angkor Wat is the main industry, almost the only industry….and I kind of like that.

I don’t like trying to see something so overwhelmingly beautiful with thousands of chattering tourists all around me, but yesterday it didn’t seem to bother me. Yesterday, we started out by going to one of the temples [built to honor the king’s mother[ which was still in an overgrown state. It is really something to see….the enormous vines and roots of a banyan like tree wrapped around the ancient monuments, cracking them in half or in some cases completely shattering them.

After that we went on over to the more familiar towers of Angkor Wat itself. It was excruciatingly hot and like many others, I had stop and rest a few times. And drank a dozen diet cokes and plain soda waters.

These are amazing monuments. Whatever one’s feelings about the inhumanity of religions, nearly all religions, with the possible exception of Buddhism, it is an incredibly complex work of art. The carved reliefs along the interior of various scenes from the Hindu Ramayana—rama facing off the evil monkey king hanuman---are absolutely amazing. Weird wild contortions as the sides of good and evil fight it out and raise hands in delirious dances—of victory or defeat, I reckon. Most of the stonework appears to be sandstone, but so many people have rubbed some of the figures, they look like polished black marble. The main towers that appear on the Cambodian flag are quite extraordinary to behold. Like the pyramids in Egypt and the Acropolis in Athens, their very familiarity [from pictures] add to the stunning moment when you behold them in person. In Athens, I was struck by the Acropolis rising right in the middle of the city…and I walked up there, just to feel how it must have felt to the ancients….and in Cairo, there were the familiar pyramids rising up at the very edge of a tacky suburb of the city.

Ralph showed me where various parts of the main temple were used for the Angelina Jolie movie, Tomb Raiders, although I may have the title of that film wrong. It’s hard to imagine how we could ever get access to such a popular tourist site for our film, but he thinks it’s possible….also possible to juxtapose shots of empty ruins with other scenes less populated…..there are Hindu/buddhistic ruins all over the country, although none so magnificent as these.

With Siam on the west and Vietnam on the east, Cambodia is a country that has a deep, historic inferiority complex. The Buddhist teachers tell their students to learn their numbers or the Chinese and Vietnamese will take advantage of them. BUT, they all cling to the image of the magnificent Angkor wat as something so very grand their own people once built….so there is greatness within them if they can only find it again.

It had been 13 years since Ralph came to Chapel Hill to write the script for our movie, but we bonded so totally at that time, it doesn’t seem like any time has passed at all. He is in remarkable physical condition, and always razor sharp with a witty comeback if I get too smart, or too lax….lots of nice quality time alone for us to talk about The Movie and everything else under the sun. I’m waiting now for him to get his shower and come go watch the sunrise at Angkor Wat as our subject Flynn may once have done….

…..and so our wonderful tuk tuk driver was waiting for us in the dark and we puttered on out to Angkor Wat and the road was already crowded with people seeking the same quiet setting we were….hundreds of people were already at the main Angkor wat…..

out of order

These blogs are not totally out of order because I wasn't able to hook up to the internet when I made a couple of them. Here is one about our visit to the killing fields. When i mentioned to Ralph that I had not felt the revulsion I expected at the sight of all those skulls and bone fragments, he said: "It'll come back." I'm sure it will. ANyhow, I'll copy the two missing blogs and paste them out of order....

one quiet day

IT is monday morning and nothing at all planned for the day. Ralph and I had a great trip up to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat. Flew up Saturday morning, came back Sunday afternooon. We stayed at the Auberge hotel near the old market, a hotel Graham Greene might well have stayed in....beautiful old courtyards full of tropical foliage, dark wood stairways and thick heavy doors, all overshellacked for a hundred years. The town was all a bustle getting ready for the major summer Buddhist festival on Tuesday, complete with a visit from the king himself. Banners stretched across every street every 50 feet and flags of all the southeast asia nations unfurled from every light post.

we had, of course, come there to connect with the kind of quiet strange experience Sean Flynn had on his visit in 1969, but that can never be. Angkor has become a major major tourist attraction, with more than a million visitors. Looking at the guide book, we thought the ruins at Ta Prohm, still in an overgrown state, would be a good place to start and it was. Roots and vines from huge banyan trees have wrapped around and strangled the ancient hindu gods and goddesses. And here and there still a few local shrines to the later buddhist images. One funny moment. We kept hearing what we thought must be an exotic bird, very faintly, and both of us said: we've got to have that sound....but as we climbed over yet another tumbled temple, we came on a young girl selling an odd kind of clapper. that was our bird! we bought two. one dollah.

The next morning, we got up at 4:30 to go see the sunrise, thinking now we might find some quiet away from the tourists. We should have known better. Hundreds of people were already in place, but nothing like the previous day. Ralph got some really good still and moving pictures as the dawn brok over the towers of the main Angkor temple. We had a wonderful tuk tuk driver who really looked after us. He took us around to the enormous Buddha faces carved into the Bayon ruins and there we found the peace and quiet we'd been looking for. I also found a delightful group of monks climbing about the ruin and posed for pictures with them.

The ritual with the king on Tuesday will involve a ceremony in which the king plows the first furrow in a field, thus assuring a bountiful crop for all his people. While we were there, there was a run-through rehearsal using three teams of royal oxen and a very primitive wooden plow. These were the healthiest cattle we'd seen anywhere in the country. most of them are emaciated. The royal gamelan [orchestra of xylophones] and the royal ballet were also there; they didn't do any dances, but we did get to hear a rehearsal of some of the music.

Back in town, our tuk tuk driver, Mr. Ban, took us on a wild ride through some of the older and poorer parts of town out to a lake--or at least it'll be a lake when the rainy season starts. The importance of this was being able to show Ralph a setting like Dong Palane, the section of Vientiane where Flynn and I once got so stoned on opium, described in the book and a key scene in our script. Thatched huts up on stilts, the kind of places where we'd go smoke opium in LAos and Vietnam.

Back here in Phnom Penh, we connected up with Tim Page and his young Aussie cameraman, Sean, who never says a word, but seems remarkable competent and adept at all the technical stuff none of us old hacks can understand, and George Hamilton who had had a frustrating day, and wished he'd gone to Angkor with us.

What a delightful new friend has Hamilton turned out to be. He tells one wickedly funny story after another. But, more important, he is wonderfully supportive of my book and speaks passionately about what a great film it's going to be. At this point, we have discussed every possible angle and possibility for it....and I am forever grateful for his interest.

A moment of high drama as friend Page described in detail how he got his last major wound and left a piece of his skull in Vietnam. What I'd never connected before was how close he was when he was wounded to where just two years later Flynn and Stone would be captured on the other side of the border in Cambodia.

The whole nasty episode with the two Aussie bounty hunters seems to have really gotten to him. He calls them Feral I and Feral II. Their claim that they had found Flynn's bones has now been totally dismissed by the official JPAC people who have examined the bones in Hawaii. They say the dental work is clearly not American, and the fragments belong to an indigenous person. The JPAC deputy director is a terrific old boy from Texas named Johnie [sic] Webb and we've spent a good deal of time with him. We recorded an interview with him which dispelled a dozen different myths about the search for the missing and dead correspondents.

Toward the end of the evening [midnight] Page told me how weary he was of this long long search for Flynn's remains. "Perry deane, I really think we're going to find them this year. And once we've found them, I think I am going to die." He said it without any sort of self pity, just this is what is going to happen.

Tomorrow we are renting a van and going down to the spot at Chi Pou on Highway 1 where Flynn and Stone were captured. After spending some time filming there, we'll go on over to the nearby VN border and catch a bus into saigon...what I know from last night's remembrances is that we will also be going with a Klick or two of the spot where Page was so horribly wounded in 1969.

I think the reunion in Saigon will be a lot more relaxed. I decided not to be a guest of the government, although I'll surely take in their victory parades and exhibitions. I am being interviewed by a local reporter and I'm actually looking forward to her questions. Last night page put a real damper on my expectations by running down a list of landmarks so important to us which have now been destroyed. Where our apt. was on Tu Do St., is now the location of a 35-story skyscraper....

Carl Robinson reports from Ho Chi Minh City that the government has gone all out for the celebration of the 35th anniversary of the liberation or fall of Saigon....all the 4road ways decorated with elaborate peace doves.....but, today, it's nice to have no plans at all; although I do miss having that air conditioned bus with the police escort.

april 23 last day of old hacks reunion in pp

Friday April 23, 2010
The Last Day of the Reunion in Cambodia….

A very emotional day yesterday for the old hacks. We drove way the hell down into the countryside where 9 journalists were executed by the Khmer rouge in 1970, not long after Flynn and Stone were captured. Carl Robinson said it was a classic competitive case of journalism….the CBS teams goes down a road and gets zapped; then they’re soon followed by an NBC team that gets captured and beaten to death, too. Villagers had come from miles around in this flat open countryside. It’s the end of the dry season so all the rice paddies are dead brown for as far as you can see. The Buddhist monks had erected a magnificent yellow and red tent over the site where the remains were found in 1992. Kurt Volkert, a German cameraman for CBS, rode with us on the bus and told us about being in the bureau that day and waiting for the team to come back….and then about the search for their remains that went on for 22 years.
It was unbelievably hot as we all tried to gather under the little tent, shoes and hats off….with the monks chanting…and the Japanese widow of one of the CBS cameramen opening the ceremony with a gift of jost sticks. Elizbeth Becker read the list of names of the 37 correspondents who were killed in Cambodia.

I had ridden down there sitting beside Ralph Hemecker, who was like a kid as he played boy reporter the whole day with a half dozen different cameras---the whole scene here is so overwhelming [not overwhelmingly beautiful or overwhelmingly sad and depressing, but both] The site near a magnificent wat or temple was so remote, there was no electricity and of course nor real water supply, although I did see a couple of new wells in the yards of some wealthier homes.

Back on the bus, George Hamilton, asked if he could sit with me, “I really want to talk with you.” “And I really want to talk with you….” What an extraordinary fellow he turns out to be; a real raconteur. But, he also has a passionate interest in his childhood friend, Sean Flynn, and he seems seriously supportive of the efforts to make a film of my book, Two of the Missing. Many of the stories he told me I recalled from his book—which got very good reviews. Dodging the draft and dating Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s daughter; visiting The Ranch and shooting deer from an open convertible. And stories of various movie stars he’s worked with—Robert Mitchum who said of his would-be actor son, “he doesn’t have the moves.”

Here is a report from a Japanese reporter about the memorial service near Wat Po:

Here is a report from Kyodo on today's moving ceremony at Wat Po sw of Phnom Penh. Pictures are from Martha & Steve Northup. Yoko Ishiyama, widow of Kyodo's Koki who died in early 1974, was a particularly strong link to our dead & missing. Memorial Dedication in Phnom Penh is taking place shortly. Amazing Day. Best, Carl

Former war correspondents mourn slain colleagues in Cambodia
By Puy Kea
WAT PO, Cambodia, April 22 KYODO - A group of over two dozen former war correspondents held a solemn ceremony Thursday to mourn the loss of their colleagues who were killed or went missing while covering the war in Cambodia more than three decades ago.
The ''Old Hacks,'' as they call themselves, gathered at a remote spot 63 kilometers southwest of Phnom Penh where eight fellow journalists and a Cambodian driver were killed by the Khmer Rouge in May 1970 and where the bodies of four of them were dug up and recovered in 1992.
The slain media workers are among 37 who were killed or went missing in Cambodia between 1970 and 1975, including 10 Japanese, eight French, seven Americans and five Cambodians. Others were from Switzerland, West Germany, Austria, Netherlands, India, Laos and Australia.
Carl Robinson, 67, a former Associated Press correspondent who co-organized the first-ever reunion of war correspondents in Cambodia, said their visit to the remote site, located down a dirt track more than 2 km off the main road, was ''like a day of pilgrimage.''
''It was a very moving ceremony with a few tears shed,'' he said. ''To use an overused word, it was like a 'closure' for a lot of people to actually be able to visit and to pay their respects here today.''
The ceremony began with the chanting of Buddhists monks and local villagers amid the burning of incense, which was followed by the reading of the names of all 37 journalists.
They then held a moment of silence and planted a Bodhi, the tree under which Buddha found enlightenment, on the side of the road, which the monks of the local temple promised to take care of.
''The memorial as such is the Bodhi tree,'' said Robinson, who was based in Saigon from 1968 through 1975.
The Old Hacks, mostly former journalists in their late 60s or early 70s who had worked for Western major news organizations, arrived in Cambodia on Tuesday for a reunion which also involves a public open forum, a photo exhibition, a visit to the notorious ''Killing Fields'' and the installation of a more formal memorial in front of the Le Royal Hotel in Phnom Penh where many correspondents stayed and worked while covering the war in this country.
Among participants in Thursday's ceremony was the widow of Koki Ishiyama, a Kyodo News correspondent slain in Cambodia in 1974.
Kurt Volkert, 73, a former CBS cameraman who was instrumental in mapping where executed journalists were buried and who returned in 1992 to help a U.S. military team recover the remains of some of them from the bank of a river, said he regrets Ishiyama's body was never found despite the ''heroic effort'' put into the search by diggers, who had to dam up the river to dig.
''We were not close friends but I respected him and it's infinitely sad that he's still here somewhere, swept away by the waters,'' he said. ''He just didn't get to go home.''
Volkert said he visited Ishiyama's wife in Tokyo later that same year to deliver her a little silver box containing soil from the digging site where the bodies of two other Japanese, one Frenchman and one American were found.
Robinson said the number of journalists killed in Cambodia was much higher than in Vietnam during the Vietnam War because in the latter case, ''journalists could count on the U.S. military to take them to wherever the fighting was'' whereas in Cambodia journalists had to basically take a taxi ride to the war zone.
To make matters worse, he said the Khmer Rouge policy then was to ''smash'' or execute all perceived enemies, including journalists.
The Old Hacks have held three reunions in Vietnam for those who covered the Vietnam War and they are slated to hold their fourth next week.
''But this is the first time we've ever had one in Cambodia so it's been a wonderful experience, a really nice and wonderful feeling,'' Robinson said.
At the same time, he said, feelings are mixed. With some Old Hacks not having been back to Cambodia since the early 1970s, ''it's been quite an emotional return for a lot of people.''
''You enjoy it but you can't help remember the sadness as well.''
==Kyodo
April 22, 2010


We got back to Phnom Penh and were treated [if that’s the word} to yet another Cambodian feast, a huge banquet laid out in a big restaurant. I usually like any kind of foreign food. Vietnamese food is genuine haute cuisine. But I just don’t like the Cambodian stuff and Ralph agreed we’re both losing weight here because of just barely touching the food put before us. [after last night’s event, we found a little Italian place on the riverfront and devoured a pizza with salami!]

The most moving moment for me came at the dedication of the site of a memorial to the missing journalists in front of the old Royale Hotel, which has been bought and vastly expanded and refurbished by the very elegant Raffles chain. It was pretty seedy when we journalists worked out of it in the early 1970s, now it’s the ritz!

After much discussion the group had decided to plant a Buddhist Bo [sp?] tree in memory of the correspondents. At first the government objected to the site, but soon came around with a wonderful site of their own. As our tuk tuk driver pulled onto the enormously gran boulevard, I saw for the first time yet another Buddhist yellow and red tent, with yet another contingent of monks chanting and praying. A bigger tent was provided for the rest of us, complete with white satin covered chairs.

The information minister under Lon Nol, Chhanh Song, who was the chief organizer of the reunion with Carl Robinson, was the main speaker. Close up, he’s impossible to understand, but with a microphone his English was quite clear. He had been genuinely impressed by the dedication of the western journalists he worked with—and the local ones as well. A very frail looking Matt Franjola, one of the legendary figures in press corps history, read the list of names of journalists who worked for western media; and a Cambodian read the names of the dead or missing Khmer journalists. A truly beautifl, tasteful, monument about 5 feet high was in place, it will be replicated in stone with all the names of the dead and missing engraved on it….i hope they don’t make it too much bigger; it’s a wonderfully understated design….

The moment came for me when they were reading the names; Franjola quickly got to “Sean Flynn and Dana Stone” and, oh, my, the tears welled up and I choked them back….and then the name of Kyoichi Sawada, the Pulitzer prize winning Japanese photographer who was such a gentle man and who was always so good to me…….We were all given white lotus blooms to place in front of the memorial in between where the two trees will later be planted. I was touched by JPAC’s Johnie Webb’s moment of genuine Buddhist reverence as he placed his lotus and offered a prayer…..

Afterwards when we got to the hotel where that night’s activities were planned, none of us could believe it but several hundred people had filled the hall where a forum was held and on out into all of the adjacent rooms and terraces and gardens…You literally couldn’t barely move around them. .Tim Page had put up a wonderful selection of photos from his Requiem book and they adorned the walls with grisly reminders of what it was all about….

Sylvan Foa, Dan Southerland, Matt Franjola and Jon Swain led the panel discussion about covering the 1970-75 war; I stood through most of it, but I was desperately hungry [the food for the event was long gone by the time our bus brought us there] ….And Alice Smith, who’s been so wonderful about showing me about town, was pushing the envelope a little too hard by ordering me to stay and have another glass of wine: No, I said and walked off alone….Ralph swiftly followed, “Hey, dude, I’m here for you!” And we had a great little Italian dinner, with a table full of Marine guards from the embassy across from us.

By the way, very nice air conditioned buses take us to all these events, and with a police escort. I’m sure the locals wonder just what new corruption their government is involved in as traffic is blocked and the sirens wail and this big group of westerners moves about town…..

A busy day today; we visit the killing fields this morning; Ralph and I plan to interview JPAC’s Johnie Webb this afternoon and maybe the group of us who knew Flynn….we’re invited to the American Embassy’s enormous fortress tonight….and then it will all be over.

Days 2/3 of Old Hacks Reunion in Cambodia

5 a.m. Thursday April 21, 2010

I’m now totally confused about time; my laptop is still on EDT, 12 hours earlier than here….so it’s 5 p.m. april 20 to all y’all back east in NC.

The events are really crowding out my time to reflect on it all now. Another amazing day yesterday, Wednesday. It began early with a tour of the magnificent Royal Palace and National Museum, both just 2 blocks from the little hotel where I’m staying. You had to wade through the garbage and walk past the mutilated and devastatingly poor beggars to get to the gates to the Silver Pagoda and palace. All I could think about was the absurdity of religion when so much is lavished on the gods while outside people are starving to death. I’ve asked the question many times about the splendid palaces and medieval costumes of the Roman Catholic Church and other sects of Christianity: What does any of this have to do with the life and teachings of a simple Jewish carpenter.

And, yesterday, I had to wonder what all that gold and silver and carved images had to do with the life of Buddha, whose life and teachings were all about the rejection of such trappings….

Oh, well, the reunion proceeded apace yesterday. Ralph Hemecker, who’s had the movie option on Two of the Missing, for 13 years arrived at 1:30. I went out to meet his plane, which arrived early so he was outside waiting for me. I had teased him that I might not recognize him if he’d gotten old and fat after 13 years. But I needn’t have worried; he still looks like a trim young movie star himself. I feel such a great kinship with this man, and not just because he’s paid me $5,000 every Jan. 1 for 13 years. He genuinely shares my passion for this story of my two missing friends.

He brought all sorts of camera equipment with him and we’d planned on a leisurely talk about what we wanted to film, who we wanted to interview. But, there was a message waiting for me from Tim Page and his partner Mau Harris, wanting me to come over to the Raffles Royale and be interviewed by actor George Hamilton, who grew up in Palm Beach with Sean Flynn. He appears to be having the time of his life here among all us old hacks. He was a tremendous help to me when I was writing Two of the Missing. When Mau told me he had dropped in on them in Brisbane Australia, I got his address and sent him a copy of the new edition. He’s brought it with him and has it dog-eared with all his notes and reading.

Tim and Mau are traveling with a film crew for a documentary about Tim’s search for Flynn’s remains….and Mau had the idea for a private project following George around. That led to asking if he’d like to do some interviews—and he loved the idea. He handles his celebrity extremely well. Of course, the old hacks are used to mingling with celebrities, so that helps. But he’s a wonderfully engaging conversationalist….and like a lot of us, he’s intrigued with the life and mysterious disappearance of his friend Flynn. With the cameras rolling [there were four or five others filming the filming], Hamilton conducted the best interview anybody’s ever done with me about my book or the disappearance of Flynn and Stone.

There was a moment of epiphany, or whatever’s the proper word. For many years, people have speculated on the psychology of what led Flynn and Stone to deliberately go down that dangerous road where they had to know they might die. I had pieced together little bits and pieces of dialogue people overheard. But with George’s questions, it finally dawned on me: No, they did not think they were definitely headed toward death. It wasn’t purely a suicidal ride. Flynn had to convince Stone that they just might come out of it alive with their pictures and stories—or Stone wouldn’t have gone along.

The other important news is the entrance of JPAC into the search for the remains of Flynn and Stone. Actually, they’ve been there all along, even though some correspondents have complained about how little attention is paid to the missing civilians in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Johnie Webb is the former military commander of the Joint POW MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, where the remains are taken in order to be identified with DNA collected from relatives. In retirement, he was asked to stay on as deputy civilian commander. He says JPAC will never be disbanded because their sophisticated labs are now being used by the FBI and Justice Dpt. And the CIA. Webb has been at the Old Hacks reunion all week and he too seems to be having a grand time hearing all our stories and adding some of his own.

He says they have investigated 16 different sites where Flynn’s and Stone’s remains might have been located. Like the most recent highly publicized “find,” they all led to nothing. After all the worldwide publicity stirred up by two Aussie bounty hunters, JPAC had to step in and do something at this alleged “site.” They spent all of last week digging and sifting the soil in the area where the aussies claim they found Flynn’s jaw bone and teeth. They found only 1 small piece of a scull and no other remains. This also puts to rest a report that came from CIA interviews of captured Communist soldiers…that as many as 12 westerners may have been buried there. Webb has sent the remains found by the scavengers off to Hawaii, but after inspecting them, he says he does not believe for a second they belong to Flynn. What the aussies described as “a fine set of American teeth,” he said was “at best a crude set of European teeth”—from the dental work.

Meanwhile, the two aussies who surely thought their “discovery” would cause them to be welcomed as heroes at our reunion have been banned from coming anywhere near the group. They’re hanging out at a bar down the street and muttering about how unfair it all is. Yesterday, a young freelance reporter relayed the news to me that they had also found a bathing suit with Flynn’s “remains.” “And they think it’s the bathing suit in that picture of you and Flynn on China beach in your book.”

Wait a minute, I said, as we sat in 100 degree heat, humidity in the upper 90s, there’s no way a piece of cloth would survive intact in the ground in this weather for 40 years.

Today, we are going to Wat Po where 9 correspondents were executed by the Khmer Rouge not long after Flynn and Stone went missing. Later today, we will visit the site where a tree will be planted here in Phnom Penh in memory of all the correspondents killed in the Cambodian war. Tonight, there’s an exhibit of photos from Tim Page’s Requiem book and a showing of a documentary film about the great New Zealander Neal Davis, who survived incredible stuff in VN and Cambodia only to get killed in a Bangkok street demonstration. Somehow, his camera was engaged when he was hit and it continued to roll, focused on him as he lay dying. He was a most remarkable man. He’s the one in my book that I describe during the battle for Hue; we were walking with General Loan, when Loan pointed to Davis and said: “One day, I gonna kill you!”

A really nice local bookstore, Monument Books, will also be selling books by authors attending the reunion—including my own Two of the Missing.


I’m in a quandary about whether to accept the VN government’s offer of free hotel in Saigon. They have sent us a schedule where we’d be tied up with them from dawn to dinner every day for five days….and I’m not sure I want that. Ralph said last night we’ve got to go up to Angkor Wat. We are too close not to do it. It’s a six hour drive from here so not feasible for a one day trip unless we fly….Also, we want to go down to the town of Chi Pou where Flynn and Stone were last seen. I think we may be able to tag along with Page’s crew.

First morning in phnom penh

April 20, 2010

1st day of the Old Hacks Reunion
Arrived in Phnom Penh late last night, 26 hours after leaving Raleigh. Not a bad trip at all, much better than I feared. I did read two complete books and watched two complete movies—sherlock holmes and the young Victoria, learned some stuff about her.

My new friend Alice Smith met me at the huge new PP air terminal. How wonderful it was to see a happy smiling face in all that chaotic crowd of people. She was a close friend of Dana Stone’s younger brother, Tom, who is described in my book. He was killed in Afghanistan after devoting much of his life searching for his older brother. He lived here in PP for a time in 1998. All the local workers were in almost cartoonish military garb….and nobody smiled. Apparently a characteristic of the people here. But, as one resident old hack pointed out, “they still smile if you smile…of course, in the old days it was the reverse.” Of course, they didn’t have a lot to smile about for quite a long time there and who can blame them with all the horrible memories they have to live with….however, a whole new generation has come of age since Pol Pot’s khmer rouge troops murdered 1/4 th of the population

Alice said people describe PP as Saigon 40 years ago. It is certainly seedy, garbage piled up everywhere. My hotel was locked up tight behind one of those metal gates. We hit the buzzer and walked into a tropical paradise. One of the most beautiful swimming pools, surrounded by a palm garden, I’ve ever seen….and after sitting on a plane all that time, it truly did look like paradise to me. And I jumped right in.

Alice is a speech therapist who does volunteer work with Operation Smile, a program to help children with cleft palates. I felt an instant kinship with her when she first began e-mailing me and telling me about Dana’s younger brother….

Nothing scheduled until 5 p.m. today and it’s a good thing. I was so wired when I got in last night, I could hardly sleep, and then the sleeping desk boy’s cell phone kept beeping until I woke him up and got him to turn it off!!!

So, I’m going to go for a swim; go out rambling around the neighborhood. The museum and royal palace are only a block away…..and then at some point, I hope to catch up on my sleep with a long old man’s nap……

Had a wonderfully healthy breakfast [free] by the pool; fresh bread and marmalade and fresh papaya juice, watermelon, pineapple, banana….what a breakfast should be but mine never is…..then, walked over to the river, desperately poor people every way you look, camped out on the very wide sidewalks; magnificently beautiful museum building a block away from me and the royal palace…..and some truly beautiful pagodas………….

Old Hacks Phnom Penh Reunion itinerary

Here is the latest Agenda for the Phnom Penh Reunion -- 20 to 23 April 2010.
Saturday, 17 April 2010.
DAY 1: Tuesday, 20 April 2010.
1700: Welcome Drinks and Reunion Check-in at Elephant Bar of Le Royal Hotel.
1930 - Welcome dinner by the Minister of Information at Le Royal
Updating the post-war Cambodian situation by Minister Khieu Kanharith
DAY 2: Wednesday, 21 April 2010.
0730 - Visit Royal Palace in the morning cool air.
0900 – Arrive at National Museum, conducted by Peter Sharrock
1030 – Stroll along the riverbank bank through the city’s “art corridor” and then early lunch at riverside restaurant.
Afternoon: Free Time to rest up and take a siesta, or continue your sightseeing.
1930 - Dinner, courtesy of SEA Television
Brief by Puy Kea, Club of Cambodian Journalists
DAY 3: Thursday, 22 April 2010.
0900 - Visit to Wat Po - tour briefing (bus provided by the Documentation Center of
Cambodia). Snack on bus, courtesy of Kiss Magazine
1700: Official Dedication of Memorial to Journalists outside Le Royal Hotel.
1930 - Public Open Forum and opening of photo exhibition at Himawara Hotel on the river. Panel discussion.
Book stall with books by “old hacks” run by Monument Books. Refreshments.
Sponsored by Overseas Press Club of Cambodia (OPCC)
DAY 4: Friday, 23 April 2010.
0830: Tour visit to the Killing Fields (Toul Sleng & Choeung Ek)
Bus provided by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam)
1100: Lunch, courtesy of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
1230: Book signing by Elizabeth Becker at Toul Sleng
1730-1900: Reception at US Embassy .
1900: Open House with drinks and snacks at the home of Hack-in-Residence, James Pringle and his wife Milly. 34 Monivong across from Calmette Hospital.
Best,
Carl

Remembering Two of the Missing

Posted on Tue, Apr. 06, 2010
Commentary: Remembering two of the missing from a long-ago war
Perry Deane Young | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: April 06, 2010 06:29:11 PM
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Forty years have passed since my close friends, Dana Stone and Sean Flynn, rode bright red motorcycles into Communist-held territory in Cambodia on April 6, 1970, and were never seen again. Dana was a cameraman on assignment with CBS; Flynn was freelancing for Time magazine.
Now, suddenly, almost out of the oblivion of time, their names are back in the news with reports almost daily from Cambodia that Flynn's remains may have been found.
I emphasize that word "may" because there's no evidence whatsoever that the remains are Flynn's. He would have hated this kind of sensationalism. The son and spitting image of actor Errol Flynn, Sean loathed the superficial celebrity that went with a name that was only partly his own.
Stone, the merry prankster among the press corps in Vietnam, would be delighted to see his name in the papers and would have a wickedly funny remark about it all that cut right through the hype.
An international group of journalists has been outraged in recent days, not with the finding, but with the manner in which the search was conducted. Two "bounty hunters," as the London tabloids described them, took a backhoe to a site where as many as 12 Westerners were thought to have been buried. Neither of them had any credentials as archeologists or forensic researchers. One is an Australian adventurer; the other is a British born bar-owner in Cambodia.
Their "finding" came days before the "first and last reunion" of the aging correspondents who covered the dreadful wars of the 1970s in Cambodia. The sponsors billed it as the last because they said most of us were so old that we'd never be able to get there again.
Vietnam war correspondents Flynn, Stone, Stone's wife Louise and I had been part of the lively young group of friends celebrated in Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and in my own book, "Two of the Missing," which I initially wrote as a magazine article to help publicize their plight as civilian POWs.
On that fateful day, April 6, 1970, other reporters overheard Flynn and Stone arguing just before they left the little village of Chi Pou.
"I've got a wife in the hotel back in Phnom Penh, and I haven't spent all this time here to get myself captured," Stone said.
"I know it's dangerous," Flynn said. "That's what makes it a good story."
Flynn grabbed Stone's keys and tossed them into a mud puddle. Stone retrieved his keys and quickly joined him.
"Flynn's trying to scoop me," he muttered as he sped off.
In a stunning picture taken as they headed out, Flynn is dressed in a floppy hat, T-shirt, cut-off jeans, flip-flops and, of course, the latest shades from Paris. Right to that last adventure, he remained ever the casual one about the reckless daring he was known for as a photographer in Vietnam.
Lacking Flynn's glamorous looks, Stone was if anything an even more memorable character. He could never sit still long enough for college, but he was an intellectual in that he was always trying to figure out what he was witnessing and what his pictures really meant. He could recite A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" from memory.
If you were his friend, you knew to expect a lightning quick thumb in your perfectly cooked over-easy eggs or mashed potatoes, or a lighted trail of lighter fluid up to your nose as you lay sleeping.
That morning 40 years ago, I got a call from my former colleague, Tom Cheatham, at UPI. "Just wanted you to know they think Flynn and Stone have been captured, but don't worry . . . ."
"Don't worry? I wish to hell I were with them."
Even I was shocked by my response. In truth, I knew at the time that nothing would ever measure up to the very special camaraderie we'd shared in Vietnam . . . and nothing ever has. I remember coming back to the world, standing with a friend in a Greenwich Village jazz club and saying: "I feel like my life is all in the past."
I was 29 years old.
The search for Flynn and Stone began almost immediately after they were captured. Dana's wife, Louise, may have seemed like a mousy little thing to some, but she instantly became a tiger determined to find her "Danie."
In 1970, she went to the site where these bones were just found after she interviewed a captured Khmer Rouge soldier who reported seeing Westerners who looked like Flynn and Stone.
She hired a Dutch adventurer to cross into communist lines to look for them; she talked two young men who'd hijacked an American munitions ship into escaping house arrest in Phnom Penh and going over to the communists.
She knew that her Dana would come back; he always had. Many years later, she would die a terrible wasting death from multiple sclerosis, still clinging to that hope.
Walter Cronkite headed up an international group of journalists to negotiate with the communists and try to convince them that the Westerners were journalists, not combatants.
The group hired Zalin Grant, a former Army intelligence officer and Time reporter, to interview captured communist soldiers. The consensus was that Flynn and Stone might have lived for as long as six months, but probably no longer. They probably were executed out of expediency.
In recent years, Flynn's closest friend, legendary war photographer Tim Page, has picked up the search for the remains of Flynn and others. In a British documentary, "Danger on the Edge of Town," Tim found some remains that he thought were Flynn's. They turned out to belong to one of the mutineers.
At the time, I was appalled by Page's digging in the dirt and coming out with what may have been pieces of our old Saigon roommate. Page may need that kind of closure, but I don't.
I want to remember Flynn and Stone as they're preserved in that last picture, alive and young and setting off on one more adventure. Like Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young," they won't live to wear out their laurels, and their names won't die before they do.
Still, at least Page did what he did with great respect, even reverence. I shared his outrage over the desecration caused by these recent headline seekers, and I must say, I was delighted to hear the report back from a trip Page took to the burial site on April 4 with New York Times reporter Seth Mydans.
"Good news and bad news," Mydans e-mailed me. They made the trip, all right, he said, but they were denied access. At last, the site has been sealed off by JPAC, the Joint POW, MIA Accounting Command.
Maybe now my friends' remains will be properly found and identified, and they'll be safe from scavengers. I have no interest in seeing their remains, however. I'll hold onto to that last picture.
(Perry Deane Young is the author of three plays and nine books, including "Two of the Missing, Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone," a new edition of which was published by Press 53 in 2009. He lives in Chapel Hill, N.C. Movie rights on "Two of the Missing" are currently optioned by Mythic Studios and Ralph Hemecker, a director in the "X-Files," "Millennium" and "Numb3rs" TV series.)
ON THE WEB
'To an Athlete Dying Young,' by A.E. Housman
McClatchy Newspapers 2010