Perry Deane Young

Back in the world

2010-05-05T02:40:00.000-07:00

Back in the world now. got in Monday afternoon after a long long long flight...my ass feels like it'll be sore for a month.....quickly got back into my old routine. slept soundly and up at 4:30; my bookstore is back in operation and all is well.

Seoul korea airport, 3 hour layover for my flight to Atlanta and then on home to RDU and Chapel Hill….

What an extraordinary 2 weeks in my life it’s been. Everybody had left and Ralph and I still had the “War Remnants Museum to see,” mainly because the Requiem exhibit in memory of all the photographers who died was there.

Neither one of us was prepared for what we saw. There were the expected American aircraft and tanks; there also were replicas of the torture chambers where the Viet Cong and NVA were brutally interrogated by the Americans and the South Vietnamese.

The exhibit actually began or ended with a real guillotine brought to Vietnam by the French….and one had to remember that this was actually invented as a humane device that killed quickly without the usual extended pain. What struck me as I thought about it this morning was how we moved from the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Phnom Penh to our own American atrocities in VN…..Larry Burroughs family going to pay homage to the girl in his photographs….Richard Brummett, coming back to apologize to the family of the old man tortured by his sergeant…and breaking down as he told Ralph about it.

The reconstructed torture chambers included real barbed wire “tiger cages,” so tiny a prisoner could not move without being sliced by barbed wire. we went into the main exhibition building, a very modern open structure with no air conditioning but lots of fans scattered about. Again, all the weapons were there, but what was truly numbing were the displays of families destroyed by the war—not VC, not the enemy, but mothers, fathers, children….with snapshots and formal portraits and life stories. The My Lai massacre took up an entire wall…again not political enemies now, but real live human beings with relatives, friends and families. Another display was devoted to the unbelievably barbaric slaughter Sen. Bob Kerrey engaged in—killing women and children and gutting them like animals.

With the oppressive heat adding to the emotions, we were both numb by the time we reached the 3rd floor. It is a splendid exhibit, if non-air conditioned! Huge fans have been placed around at Tim Page’s very loud insistence…..And there were all the photos of the real horror of war, our own American troops in those last desperate moments facing death.

And there were my friends. Unlike earlier exhibits I’d seen, the photos were a mixed bag from all the photographers…..with various ones spread about the enormous space, not grouped in special exhibits….although there is a special wall or two or three for Larry Burroughs incredible photos. There were several photos by Dana Stone and Sean Flynn….and by Henri Huet and Kyoichi Sawada….I thought about all the fun I’d had with Dana; the quiet moments with Flynn….about what a gentle man was Sawada and how kind he always was with me…that weekend he and his wife, Bert Okuley and I went from Hong Kong to Macau….and I had to marvel once again at the amazing experience had dropped me into in Vietnam….such talented people I am humbled even to have my name listed among theirs….their contributions so much more important than anything I’ve ever done or ever will do. How lucky am I to have been a member of that very special group and to have shared in this historic experience.

I will be sorting out these two weeks for a very long time. Carl Robinson jammed a lifetime—several life times—of experiences into 14 very short days. I told him I’m like the kid who goes to summer camp and loves it and then years to take all his pals home with him, knowing how much he’ll miss them once he gets home. But, again, how lucky was I to have ever been a member of this fascinating band of reporters…..

may 2, 2010

2010-05-05T02:31:00.000-07:00

May 2, 2010

And suddenly it is all over. We have been so busy for so long, we didn’t stop to think it was all about to end.

Thanks to friend Carl, we got an extra day out of it. The real final day was Friday April 30, “Liberation Day,” as they celebrate the “fall” of Saigon here. I had a very practical reason for not going to the parade, I was not sure I could sit for 5 hours without going to the bathroom! But several others didd get up at 4 to catch the govt bus at 5 and take their places in the reviewing stand. According to Peter Arnett, 30 American soldiers had a plaace of honor as Communist Vietnam celebrated itself. Hilarious entry from Jimmy Pringle that he confronted a man he thought was head of the party and natural son of Ho Chi Minh; only to find out the next day that man was in Hanoi. [For the record, the man laughed at the question and probably didn’t understand it.]

We had a leisurely cruise on the Saigon River at noon, more wonderful Vietnamese food….cha gio as always, but I never get tired of it. Oddly, the nuoc mam we’re being served here is not what I remember; it is too sweet. What I remember was a pungent pepper and vinegary sauce, fermented fish!

Ralph and I were sitting in Brodard’s [now Gloria Jeans, an Aussie brand of Starbucks] when he spotted Page going down Dong Choi [old Tu Do Street]. I yelled at him and he came on over and joined us for iced coffee. We did a long interview of him…he looked up above the magnificent modern Gucci store where our old apt. building used to be, and said, “Flynn is in the window.” The entire block where our apt. building was located was razed for the enormous Sheraton hotel skyscraper. But, the sounds of espresso machines and chatter were too much; not good quality but Ralph says it’s understandable. Page relived his first meeting with Flynn and described in fine detail his apt. in Paris and all the weapons that adorned it.

The final banquet was at Maxim’s one of the grand old restaurants [complete with floor show] from the French days here. It would have been yet another banquet, except at some point we heard a disturbance on the street. Kim Dung came back from the front door saying “fireworks.” I yelled, “incoming,” and took off outside into a mob of people gathered along the riverfront beside the Majestic Hotel…..and we were all awed by the most amazing fireworks display I have ever seen. [leave it to the Orientals, after all, they invented the stuff]…..It was all so exciting, a young Vietnames couple standing beside me just spontaneously shared a big long hug.

Edet, the young filmmaker who’s doing a film about Kate Webb, was out front and we exchanged cameras to get shots of each other watching the fireworks….

And of course, I had to remember my first visit to that spot, Jan. 29, 1968, when every building was covered in firecrackers at the start of Tet….and then at 3 a.m., the “incoming” wasn’t firecrackers any more. And my office called and said, “If you can get across the street, come to work!”

Carl gave a nice short speech to end it all and brought Kim Dung up to say she never ever wanted to do it again. I had thought about standing up and saying a grand thank you, but it was all so perfect, I just didn’t want to spoil the moment. Don North sang “we’ll meet again” very badly; and Scotsman Pringle led us all in Auld Lang Syne, joining hands around the room I burst out with “we gotta get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do….” That was the real anthem of Vietnam.

How does one thank someone for such an overwhelming life changing experience. I told Carl that I’ll be going back to the world ten years younger….and it’s the truth. The love and support I’ve felt here has re-charged my batteries in a way I simply could never have imagined. And over it all, a sense of fun we shared then and we still share. Fucking Page, still crazy after all these years. Peter Arnett is 75 years old for christ’s sake and he’s still as enthusiastic as a teenager about whatever he’s doing or talking about. He’s still the boy reporter, out front of every gathering, asking questions, taking pictures. May he last forever!

The fascinating thing is that our bond was so strong from “Vietnam,” and all that word came to mean in our lives, we just picked up as close as we had always been, even though we hadn’t seen each other in 30 and 40 years.

Yesterday, Saturday, May 1, was “Workers’ Day,” a major communist holiday; so the whole country was out celebrating. Carl laid on a Mercedes van for us to go down to Con Phung, the island of the Phoenix, where lived the Coconut Monk and his followers and where our little group once spent a magical few days together in Dec. 1968. Just outside Saigon, we got on the magnificent new four lane highway and it took us all the way to My Tho. Carl had said a new bridge would take us over to the island and I was disappointed we wouldn’t go by boat, but in fact, we did have to go the last leg of the trip by the same little putt putt boat that had taken us there 42 years ago.

In 1968, the coconut monk’s little religious Disneyland had stood out above the Mekong; now it seemed really overgrown with greenery. As we got close to the dock, however, we could see it had become a major tourist attraction to the Vietnamese. Gone was any semblance of spirituality or religiosity; At best it was a curiosity, and an amusing one, to the tourists scrambling about the weird structures that had been built with such reverence. In the main entrance building, [the top 2 floors now a hotel!] there was a kind of museum, with a huge wall dedicated to the heroes of the Revolution from that area. Madame Binh was from Ben Tre.

Finally, we found a wall dedicated to the Dao Dua, the Coconut monk, himself….

and there I was!

There was a fuzzy copy of a picture of John Steinbeck, me and the coconut Monk leading the prayers that day in late 1968. The caption said that the monk had thought he could “convince foreigners to venerate him.” [“And he DID,” laughed Arnett when I told him later.] Page had told me that when he first saw that picture a year ago, the guides had told him it was the Dao Dua “with his CIA friends.” “No, no, no,” Page had said, “this is a good old boy from North Carolina.”

Going with us on the trip were Carl’s wife Kim Dung, who did a masterful job of arranging absolutely everything; John Gianini, a young aussie cameraman named Sean Gibbons [whose father had worked for upi 1966-1970], George Hamilton and my movie guy Ralph Hemecker. Also, Mike Morrow, who broke the My Lai story with his Dispatch News Service and who has added a wonderful intellectual presence to all our gatherings. Gianini had gotten involved with our group as a very young Army intelligence sergeant. He would sneak out documents—mainly interviews of Communist POWS captured in Cambodia—and bring them to Louise Stone when she was just beginning her futile search for Dana. He had thought he couldn’t afford to come to the reunion but at the last minute got an assignment from the American Catfish Farmers Association to document how unsafe the VN catfish farms were…..He and Kim Dung broke off at My Tho and went on their assignment.

Ralph and I had planned to do interviews of everybody who had been close to Flynn and Stone, but the days had slipped by and I was worried we just might not get them. The trip turned out to be a perfect venue for the interviews. On the way down, George told about first meeting Sean in traffic court in Palm Beach, then about helping him in his film career and gadding about London and Beirut; and that last time he saw him: Flynn unexpectedly got off a plane in Geneva and George never saw him again. It turns out he’s writing a book of his own and his reminiscences of Flynn and his participation in the reunion will be the first chapter. He has turned out to be a high point of the whole reunion; telling one wickedly funny story after another and keeping us all entertained with his self-deprecating wit. “Just look up George Hamilton and Rat on Google,” he laughed after telling about one incredible predicament he got into recently in Australia. “I’m not exaggerating, it’s all true.” He handles his celebrity extremely well. My friend Alice kept wanting to get a picture with him in Phnom Penh, but was too embarrassed to ask. Finally, she got up nerve to ask him and his response was classic: “I thought you’d never ask!”

On the way back, Ralph interviewed Carl about Flynn. Like me, he had not known Flynn for a long time, but it was still a very deep and special relationship. Sean had been the best man at the wedding when Carl Married Kim Dung in May 1969, not long after Flynn and I had come to Saigon after Page was wounded. And, then, we all talked all the way back to Saigon about Flynn and the whole war experience and what it all meant….a fascinating discussion we could not possibly have programmed any better. Mike Morrow added his slow insightful comments throughout. Mike had been part of our group through Steinbeck and of course Dispatch news. He was also captured by the Khmer Rouge and held for 30 days in Cambodia. More recently, the communist government here had arrested him and held him in prison here for 40 days. He was very reluctant to join us for the reunion, but Carl had talked him into it.

The night was topped off by yet another dramatic evening with old hacks, only this time they were some very brave reporters from the other side. Our host was Nguyen Van Vinh, now 60, who had covered Jane Fonda’s notorious visit to Hanoi. We were taken by taxi out past the Bien Hoa Bridge to yet another beautiful public park, this one laid out around a lake, with several open-air restaurants. They introduced the former NVA/VC reporters first and described their years in the jungle before the victory in Saigon 1975. When they introduced us, Arnett took the microphone and pointed to a wiry little photographer: “He was a stringer for the AP and on the second day after the fall, he came into our office and said: ‘I am VC!’”] Tim Page was holding court with a group of young Vietnamese reporters. He is an official hero of the revolution and all the local reporters have been interviewing him relentlessly. A tough little old lady, 81 years old, who looked 40, was introduced as a hero journalist of the revolution, having run the liberation news service from the jungle for more than 15 years. She came and sat by Peter Arnett. And talked about her post-revolutionary life. She owns 5 businesses and travels frequently to New York to visit her grandson, a student at NYU; she loves Americans and says we should all go on with our lives. Although some right wingers in America would never believe it, Peter is just as tough with the communists as he is with everybody else he interviews. He always talks about the brave Americans who died here, no matter how uncomfortable it makes his hosts. His brother-in-law is with the World Bank and has a very fine house here. Peter says he helped negotiate the “moi moi” or “doi moi” accommodation with capitalism that has been so successful in Vietnam.

I don’t know how PAge does it, but when we saw him after the parade, he was looking pretty bedraggled; only to rise again that afternoon!

What an amazing 2 weeks in my life. There are no words to express the gratitude I feel in my heart for the friends who made the trip possible and to Carl and Kim Dung who spent hours and days and weeks of hard labor making sure it all happened. As with my original Vietnam experience, I leave here a changed, a better person.

[My apologies to the friends who were following me on facebook; unfortunately, there is no access to faceboook here in VN.] Having a goodbye breakfast with George Hamilton and Page this morning; they’re both leaving later today. And then Ralph and I have a few sights we want to see and then tomorrow night, once again, I say goodbye to Vietnam. Not really; an important part of me will always be here.

May 3:

My last morning in Saigon. Started to unwind yesterday; we took a hydrofoil through the delta down to the beautiful resort/casino town of Vung Tao on the coast. We only stayed an hour, because all the boats back were booked up and we came within a hair of getting stuck there. After a hilarious scene selling a fake Rolex to Ralph, George bid his farewell, flying off to Frankfurt Germany and then on to Cancun. He shook hands with the group, looked me in the eye and said, “I’ll call you.”

We’ve planned a relaxed no hassle day; going to the war remnants museum and then doing some shopping and then a last night at the Majestic rooftop bar….we sat there saying nothing last night, just absorbing the warm moist air coming off the river and enjoying the boat and car traffic down below…..a lot of memories, from then and now…..but the party’s over, time to go……

4-30-2010 liberation day in saigon

2010-04-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-28T01:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-25T18:57:00.001-07:00

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

2010-04-25T18:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-25T17:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-22T16:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-17T03:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-17T03:30:00.000-07:00

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

A Monument to Greed

2010-03-29T06:08:00.001-07:00

A monument to greed

Perry Deane Young

One good thing about recently having to be away from my beloved Chapel Hill for a month was that I didn’t have to look at that hideous monstrosity taking shape on West Rosemary Street. Every time I have to drive or walk west toward that once pleasant area, my blood boils when I look up and see this huge monument to greed looming over all else in front of me.

For weeks and months we have all watched in dismay as the concrete and steel piled up and up and up to radically alter the low skyline we’re all used to. That this “Greenbridge” project is masquerading as something good for the environment is just plain ludicrous. The only things green about it are the greed in the developers’ eyes and the greenbacks they hope to reap from the destruction of yet another neighborhood. That certain “environmental” groups are in cahoots with Greenbridge reminds us that the right wingers have no franchise on hypocrisy.

Even if the building were as “green” as it’s being touted, it is still a disastrous mistake for the environment. How in the world this project ever got through our planning commission is a mystery to me. Do we even have a planning commission if such a building can get approved? How it cleared the town council supposedly dedicated to the good of our town is yet another mystery. But the real mystery is how could we ordinary citizens have grown so complacent that we allowed this to happen.

Greenbridge violates every tenet of careful and sensible planning. It has already destroyed a once viable neighborhood and for the moment turned it into something like a very dangerous combat zone. The building is out of all proportion to everything surrounding it. It has already changed a low-level neighborhood of small houses into a very high-priced commercial zone. If you don’t believe me, take a look across Rosemary Street where a huge lot has already been “cleared for development.”

What Greenbridge will have to offer will benefit nobody in that immediate neighborhood and only a ridiculously small number in the rest of the town. In fact, most of the people in the surrounding blocks will probably never set foot inside this awful building now looming over their lives.

With “luxury condos” planned for the huge parking lot once owned by the town on Franklin Street, the last thing our town needed was more space for the very rich on West Rosemary Street. You have to ask yourself, again, why is the town of Chapel Hill in the business of encouraging such high-end development when there is such a crying need for lower and middle-income housing here?

In his great book, In Design with Nature, Ian McHarg wrote that “poverty exercises a great restraint on vulgarity and wealth is its fuel.” My mountain ancestors would say Chapel Hill is suffering from too much money and too little sense. The traditional charm of Chapel Hill involved a town of small neighborhoods that grew out of and served the University. Almost overnight, we have watched that charm disappear in the face of monumental and uncontrolled development. Every way you look, there are huge ugly buildings taking shape and blocking the view—not for anything the town needs, but creating new needs for new residents.

Where once there was a magnificent green space in front of the University Motel, now there is the very latest in prison architecture being built right up to the sidewalk. At last there is a conglomeration of ugly buildings that makes even Meadowmont look good.

We will soon be facing an election in Chapel Hill. All of us who love this town should demand that candidates who want our votes must pledge to bring an end to all this. We can’t undo the serious damage done by Greenbridge and the people developing the University Motel property, but we can work to insure that there will be no more of these monuments to greed in our town.

Preparing for the play, HOME AGAIN

2009-07-16T05:23:00.000-07:00

HOME AGAIN
A new play based on the life of Thomas Wolfe

I will be writing a daily blog about preparations for this the third play I have written with William Gregg, artistic director of the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre at Mars Hill, N.C. It is one of the great regional theaters in America and I consider myself very lucky to be involved with these incredibly fine actors and the director, Bill himself.

For starters, I’d like to do a rundown of how I see each of the main characters in the play:

THOMAS WOLFE was one great big 6’4” 245-pound bundle of contradictions. He was first and foremost passionately dedicated to his art, all else came second in his life. He never owned a home, never learned to drive a car. He was at times a brooding loner, at other times the most gregarious life of the party. His prose seemed to flow with effortless eloquence, however, he had a pronounced stutter when he was excited and trying to explain himself. Although a physical giant of a man, he remained boyish, the kind of man women want to mother and men want to protect.

ALINE BERNSTEIN was 20 years older than young Wolfe when they became passionately involved. It is a fact, he could never have written Look Homeward, Angel, without her financial and moral support. She was glamorous in contrast to Wolfe’s disheveled appearance, but not in the movie star sense. She was always neat a stylish down to the last button. She moved in the very highest artistic levels of New York, but there was nothing phony about her. In addition to being the most talented costume and set designed in New York for 3 decades, she was also a fabulous cook and the kind of woman who made here own clothes. She was every bit as passionate a romantic as Wolfe, but she had the practical down to earth side that he was missing. She never stopped loving him even though he broke off with her not long after Look Homeward, Angel came out. [He would keep coming back to her—for money and love—until his final illness…and she was one of the few he called to say he was dying.]

JULIA WOLFE was a stingy penny pincher, but she was never mean. She was very well educated for her time. Two of her brothers were among the wealthiest men in Asheville at that time and she herself had made a small fortune in real estate in Miami and Asheville. Her stinginess never extended to Tom, who would remain her baby boy until he died. He could do no wrong, even when he described her as the opposite to his father’s gregarious love of life and poetry. Wolfe could rave about the money-grubbers of Asheville [such as his mother] but the truth was her money sent him through UNC and Harvard and supported him until after Look Homeward, Angel came out. Hers was a textbook case of “smother love.” Her “baby” slept with her until he was a grown boy.

FRED WOLFE was the quintessential good old boy. Tall and somewhat awkward, he was always there to help. He never had an unkind word to say about anybody and just got up each day and did what he had to do. He sold ice cream for the Blue Bird ice cream company in South Carolina. Although he had a serious stutter, he was famous as the kind of salesman who could sell anything. People loved him.

FRANK WOLFE was a loveable rascal. He was a boozer and womanizer quite literally in his father’s footsteps. But [unless he wrote bad checks on your account] he didn’t hurt anybody with his behavior. Although he had a wife and children of his own, he would end up a sad wreck of a human being living in his mother’s boardinghouse because he had nowhere else to go. Wolfe hated him because Frank had taunted him for being a sissy when he was a child and he never forgave him. Frank resented his mother’s generosity toward young Tom. He was also bitter [and rightly so] about Look Homeward, Angel, where all his many faults were set forth for everybody to read about.

MABEL WOLFE was [as we southerners say] “good hearted.” She was the kind one would begin by saying, “bless her heart.” She had a pretentious streak, but she was genuine in her desire to better herself and move among the quality folks of Asheville. Appearances were important to her. She was also excitable in a way her Mama never was. Mabel was often out of control; Julia never was. But like the others, she was devoted to the family and rode the train across country to bring the dying Tom back to Baltimore. The day of the funeral, Mabel was hitting the sauce so heavily her Mama forbade her going to the funeral.

GEORGE MCCOY was the kind of small town newspaperman who always thought he had a dozen novels in his desk drawer, although even he knew he would never get around to actually writing them. A UNC classmate of Wolfe’s, he was devoted to him and admired [and maybe envied] his success beyond words.

MAX PERKINS was the greatest editor of the 20th Century. A typically reserved New Englander, he became personally involved with Wolfe in a way he did with none of his other writers—and they included Hemingway and Fitzgerald at the same time. The obvious reason was that Wolfe needed him more. Even as he tried to be the stern editor who knew it was necessary to take an axe to Wolfe’s out of control prose, he also appreciated this passionately romantic boy writer. Again, the reason is obvious: that kind of passion was something that would never be a part of his own life. And, even after Wolfe left him and Scribners for Ed Aswell and Harper’s, Perkins remained Wolfe’s friend and mentor. And as Wolfe lay dying, it was Perkins to whom he turned; and it was Perkins he entrusted with his literary estate.

Of course, one thing I’ve learned in my brief experience in the theater is that the actor must create a reality of his or her own on the stage. It doesn’t matter what the real character looked like or talked like; what is important is that the actor create a believable character for the moment on stage. I’m learning.

2009-06-02T06:26:00.000-07:00

World premiere of Home Again, a new play about Thomas Wolfe by William Gregg and Perry Deane Young

HOME AGAIN

The Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre is proud to announce the world premiere of the play, Home Again, by SART director William Gregg and author Perry Deane Young. The new play premieres July 29-August 9 at the historic Owen Theater at Mars Hill College in Mars Hill, near Asheville, N.C. It tells the story of what happened when the author of You Can’t Go Home Again went home again. It is based not on Thomas Wolfe’s fiction but on the personal drama of his life.

In fact, the author Thomas Wolfe returned to his native Asheville, N.C., in September 1929 just days before his locally-explosive novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was published in New York. He would visit all those who later felt he had betrayed and ridiculed them in his widely praised novel. And then he went back to New York City and never returned to his beloved home town and the people there until eight years had passed. A wildly passionate man, Wolfe was caught in a web of loyalties that first involved his devotion to his art. Next was his love of the great stage designer, Aline Bernstein And always hovering in his memory was his devoted but needy family back in Asheville.

When the school teacher who had molded him as an intellectual and a writer read what Wolfe had written about her husband, she wrote him: “You have devastated your own family but you have crucified mine.” His sister was shunned by the literary club she was desperate to belong to. His older brother threatened to sue because Wolfe said he had a piece of “tough suet” where his heart ought to be.

But the publication of Look Homeward, Angel coincided almost to the day with the stock market crash in 1929 and Wolfe’s family like everybody else in Asheville was truly devastated. Ironically, the success of the hated novel enabled Wolfe to lend his family money when they needed it most.

When Wolfe actually came home again in 1937, he stopped off in his mother’s ancestral homeland of mountain-bound Yancey County. He got off the bus and walked into a gunfight among some distant cousins. But, his welcome home in nearby Asheville was tumultuous. All the bad feelings had been forgotten and he was greeted like a returning sports hero. The peace and quiet he sought in a little cabin out from Asheville evaded him as hordes of visitors invaded his privacy to tell him their stories and party with the famous author.

Wolfe fled back to the haven New York City had always offered him and plunged himself into his work, writing nearly 2 million words in less than a year. Leaving a mountainous manuscript with his publisher, he headed west on an extended vacation trip. From Seattle, Wolfe wired his family that he was hospitalized with a mysterious illness which was later diagnosed as tuberculosis of the brain. His family as always came to his aid, first his sister and then his brother and then his mother helped get him back to Baltimore for treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The famous author died there, surrounded by his devoted family. They brought him home to a celebrity’s farewell funeral. He was laid to rest in Riverside Cemetery among all those who once felt he betrayed them—and all their tombstones would eventually carry inscriptions from his writing. He was home again, home at last.
William Gregg and Perry Deane Young both grew up in Wolfe’s literary shadow in the Asheville suburb of Woodfin. This is their third play. SART previously produced their plays, Frankie, and Mountain of Hope. Prior to coming home to Mars Hill, Gregg served as director of the New American Theater in Illinois, the Theatre Virginia in Richmond, the New Raft Theatre Company in New York City and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. At the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, he worked as production stage manager and assistant director for artistic director Liviu Ciulei. In addition to the three plays, Young is the author of 10 books and one screenplay. A new edition of his Vietnam memoir, Two of the Missing, has just been published by Press 53. Millenium Films has announced that production of the film based on the book will begin in 2009.

Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone

2009-04-06T04:11:00.001-07:00

Copies of the splendid new edition of my book, Two of the Missing, are now available. You can order them directly from me by sending a check for $19.95 to Perry Deane Young, P.O. Box 1366, Chapel Hill, NC 27514. Or, by contacting the publisher www.Press53.com or through Amazon.com

PRE-ORDER SIGNED COPIES NOW
Contact: Kevin Watson (336) 414-5599/ kevin@press53.com
Press 53
P.O. Box 30314
Winston-Salem, NC 27130-0314
www.Press53.com

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SEAN FLYNN AND DANA STONE?
New Book updates ongoing search for Errol Flynn’s Son and colleague still missing in Cambodia
Winston-Salem, NC - April 6, 2009—Press 53 is proud to announce the publication of a new updated edition of Two of the Missing, Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone. The new edition contains 18 pages of photographs by and of these two courageous photojournalists who drove bright red motorcycles into Communist-held territory in Cambodia on April 6, 1970—and were never seen again. Most of these photos have never been published before.
“Sean Flynn and Dana Stone were among the bravest and best of that daring young crew of photographers who covered the Vietnam War,” says author and friend Perry Deane Young. “Flynn was on assignment for Time magazine and Stone was a cameraman with CBS when they were last seen heading around a Communist roadblock near the Cambodian town of Chi Pou.” Director Ralph Hemecker has optioned the film rights to the book and is now in the process of casting. The screenplay was written by Young and Hemecker.
A native of Asheville who now lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., Young is the author of three plays and nine books, including the national bestseller, The David Kopay Story. A journalist with UPI during the Vietnam War, he remembers his close friends and colleagues as he examines their lives and wonders what led them to take this one final risk. Young also includes profiles of several other colleagues who took very different paths from Flynn and Stone. These include the legendary madcap English photographer Tim Page, who left part of his skull in Vietnam and continues to this day to search Cambodia for the remains of his beloved friends.
When first published in 1975, Two of the Missing was hailed by The Washington Post as “Magnificent…unforgettable…one of the best books yet prompted by the Vietnam War.” Truman Capote called it “a moving and engrossing chronicle of several fascinating young men drifting toward mysterious and desperate destinations.” Newsday described the book as “a tender book about war, about friendship and love, with more plain virility to it than all the gory epics put together.” Christopher Isherwood, author of Berlin Stories on which the musical Cabaret was based, said: “This is an extraordinary book, I cannot recommend it too highly.” The new edition by Press 53 has been hailed by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer David Kennerly as “A brilliant tale…One of the great books about photographers in war.” And by Joseph L. Galloway, co-author of We Were Soldiers One…and Young and We are Soldiers Still: “What great news that Two of the Missing is back in print.”
Two of the Missing is distributed by Ingram and Baker& Taylor, and is available from bookstores and online booksellers. It is also available at www.Press53.com.
Paperback: 296 pages, 6 x 9 inches
Publisher: Press 53
ISBN: 978-0-9816280-9-7 Price: $19.95

McCain's Choice insults us all, especially women

2008-08-31T05:51:00.000-07:00

McCain’s choice insults us all, especially women

John McCain’s choice of the former Miss Wasilla, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is downright insulting to every American, but especially to women.
It is a calculated Karl Rovian move designed for one thing and one thing only: political expediency. The backroom boys sat around and apparently came to the conclusion that they needed a woman, any woman, to appeal to the disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. It is tokenism at its most extreme. There are plenty of women who are fully qualified for the vice presidency, but Sarah Palin is not one of them.
The very idea that McCain—aged 72, with serious medical problems--would put a person so poorly qualified within a heartbeat of the presidency is just plain ludicrous. The woman has admitted she knows little or nothing about Iraq and there is no evidence that she has any better knowledge of the economy. It’s as if the political gods are plaing some kind of sick joke on us: McCain says he knows nothing about the economy; he’s chosen a running mate who knows nothing about the war in Iraq. At a time when the country faces a serious energy crisis, Palin has aligned herself with the interests of big oil.
Although baptized a Roman Catholic as a baby, she was re-baptized as an adult into an independent “Assembly of God” church, a sect on the outer fringes of fundamentalist extremism. She is vehemently anti-abortion, favors a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages and favors the teaching of “Creationism” in our public schools. She is precisely the kind of divisive candidate we do not need in these perilous times when all efforts should be focused on healing the near-fatal wounds both spiritual and economic inflicted upon our beloved country by eight years of Republic mis-rule.
Once again, McCain’s judgment is called into question and once again, he is just plain wrong. Let us hope the political pundits will have the courage to take their gloves off and call this for what it is. Let us hope that the hypocrisy of this decision will be exposed. I’m confident there’s more to her troubled past than the brother-in-law incident; I truly believe Sarah Palin herself will explain just how unqualified she is to be vice president…if she’s just given enough rope to hang herself.
McCain’s decision makes a mockery of his campaign’s efforts to brand Sen. Barack Obama as “inexperienced.” Palin is a journalism graduate of the university of Idaho; Obama is an honors graduate of the Harvard Law School. Palin was elected Miss Wassila; Obama worked to improve conditions in an impoverished South Chicago neighborhood; Palin was elected mayor of Wassilla, population 6,000; Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate; Palin is governor of Alaska; Obama is a U.S. Senator.
More important, Obama’s judgment has once again proven to be far superior to John McCain’s. It was Obama, not McCain, who said we need more troops in Afghanistan. It was Obama, not McCain, who said we need a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Both of these decisions once vehemently opposed by the Republicans, are now public policy.

And, finally, it was Obama who chose as his running mate a person with vast foreign policy experience who could step in as president at any time. Miss Wassilla as president of the United States. Think about it.

Finally an accurate obit of an evil man

2008-07-08T13:49:00.000-07:00

A friend in Key west relayed the Guardian's obit for Jesse Helms, which had been sent to him by a friend in Italy; shows you the worldwide concern about the evil that this one man did in his lifetime. You can access the guardian's words about Jesse at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/04/usa

Meanwhile, here's a little run-in I had with Jesse very early in my career:

Jesse and me

June 25th is a date that should live in infamy to all those who believe in academic freedom in North Carolina. It was on that date in 1963 that a renegade band of redneck legislators suspended the rules of the General Assembly and within minutes enacted the infamous Speaker Ban.

It was only a matter of minutes after that when Ol’ Jesse Helms, the man we then dismissed as a minor nuisance and major right wing crackpot at WRAL, tried to get me fired from my job as a reporter for United Press International. I was a very young 21 when I dropped out of my junior year at UNC to cover the 1963 General Assembly.

On the last day of the session, I was sitting alone in the press section, which was then right on the floor beside the legislators. My ears perked up as Reps. Phil Godwin and Ned Delamar asked for a suspension of the rules and submitted a bill. A bill had gone through the previous day to censor public television and now here was a bill to restrict speakers at state universities. It was, from the beginning, a clear slap at UNC President Bill Friday because he would not fire two professors involved in the civil rights movement. None of the Speaker Ban’s sponsors had attended UNC, two had never been to college.

Rep. Paul Story protested, “Gentlemen, this is clearly unconstitutional on its face,” but the House Speaker was in on the plan and it passed by voice vote. I was so incensed by this that I went to the back of the hall and ran with the bill’s sponsors onto the floor of the senate, where the Senate President Clarence Stone was waiting. Sen. Luther Hamilton, among others, was shouting to be recognized, but Stone would hear no dissent and hammed the bill into law on a voice vote. Hamilton was finally able to say in utter disgust: “Gentlemen, this is not worthy of the senate of North Carolina.”

A passionate believer in truth, justice and the American way, I rushed to the UPI teletype machine in the press room and punched out my story: “Reactionaries in the North Carolina General Assembly have ramrodded another censorship bill into law.” I knew that WRAL was UPI’s biggest client in the state; what I did not know was that Jesse Helms was apparently standing there reading the wire as my “reactionaries” story came across.

Jesse didn’t mess with the local bureau chief. He called the president of UPI in New York and demanded that I be fired on the spot. UPI immediately issued a “mandatory kill” on the story, the only one I ever saw in several years with the company in Raleigh, New York and Saigon.

It turned out that Jesse played a key role in the speaker ban. He had gotten hold of an Ohio speaker ban law and had praised it on the air the week before [June 21] and passed it along to friendly hands in the legislature. I learned a great deal from this experience. One inflammatory word had cost me the chance to describe the very dramatic debate I had witnessed that day. [No other reporters were on the floor when the bill passed.] None of the later stories reported the eloquent opposition to the ban.

More important, I will always remember walking into the UPI bureau across from the news room at the News and Observer and hearing my bureau chief still on the phone with his superiors in New York. This was Robert “Bo” McNeill, a proud UNC graduate, who was saying into the phone, “But they ARE reactionaries; he’s right.” He refused to fire me. He hung up the phone, grinned and said: “Well, you sure screwed up this time.” And the next day he wrote me a commendation for doing a fine job covering the legislature.

Jesse Helms, dead at last

2008-07-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

The following letter to the editor was published in today's News and Observer. The only problem was they left off the key lines in the quote from H.L. Mencken. I also wrote a piece about the day Jesse tried to get me fired at UPI, which they were going to run, but I guess didn't because of the letter to the editor I'd already sent. I'll post that story later today. Laura Belle, and Jenny, glad to SOMEbody's reading my blog..........loveya. uncle p.Before the media elevate Jesse Helms to sainthood, we should remember all those who were denied their rights and harmed by his decades of mean-spirited racism and sexism that did untold damage to the good name of North Carolina and the South. There were the blacks he ridiculed in their efforts for equal rights, there was the mother of an AIDS victim whom he told, “I’m sorry your son chose to play Russian roulette with his life.” Ever since the man went into politics, we've heard these ultimate rationalizations for his bigotry: "you knew where he stood;" and "at least he was sincere in his beliefs." Before the rhetoric gets too thick, it is well to recall what H.L. Mencken wrote on the death of an earlier demagogue, William Jennings Bryan: "This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity."

2008-03-16T13:27:00.001-07:00

Here's the robotic response from Obama's church:

Thank you for your interest in Trinity United Church of Christ and for your consideration of our member, Sen. Barack Obama, in the Democratic primary election. Due to the high volume of emails and inquiries, we are unable to respond to each one personally. We were overwhelmed with "hits" after Senator Obama's historic victory in the Iowa democratic caucus. Barack Obama has been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ for nearly two decades. As a young community organizer, new to Chicago, Barack met with Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Trinity's Senior Pastor, seeking advice. He received good counsel about the complexities of life in Chicago and the challenges faced by residents in poor communities like South Chicago's Altgeld Gardens. The United Church of Christ (http://www.ucc.org), Trinity's denominational affiliation, is "a community of faith that seeks to respond to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in word and deed." It was founded in 1957 through the union of several different Christian traditions. Not only does Trinity not exclude anyone from membership or attendance based on race or ethnicity, but: The majority of UCC members are white; the conference minister of the Illinois Conference of the UCC (Rev. Jane Fisler Hoffman) and her husband (both white) are members of Trinity (You can watch a video of Rev. Hoffman speaking at Trinity about her positive experiences there.); Trinity has been instrumental in working with and lending financial and staff support to the development of new UCC churches in Gary, IN (with the Indiana-Kentucky Conference of the UCC, Milwaukee, WI (with the Wisconsin Conference of the UCC), and Benton Harbor, MI (with the Michigan Conference of the UCC). There is no anti-American sentiment in the theology or the practice of Trinity United Church of Christ. To be sure, there is prophetic preaching against oppression, racism and other evils that would deny the American ideal. Trinity is "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." Trinity was founded in 1961 and had 87 families when Dr. Wright started his tenure in 1972. Currently, as Dr. Wright anticipates a 2008 retirement, there are more than 8,000 members, 70 ministries, and three Sunday worship services. You and your family can watch these services online at 7:30am, 11:00am and 6:00pm CST. If you require additional information, please do not hesitate to contact Senator Obama's office: Devorah Adler at dadler@barackobama.com Joshua DuBois at jdubois@barackobama.com Yours in Christ!

2008-03-16T13:22:00.001-07:00

E-mail sent to Trinity United Church of Christ which has just issued a press release comparing their pastor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Do you people have no shame? How dare you invoke the sacred named of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King was a man of peace, not of meanness and hate. Do you think for one second he would ever have uttered the idiotic hate-filled words of your pastor? How proud Dr. King would be of Barack Obama; how ashamed he would be of the hateful words of Jeremiah Wright that have cast such a cloud over Obama's chance for the presidency.

The really important question is why the UCC itself did nothing in all this time to denounce the language of Jeremiah Wright. Obama has had the courage to do that; where's the UCC?

Paul Krugman agrees with me on reporters

2007-09-20T05:52:00.000-07:00

This is yet another case of great minds sharing the same thought. Paul Krugman's blog in the New York Times for Sept. 19 is incredibly similar to the thoughts expressed in my own blog for that date. Here it is:

What I Hate About Political Coverage
Warning: this is a bit (actually, more than a bit) of a rant.
One of my pet peeves about political reporting is the fact that some of my journalistic colleagues seem to want to be in another business – namely, theater criticism. Instead of telling us what candidates are actually saying – and whether it’s true or false, sensible or silly – they tell us how it went over, and how they think it affects the horse race. During the 2004 campaign I went through two months’ worth of TV news from the major broadcast and cable networks to see what voters had been told about the Bush and Kerry health care plans; what I found, and wrote about, were several stories on how the plans were playing, but not one story about what was actually in the plans.
There are two big problems with this kind of reporting. The important problem is that it fails to inform the public about what matters. In 2004, very few people had any idea about the very real differences between the candidates on domestic policy. It remains to be seen whether 2008 is any better.
The other problem, which has become very apparent lately, is that this sort of coverage often fails even on its own terms, because the way things look to inside-the-Beltway pundits can be very different from the way they look to real people.
Which brings me to the Petraeus hearing.
To a remarkable extent, punditry has taken a pass on whether Gen. Petraeus’s picture of the situation in Iraq is accurate. Instead, it was all about the theatrics – about how impressive he looked, how well or poorly his Congressional inquisitors performed. And the judgment you got if you were watching most of the talking heads was that it was a big win for the administration – especially because the famous MoveOn ad was supposed to have created a scandal, and a problem for the Democrats.
Even if all this had been true, it wouldn’t have mattered much: if the truth is that Iraq is a mess, the public would find out soon enough, and the backlash would be all the greater because of the sense that we had been deceived yet again.
But here’s the thing: new polls by CBS and Gallup show that the Petraeus testimony had basically no effect on public opinion: Americans continue to hate the war, and want out. The whole story about how the hearing had changed everything was a pure figment of the inside-the-Beltway imagination.
What I found striking about the whole thing was the contempt the pundit consensus showed for the public – it was, more or less, “Oh, people just can’t resist a man in uniform.” But it turns out that they can; it’s the punditocracy that can’t.

the decline of newspapers and Iraq "assessments"

2007-09-19T09:19:00.000-07:00

The Decline of Newspapers and Iraq “assessments”

An old friend tells me these are hard times in the newspaper business. Advertising at the News & Observer and the Durham Herald-Sun has dropped to such low levels the two papers have had to drastically cut back their staffs. The N&O’s Chapel Hill News staff has been cut from 10 to 5; the Herald-Sun’s Chapel Hill Herald has been cut from 6 to 3.

This past week was a rather extraordinary one in the history of news out of Washington and Iraq. And, frankly, I think it might offer an object lesson as to why so many people have turned away from newspapers as a source not only for real news, but for serious criticism and commentary on what’s happening in the news. General David Petraeus went before Congress and put an embarrassing political spin on the situation where more thousands of lives are being lost, more billions are being spent every week. There was only one clear moment of honesty and that was when he answered Sen. Chuck Hagel’s question as to whether any of this sacrifice in lives and “treasure” was making America safer. “I don’t know,” answered the general.

Much as we might feel for anybody in Petraeus’ predicament, we must also be aware of the generals who went before him and were fired because they dared to question the President’s war strategy. Petraeus is still in command because he does not do that.

The only people brave enough to point out the contradictions in the General’s White House spin on the situation in Iraq has been MoveOn.Org. I salute that group for calling his report what it was, a “betrayal.” In fact, when you consider the thousands of lives lost, the billions of dollars wasted, “betrayal” is much too mild a word for anybody who would deliberately misrepresent the situation in Iraq. In a full page ad in the New York Times and on its website, www.moveon.org MoveOn clearly documented these lies [let’s call them what they are] to help prop up Bush’s war. They provided links to three specific reports, the GAO, the NIE and Gen. Jones’ independent report. The report by Petraeus flies in the face of every day’s news accounts in Iraq. The situation is not getting better, it’s getting worse.

When the President himself went on national television to deliver his own “assessment” of the situation, he spun a web of lies that went way beyond misrepresenting facts. The most egregious of these was his reference to the “36 Allied Nations fighting on the ground with us in Iraq.” Most of these countries have only one or two token representatives in Iraq and none of them are “fighting on the ground” with us.

Now, in the old days of the partisan press in America, the opposition papers would have seized on the President’s speech and run with the outright lies and misrepresentation in it. However, because of the trend toward phony “objectivity” in recent years, most papers just pick up the lies and run with them….much as we did at the daily briefing in Saigon in the 1960s. That briefing came to be called the “Five O’Clock Follies” for good reason. None of the reportage in the News & Observer or any other newspaper pointed out the follies in General Petraeus’ assessment. None of the newspapers reported the flagrant lies in President Bush’s televised report to the nation. The only reporter to do so was MSNBC’s David Shuster.

Does this help explain why so many are turning away from newspapers? I think it might. In a time that desperately cries out for honest criticism and commentary, the newspapers are simply reporting what the government spokesmen tell them. We all suffer for this in the end.

-o-

On September 12, 2007, the N&O published an outrageous letter by a Duke political science professor named Peter D. Feaver attacking the MoveOn ad criticizing Gen. Petraeus’ report. In melodramatic prose, Feaver [who worked as a security adviser to both Presidents Clinton and Bush] said this ad was comparable to the tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. And in breathless sentences, he recounted the moment when Joseph Welch turned on McCarthy and asked if he finally had no sense of decency. Luckily, a number of people agreed with me that the comparison was preposterous and the N&O published our letters of protest. Here is my letter:

Peter D. Feaver’s article, “MoveOn’s McCarthy maneuver,” was itself the very kind of “McCarthyism” the author attributes to MoveOn.

Feaver denounces MoveOn’s newspaper ad against Gen. David Petraeus’ report by saying: “the advertisement alleges, without any concrete evidence, that Petraeus would not give his honest, professional assessment of the situation in Iraq….”

Anyone who takes the time to go to www.moveon.org and read the ad, will find that Feaver’s statement is a bald faced misrepresentation of the facts. The ad clearly states “Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence… there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there.” To back up these assertions, MoveOn provides links to the full reports of the GAO, the NIE, and the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq.

It is utterly preposterous for Feaver to suggest that this ad represents the kind of baseless witch hunts conducted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Rather, Joseph Welch’s famous words to the senator might well be directed at Peter D. Feaver and other political and military leaders in Washington who got us into this bloody quagmire in Iraq: “Have you no sense of decency , Sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
-o-
Here is the responsse I got from a UNC professor.
From: "Elliot M. Cramer" <Cramer@email.unc.edu>To: <pyoung3@bellsouth.net>Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2007 10:47 AMSubject: your letter>I was glad to see your reference to the move on ad. Although I am >certainly no fan of the administration and do not agree with General >Petraeus's assessment, the headline speaks for itself; the ad is >indefensible. It certainly is a smear and is as reprehensible as >MrCarthy's claim.> -- > Elliot M. Cramer> PO 428d> Chapel Hill, NC 27514>> 919-942-2503>> Cramer@unc.edu>> Websites> www.unc.edu/~cramer> www.friendsofocas.org

And here is my response to Elliot M. Cramer’s response:

In fact, the MoveOn ad did not go far enough. To misrepresent the situation where thousands are being killed and even more thousands maimed for life goes way beyond mere "betrayal." Read Gen. Petraeus' "assessment," then read the three other reports referred to in the MoveOn advertisement. His political spin was an embarrassment for a serious military man, relieved only by his "I don't know," when asked if any of it was making our country safer.In his own "assessment," the President made no less than a dozen bald-faced lies about the situation in Iraq--the most notable referring to "the 36 Allied nations supporting us on the ground." The only reporter to point these out was David Shuster [formerly New York Times] of MSNBC.These are absurd times in our nation's history. I was at the heart of a previous similar situation, arriving in Saigon the night the Tet Offensive began in 1968. The quagmire in Iraq is even worse. Far from being McCarthyism, what the brave people at MoveOn are doing is the very noblest form of patriotism; the highest expression of honest democracy in the face of political spin.Yours, Perry Deane Young.
>

Melissa Etheridge and John Edwards

2007-08-12T06:14:00.000-07:00

Let’s hear it for Melissa Etheridge. She didn’t waste any time at the gay forum for presidential candidates Thursday night by hitting candidate John Edwards with his own words right in the face. She said he’d been quoted as saying he was uncomfortable around gay people. Then, she asked, “are you okay now?”

Edwards laughed nervously and then made a feeble attempt to set the record straight…or at least I think that’s what he was doing. First of all, he said, “that was said by a political consultant….” Excuse me, does he mean that automatically implies the fellow was lying? If not, what does it mean? Then, Edwards said, “That is wrong.” I think he even repeated the phrase, “That is wrong.”

Once again, what did he mean by “that is wrong.” If he meant to say it was a lie, that he had been misquoted, that he never said he was uncomfortable around gays, it’s too late for that. His own consultant, Harrison Hickman, has confirmed that he was in the room when Edwards had the exchange with Bob Shrum in 1998 and that it did take place. On the other hand, if he meant to say he never should have said that, well, too late for that too. He DID say it and it casts a shadow over all his other progressive proclamations. How about an apology for ever thinking such thoughts? I doubt we’ll ever hear that from a politician in our time.

-o-

I was not able to see the LOGO broadcast where I live, so I’m relying solely on video clips on their website and excerpts published in the New York Times and elsewhere. However, there does seem to be some confusion lingering about “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” This was not the policy of President Bill Clinton. Clinton had pledged during the campaign that he would do away with the military’s ban on homosexuals, period. However, once he was inaugurated and announced he was going to issue an executive order carrying through with this, the shit hit the fan in the Pentagon and Congress. The reactionary forces were not lead by some rabid Republican, but by Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia. A Coast Guard veteran, Nunn suddenly emerged as the macho defender of all things military. He set out to block the move to remove the ban on homosexuals altogether. He succeeded in getting the compromise now known as “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” President Clinton had no choice but to accept it as a step in the right direction.

It is an absurd policy that simply does not work. It is also bad for morale among straights and gays in the military. It encourages people to lie by saying it’s okay to be gay so long as you don’t tell anybody about it. What an absurd way to live. It puts straight military personnel in the position of having to report it if a colleague does talk about being gay; and, as I said, it puts gays in the same old societal position of having to lie about who they are in order to do their job.

A survivor of the Nazi death camps said it best: “Freedom is not having to lie about who you are.”

Having said all of the above, I should add that for a person born homosexual when I was, 1941, it is heartening that we even had such a forum. It’ll be another hundred years before the Republicans have such a forum. The Democrats who participated are to be congratulated for just showing up. And the panel is to be applauded for bringing the debate to a national audience and asking all the right questions.

"What's Wrong with this country?"

2007-08-09T06:50:00.000-07:00

Blogspot 8-9-07

What’s Wrong with America?

That was the question asked and answered at Tuesday night’s Democratic debate before the AFL-CIO at Soldier’s Field in Chicago. It was asked by a tearful woman who told about her husband’s death in the Sago mine disaster and how the Bush administration had turned its back on workers and allowed business owners to totally ignore workplace safety. What are you going to do about it? She asked, echoing the sentiments of all others at the event. The most poignant moment in the evening brought the entire crowd of 16,000 to its feet in the only standing ovation—not for one of the politicians but for a poor working man. He had devoted 35 years of his life to a company that declared bankruptcy and removed more than a third of the pension he’d paid into all these years. And, now, he said with his voice choking up, he sits across the kitchen table from his wife and wonders how he will pay for his wife’s health care after she has devoted her life to him and his children. “What’s wrong with America?” He asked, and “what are you going to do about it?” The answer may lie in the Neilsen ratings: less than 1 million people watched this the most important, liveliest and most interesting of the many debates.

-o-

A few weeks ago, the Independent Weekly asked readers for dog stories to accompany a “dog days” issue. My own memoir of Duke the Pacifist Dog was published in the August 8, 2007 Independent. My story is below. For other dog days stories, go to www.indyweek.com

Duke the Pacifist dog
Perry Deane Young

The first time we saw Duke the Dog, he was riding a bright red surfboard into China Beach in front of the general’s beach house.

The heavily guarded military compound, with high walls topped with razor wire was right next door to the Pink House, a busy little operation where the Mama-san could get you just about anything you were willing to pay for. It was our own private little press retreat on the beach. There had been a big lull in the war that summer of 1968—dog days even there--after all the excitement of Tet and Mini Tet. My news buddies and I reacted instantly to the surfing dog: Great pictures. Great story.

I interviewed three of the Marines who had been wounded enough times to get re-assigned to the beach house, but not enough times to get sent home. They said they’d rescued Duke. He was a combat dog who couldn’t hack it with all the killing.

Like Duke, they had had enough of the war, too. They worried that Duke
was going to get left behind when they finally got shipped back to the world. A photographer took some great pictures of the young Marines and good ol’ Duke riding the surfboard and I quickly dashed off the story and sent it into UPI/Saigon.

I had been in the war for several months at that point, but nothing I wrote about human beings killing each other got near the play this story got. The story of “Duke the Pacifist Dog” must have been printed in nearly every paper in the country.

The response was overwhelming. People sent money into UPI’s New York office. Jack Parr said on his show that he’d pay whatever it cost to bring home this noble warrior dog. People were outraged that a patriotic American dog had been trained to serve his country, but was being abandoned once he’d done his duty. Some people were also surprised the Marine general even had a beach house in the midst of a war.

Great story, it turned out, but not quite true. A bevy of Marine information officers summoned me into their office in Danang. They clearly wanted to lay into me the way they’d verbally attacked the three Marines. With great restraint, they explained that I should know that these combat patrol dogs could never be de-trained. When they were no longer good for service, they were euthanized on the spot. Furthermore, Duke was not one of these American-trained dogs, he was a native Vietnamese dog!

The story went on for several news cycles and the Marine command grew more and more mortified with the inquiries from back in Washington. Finally, they called in the three Marines and told them they were all being given an “early out,” being shipped home weeks and months before they were supposed to leave. “And you WILL take that goddamn dog with you.”

Three very happy Marines stopped by to see me at the UPI office in Saigon on their way home. One of them said Duke would live out his days with his family on Long Island. Would that all my war stories had such a happy ending.

John Edwards on Gay Rights

2007-08-08T06:55:00.000-07:00

The column published in yesterday's or the day before's blog, "No Longer Conflicted over Edwards," was published in the August 1, 2007 Chapel Hill News. Incredibly, nobody responded to it in the Letters to the Editors section of the paper. I think a lot of people here are as conflicted over supporting Edwards as I am; but, especially politicians and business people don't dare speak out. I mean, hell, he MIGHT win! And then where would we be with a President living next door. HOWEVER, several people did stop me on the street and telephoned and e-mailed their overwhelming agreement with my sentiments expressed in the column.

One Chapel Hill grande dame called to say how important the column was "because nobody is saying these things...and they simply must be said." she said she was mailing the column to everybody she knows. Another oldtime Chapel Hill figure from the 1960s left an e-mail message saying: "I knew I didn't like the guy, I just didn't know why. Thanks for the column; now I know." And, a longtime feminist activist in Democratic politics wrote to say thanks for helping make up her mind against Edwards.

I think we all had our suspicions about Edwards' raw opportunisim and this is just another outward and visible symbol of his hypocrisy and blatant ambition at any cost. The editor of the Columbia, S.C., State newspaper has a column this week entitled "Edwards is a phony." He goes into the primping and the hair, and three or four specific local incidents that were just as symbolic to him. [The primping and the hair don't tell us everything, but they do tell us some very important things about the man.]

The most damning of all is the news that while Edwards was supposed to be running an anti-poverty institute at the UNC LAw School, he was also working for a hedge fund in New York; and that he and Elizabeth have upwards of $500,000 in offshore accounts--meanwhile claiming he'll stop such accounts if elected president.

And, yes, Hillary is looking better all the time--and I mean that literally. I deplore her waffling on The War, the issue above all other issues in our country right now. But, I honestly feel she's come around. She is the only one of the candidates who truly comes across as "Presidential" in the debates. She's tough, she's intelligent, she knows what she's talking about.

I feared a Hillary candidacy at first because I thought she couldn't win. Now, I think she's the only one who can win. For a long time, I felt Edwards was the only one who could win and you'll find many earlier blogs where I rave on in praise of the man and his candidacy. However, the beauty of these long running campaigns is that everything comes out. I think Edwards may indeed be sincere, but it's a superficial sincerity fueled only by incredible ambition. That is not enough. The times cry out for a real leader with experience. That leader is Hillary.
-o-

It is with deep sadness that I report the passing of our beloved Chloe, the magnificently beautiful fish who graced our backyard at the Women's Center where I live for almost 10 years.

It was perhaps because of the heat or that the filter system wasn't working right while I was off for a week in Bucks County, Pa. Whatever the cause, Chloe the koi passed on early Sunday morning, August 5, 2007. We must pray that Chloe has gone onto a bigger pond in the sky, a happier place where the weather stays mild and the water will be cool forever. To all those who extol the virtues of a big fish in a little pond, Chloe offers her own experience to the contrary; there was just too much Chloe for such a small amount of water.

The Story of Chloe:

Several years ago, there was an ice storm, not the Great Ice Storm but still bad enough to cancel everything. My friend Thom Mount [who produced Bull Durham, among other movies] was scheduled to speak at UNC but that was canceled or postponed. He called and asked if I'd meet with him and his wife, Chloe King, a very successful screenwriter. Chloe had just been paid $250,000 to re-write a vicious murder tale set in and called "Chapel Hill." The only problem was Chloe had never been here, knew nothing about the place.

And so I invited them to breakfast and we sat around the table and discussed plots and characters and all that stuff. I told them I'd just been down for my annual trip to Key West and faced a backyard disaster when I returned. Brenda Baker had given the Women's Center 14 beautiful koi from the huge pool that wraps around and under her deck in Durham. They thrived for a year or two, then they were just gone. I got back and faced a pool that was either half empty or half full, but with no sign that any fish had ever lived there. At first, as some may remember, I thought some greedy Republican had sneaked in and stolen our beautiful fish. That was because there was no sign of murder or mayhem where the 14 koi had once lived; somebody must have stolen them. Then, folks started telling me, "Perry, you should have been here, there was this HUGE bird hanging out in the back yard all week."

Great Blue Heron. I knew in an instant. ANybody who knows about fish pools knows that this huge bird --6 foot wingspan--regards backyard fish pools as their private hors d'oeuvres platter. They not only swallow fish whole; they also swallow turtles whole! What a digestive system they must have.

Well, it was--if I do say so--a delicious breakfast I served up to my friends from L.A. They thanked me profusely and slowly exited the icy parking lot. About 3 hours later, they came slipping and sliding back in, with happy smiles on their faces. They had been all over town looking for a pet store....and finally found one open at University Mall. They presented me [us] with four very small koi. The most beautiful one was a tiny 3 or 4 inches, a glistening white and orange. She was Chloe from then on. She grew into a grande dame of 10 pounds, 26 inches. One of her sisters disappeared; her brother Joshua leaped out to his death; and her brother Jake [black and orange and white] survives.

Out of consideration for Chloe's wishes, there will be no religious service and no kind of marker or tombstone. Chloe would rather be remembered in our hearts. She was one of such exotic beauty and size everybody exclaimed when they saw her. The management is currently searching for another white and orange koi. Long live Chloe II.

The philosophy of the grounds and security and housekeeping crew, in case you hadn't noticed, is: plant more daisies. If the koi dies, buy another one; if the zinnias die, buy some lantanas. [The lantanas are thriving in the heat and drought!]

No longer conflicted over John Edwards

2007-08-05T06:52:00.001-07:00

No longer ‘conflicted’ over Edwards

Perry Deane Young

It was one of those rare moments on national television when a North Carolinian stood up and made you proud to be from the same state.

For once, it was not the Duke Lacrosse scandal or the ghost of ol’ Jesse Helms’ brand of bigotry raising its ugly head. Here was an African-American, the Rev. Reggie Longcrier of Hickory, speaking eloquently from our shared history in the South. Appearing in one of the You Tube videos on CNN’s Monday night debate among Democratic presidential candidates, Longcrier cited the long history of religion’s being used to justify slavery, segregation and men-only voting. Longcrier then pointedly asked John Edwards how he could justify using religion “to deny gay Americans their full and equal rights.” Edwards had said he was “conflicted” about gay rights and gay marriage “because of my Baptist background.”

Edwards stammered around in a manner that made you cringe for a fellow Tar Heel caught with his red neck showing. He said he would never impose his religious views on anyone else. That was the public, political him, “but if you ask me personally if I’m for gay marriage,” he said with sudden passion: “The answer is NO!”

His bumbling response was followed by the remarkably common sense answer to the same question by Barack Obama, who said that “marriage is a religious ceremony and should be left to the various denominations; however, in matters where the government is involved—like property rights and visitation in hospitals—homosexual couples deserve the same rights as heterosexual couples.”

All this comes on the heels of a shocking revelation in a new book by Edwards’ former campaign aide, Bob Shrum. In the book, “No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner,” Shrum recalls putting the question to Edwards at the beginning of his 1998 senatorial campaign in North Carolina. “What is your position, Mr. Edwards, on gay rights?”

“I’m not comfortable around those people,” Edwards responded.

Elizabeth Edwards, to her credit, is quoted as saying: “John, you know that’s wrong.” Edwards’ pollster, Harrison Hickman, was in the room when this discussion took place. Unfortunately, his defense of Edwards was even more damning than the original quote: Hickman said Shrum “is sensationalizing and taking out of context what was an honest discussion about [Edwards’] lack of exposure to these issues and openly gay people. I don’t remember any kind of venom or judgment about gay people.”

Well, you have to ask yourself, what manner of country club cocoon was Edwards hiding in all these years that kept him from being around “these issues and openly gay people.” Forget his mill town childhood, how could anybody born in 1953 say he was not aware of the issues affecting the lives of gay and lesbian men and women. Is he truly not aware that the suicide rate among homosexual teenagers is several times that of heterosexual teens? How could anybody go through the University of North Carolina in the 1970s as Edwards did and not be “exposed to” openly gay people?

And if this man presuming to assume the leadership of the free world is “uncomfortable” around such a huge segment of our society, don’t we have every right to ask: for God’s sake, WHY? What’s his problem?

How dare he fall back on his “Baptist background” as an excuse for his bigotry regarding homosexuals. Millions of us came out of that same background and learned from it. My own mother was reared by a tyrannical Baptist preacher, but if anything, that wretched experience made her a far more tolerant and compassionate person. When I wrote to her about my own homosexuality, she responded: “Having loved you since before you were born, I cannot love you less now. Come out of the shadows of shame and guilt and live your life in the sunshine.”

After Monday night’s debate, one of Edwards’ aides sent out a message saying this was a “turning point” for the campaign. Well, for this particular gay citizen of North Carolina and America, it was a turning point all right.

For a long time I felt guilty that I was not doing more to help the Edwards campaign since its main office is right here in our town. But, I am no longer conflicted on this point. If John Edwards is still uncertain about gay rights after all we’ve been through in the past few decades, then he is not my candidate. If he is uncomfortable around people like me, he simply does not have the strength of character to be president of the United States.

Perry Deane Young was press aide to Richardson Preyer in his 1964 gubernatorial campaign. He is the author of the Vietnam memoir, Two of the Missing, and was co-author with gay pro football player David Kopay of The David Kopay Story, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for 9 weeks in 1977. He can be reached at www.perrydeaneyoung.com

Perry Deane Young

2006-10-09T07:53:00.000-07:00