By Taylor Sisk, Staff Writer
Old men lust after war; young men court it. It’s the same impulse born of opposite origins – that of those who needn’t fear having to actually encounter war and those who wish to. In that nexus lies what Perry Deane Young refers to as the “peculiar obscenity†of war.
That may be putting too fine a point on it. But it does seem to be what Young suggests when he talks about war.
“It was so obviously unnecessary,†he says of the Vietnam War, which he covered as a correspondent for United Press International.
A grunt’s-eye view of war “is like a car wreck; there’s nothing noble about it,†Young said, seated on the porch of his Henderson Street home. Certainly, noble deeds are done. “But it’s stupid, and always has been. When you get out there, it’s just people killing each other. It’s slaughter. That’s what it’s always been.
“But there’s always been this glorified image …â€
Thirty-nine years ago, Young began writing a book about a band of young correspondents and photographers covering the Vietnam War. His intent was to write it devoid of romance.
It couldn’t be done.
That book, Two of the Missing, is about the disappearance into the jungle along the Cambodia-Vietnam border of photojournalists Dana Stone and Sean Flynn, Young’s friends, young men drawn into the rush of war and driven to document it.
The book was published in 1975 (Truman Capote called it “moving and engrossingâ€) and reissued in May with a new chapter updating the lives of the major personalities portrayed, excepting Stone and Flynn.
Two of the Missing is reportage, memoir, meditation. It’s about war, and about an introverted mountain boy blossoming into “the fullest flowering of Southern degeneracy†(Flynn’s description, said with great affection, as quoted in Michael Herr’s classic, Dispatches, another stripped-bare vision of America’s war in Vietnam), and where the two meet — the transformative, intoxicating effects of war, indelible and at odds, in a very particular place.
“The truth is, we loved [Vietnam],†said Young. “We were overwhelmed by the beauty of the place and the beauty of the people – they are such exquisite and beautiful people … just such a natural grace.â€
Young’s is a vivid tale of young men (and a few women) in the midst of war, an old men’s game in which young men die, having, in the best and worst senses, the times of their lives.
Young, at 68, is still writing. He’s revising his play about Thomas Wolfe that was recently staged in Mars Hill, near Asheville, and is contemplating a screenplay for another of his books. He lives a quiet life among friends. And he lives with Vietnam. With Stone and Flynn, with the GIs. With the grace of the people in whose country he was nurtured.
“It’s part of my day, every day. You see the pictures everywhere,†he said, gesturing into his apartment. “An ashtray from the Continental Palace, where we all hung out on the square in Saigon. Just dumb little bits of memorabilia.†He lives with the realization that was then formed, that “I would never have an experience that would measure up.â€
Close to history
Perry Deane Young was born on March 27, 1941 on a farm in the working-class community of Woodfin, on the northern edge of Asheville. The Young farmhouse sat on a hilltop – above a cotton mill, a casket plant and two furniture factories – overlooking some 30 acres.
“It was very picturesque,†Young said, “it was beautiful.â€
The youngest of 13 – including nine much-older half-siblings from his father’s first marriage – Young was his mother’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy.â€
“I would go to school with kids in overalls and undershirts, and my mother would dress me in little shorts and Palm Beach suits. I mean, it’s a wonder they didn’t kill me.â€
The Youngs were a colorful lot. Young’s oldest half-brother was dating the woman who would become Young’s mother until the old man stole her away. They had to wait until her 18th birthday to marry (dad was 39). After his father had his first stroke, that older brother returned to run the farm.
Dysfunctional doesn’t begin to describe the family, Young said.
He was a curious boy who always felt close to history. His father was born in 1889 (in Yancey County, just northeast of Asheville) and his father’s father, born in 1847, lied about his age to avoid conscription into the Confederacy.
His mother was fascinated by that rich and proximate history.
“She thought it was every bit as good as Shakespeare.â€
Young began collecting documents when he was 12, and as a teen traversed the mountains collecting artifacts.
It was taken as a given that Perry and his next-oldest brother, Robert, would go off to college. But raw sewage the city began shipping down Beaver Dam Creek devastated the Young farm, and Perry made his way to UNC only after Robert, who had served as student body president, convinced the right folks that his kid brother was a good investment. (Robert, former assistant dean of the Duke Divinity School and minister to the university, passed away on Aug. 31.)
At UNC, Young found a measure of confidence in writing – though not through conventional channels. The Daily Tar Heel was sufficiently intimidating that he walked in and promptly out.
Instead, he wrote a letter to the travel editor of the New York Times, made a good impression, and produced stories about the Civil War centennial. He continued to write travel pieces for the same editor for many years, including the chronicle of a train ride, post-Vietnam, from Singapore to Bangkok.
Most of what Young learned at UNC, he said, was “outside the walls.†He was soon covering the General Assembly for UPI, making $65 a week.
One step ahead of the draft, Young joined the Army Reserve, went to basic training and then military police training school, then back to UPI, moving to New York City in March ’67, covering the “long hot summer of riots†for UPI, 26 dead in Newark. “I was never so scared in Vietnam as I was in Newark, New Jersey,†he said.
(Space limitations preclude a full account of the resolution of Young’s very brief reserve-military career. Suffice to say that the reason he stopped reporting to his MP unit on Long Island was to go to Vietnam as a reporter, and he assumes he was later pardoned by Gerald Ford. One wonders how many young men went AWOL in order to trek on into the war.)
Saigon
Young had never been west of New Orleans. Why to Vietnam?
“I don’t know,†he said. “I still don’t understand it. It’s all involved with proving yourself as a man, wanting the big story … and wanting to travel. I had no money. The only way I could have ever seen the world was going that way.â€
On Jan. 29, 1968, Young stepped off a Pan Am flight from Tokyo into a Saigon celebration of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, and, within 36 hours, smack into the middle of the Tet Offensive.
“The weather was like Charleston,†Young recalled, “it just embraced you. It was hot and humid, and just utter chaos. Total chaos.
“I knew that it was a holiday. But I didn’t know about this thing of putting firecrackers from the tops of buildings, completely covering the facade of a building with firecrackers and then setting fire to them, to scare the dragons, the bad spirits, off. And it was insane.
“Millions of motorcycles. Noise, noise, noise, everywhere. And the military all around. And there were all these parties to go to. And being me, I went to them all.
“Then at 3 a.m., my office called and said if you can get across the street, come to work.†Just down the street, in front of the Long Binh Naval Headquarters, 40 people had been killed in a pitched battle. Young didn’t yet have his press credentials.
“It was never quite real from then on,†he said. “It was all surreal.â€
Surreal in Hue and Khe Sanh. Stone and his beguiling boyishness. Flynn: quiet, a cougar. And the others – Herr, Nic Wheeler, Tim Page. Shrapnel buzzing past his head in the doorway of a C-130. The young absent-eyed GI in the corner strumming “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,†over and again. His stories “needled†by editors back in the States. The drugs. The extended, surreal journey home, zigzagging through Southeast Asia.
Back in the States, Young didn’t want to be where he was. “I desperately wanted to be back there with Flynn and Stone.†In a Greenwich Village bar, he said to a friend: “I feel like my life is all behind me.†He was 29 years old.
“I didn’t think I’d ever do anything that would measure up to that,†he said. “And I haven’t.â€
Back home
In fact, he’s done plenty: newspaper work, stories for Harper’s and Rolling Stone, 10 books, including a New York Times bestseller, The David Kopay Story, and three plays. In December 1972, Young returned to Vietnam for Rolling Stone.
“It was pretty awful,†he said. “I was pretty screwed up. I was on drugs most of the time.†Mostly speed, then opium. Rolling Stone picked up the tab for the trip, but there were differences of opinion and nothing ever ran, though much of what he wrote ended up in Two of the Missing.
There were up years and down. He returned to Chapel Hill in 1993 from San Diego, where he’d had a rough time of it.
He ran an ad: “Starving author will exchange work for rent; expert gardener …†and landed the apartment in the basement of the Women’s Center that remains his home.
“Coming back here, to North Carolina, is what cleared my head,†he said. “I needed to be here. Here are my roots. Here’s where I belong.
“I was traveling around with these boxes of Western North Carolina history. I used to say I was the only correspondent in Saigon who had the 1850 census of Yancey County in his bag. But this is what I knew and this is what I loved, and I’d sort of been in exile.
“I was ready to come home. This has been the most stable thing.â€
He recently dealt with prostate cancer. Post-radiation, the prognosis is good.
“I feel like I’m pretty well over it,†Young said. He’s swimming again, building his endurance. “I’m probably in better health than I was when I was a teenager.â€
But that nothing-would-ever-measure-up part – it still gnaws, if gently.
“In the midst of what everybody now regards as the horror of Vietnam,†Young affirms, “was the great moment of my life. And it was fun, and I loved it, and how do you duplicate it?â€
He’s joined a Yahoo group of some 300 Vietnam correspondents: reviving tales, conjuring spirits, easing the ongoing transition. A reunion is planned in Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City next April, and Young intends to be there.
Among the things he carries from Vietnam:
“You learn the double lessons of man’s inhumanity to man and man’s humanity under stress or in crisis.â€
A peculiar genius of the very best among those with whom Young traveled was in exposing the absurdities of war.
He tells this story in Two of the Missing: “Once when Dana was out in the field, a company commander called in air strikes on some huts, from which someone had been firing on the Americans. When it was all smoke and rubble, the captain said to Dana, ‘That takes care of that.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Dana, ‘gives everybody a fresh start.’â€
And the legacy of those journalists, Young and his colleagues, lies in their ability to expose an authentic face of the war, something Americans were unaccustomed to seeing – the anger, abject fear, resentment, drugs; a young Vietnamese girl running down the street, scorched by napalm.
That, said Young, is what his buddies in Vietnam did: “They stripped away the glory.â€
But wait. What of that photo on the cover of Two of the Missing – two young rebels, Stone and Flynn, astride motorcycles, the last known photo of them, poised to ride off into …
“Whatever their intentions,†Young said, “they are frozen in all our memories like that cover photo taken minutes before they disappeared – young and alive and heading off on another dangerous adventure.â€
A touch of the romantic?
“We have this romance with war,†he allows.
And of that photo of Stone and Flynn: “I love it.â€
No contradiction there. Because young men never grow old.
Great story! I love first-person stories from different events. They give you great and various perspectives on history. I’d like journalists to create more stories like this to replace the McNews that is so common today on TV and in written media.
I’m grateful to Mr. Young and other correspondents who share these stories. I also enjoyed the local (to NC) connection.
Thanks for running such an interesting story.
Perry, I loved this story. I would love to see an autobiography of yours. I will never forget the times we spent together growing up on Washington Avenue – picking daisys and playing in the creek below your father’s farm. You are and will always be my first love.