By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer
The distance from Phnom Penh to Saigon has diminished. Actually, you no longer can go from Phnom Penh to Saigon, as there no longer is a Saigon. But the last time Perry Deane Young was in the region, in 1972, the distance from Phnom Penh to what’s now called Ho Chi Minh City seemed considerable. War has that effect on distances.
The drive these days takes some six hours, first past the throngs of desperately poor in the streets of Phnom Penh, over the Mekong River by ferry and across the flat delta dotted with the occasional tiny village. Then from nowhere, it seems, flush against the Vietnamese border appear a half dozen or so casinos. Ahead lies today’s Vietnam, so dramatically different from the Vietnam of four decades ago. “Night and day,†Young says, from both Cambodia and its own past.
“Vietnam is booming,†Young, a Chapel Hill resident, says. “Everywhere you look now, four-lane highways with elaborate bridges … irrigations systems and canals.â€
Young arrived in Vietnam in 1968 as a correspondent for United Press International, and he returned to Southeast Asia in late April for two weeks – one each in Cambodia and Vietnam – to attend an “Old Hacks Reunion,†a reuniting of former Vietnam War correspondents.
The impetus for the gathering was the illness and death in Hong Kong of Dutch photojournalist Hugh van Es, who took so many iconic photos of the war. Upon the news of van Es’s illness, a Google group formed that according to Young now includes some 300 former war correspondents, colleagues and family members.
Young’s book Two of the Missing, which was published in 1975 and re-released last year in paperback, tells the story of two of his friends, the photojournalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, who, in 1970, disappeared forever into the jungles along the Cambodia-Vietnam border. For Young, the April trip provided an opportunity to retrace his friends’ last documented miles and to revisit what he calls “the great moment of my life†– the events he witnessed and the people he met as a young correspondent amidst the horror of war in Vietnam.
The group was given first-class accommodation by the Cambodian government; they traveled in air-conditioned buses with police escorts.
“It was bang, bang, bang, one thing after another,†Young says. They took part in a Buddhist ceremony at the site where nine journalists were executed by the Khmer Rouge in 1970 and visited one of the Killing Fields, where perhaps 200,000 Cambodians were murdered.
“You just look down and it’s just absolutely littered with bones,†Young says. “Pits with 200 bodies and no heads. Where are the heads? … To think of the horror of it all.â€
Along with the photographer Tim Page and actor George Hamilton, Young then hired a car to drive the route Flynn and Stone had taken out of Cambodia. Page, Young, Flynn and Stone were among a tight-knit, loosely bound cohort of young journalists who covered the war, and Page has dedicated his life to learning what he can about his missing friends’ fate. Flynn (the son of actor Errol Flynn) and Hamilton were boyhood pals, and Hamilton remains deeply affected by his disappearance.
The men stopped at the place where Flynn and Stone were last seen and at the spot on the road where they were reportedly captured, paying quiet homage, Young says, to their friends, then continuing on to Vietnam.
In Ho Chi Minh City, the Vietnamese government was initially a bit wary about the arrival of the Old Hacks, but, Young says, soon warmed to their presence.
Young shadowed past haunts: his old apartment building, which is “now a 20-story Sheraton Hotel with a Gucci store on the ground floor,†and the Majestic Hotel, where he stayed his first night in 1968, rundown then, now “incredibly restored … $300 or $400 a night.â€
“The Continental Hotel is still there,†Young says, “but the famous terrace is gone, the one where the Graham Green character in The Quiet American would go every night. Lots of stories from that terrace, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, everybody sat on that terrace. And we would go there every afternoon. For some reason, they closed it in; it’s an Italian restaurant now.â€
They did it
“Oh, yes; no question,†Young says when asked if he was visited on the trip by the ghosts of Flynn and Stone and of that other time and place. “But we went looking for them. This wasn’t about closure. It was about bringing them back and celebrating them and living with them.â€
Young had an epiphany in Vietnam while being interviewed by Hamilton for a documentary.
“For many years,†he says, “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. And I had pieced together little bits and pieces of dialogue people overheard.â€
But it now dawned on him: “No, they did not think they were definitely headed toward death. It wasn’t purely a suicidal ride.†Flynn, Young reasoned, had convinced Stone that they really could come out of it alive, with their pictures and stories, and a rare perspective on war from the other side.
It was, Young believes, “the very real presence of their ghosts right there among us†that gave rise to this insight. It was, he says, “one of those light bulb momentsâ€: The allure was too much, and off they went.
Young says that he himself once asked permission at the North Vietnamese embassy in Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, to be allowed to cover the war from their side, but never received a response.
“As I say in the [first pages] of my book, we all thought about it,†he says. “Flynn and Stone actually did it.â€
“Of course,†Young adds, “there are questions Flynn himself could not have answered. Was he fulfilling a death wish? Was it one last suicidal run? Or was it the purely professional Flynn looking for the last segment in the epic war movie he was creating?†The ambiguity of the allure.
During the Old Hacks’ final banquet, held in an elegant old hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, a fireworks display erupted over the Saigon River as part of the celebration of the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and Young was taken back to his first night in the city many years ago, when fireworks over the river celebrated Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Within two days, Young would find himself in the middle of the Tet Offensive.
“For me, it was coming all the way back around. And so I yelled, ‘Incoming,’ and ran outside and watched the thing†– the “most amazing fireworks display I have ever seen,†he later wrote on his blog.
Back inside the banquet hall, Young countered choruses of “We’ll Meet Again†and “Auld Lang Syne†with The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of this Place,†“the real anthem of Vietnam,†he says.
An ‘extraordinary group’
In retrospect, Young thinks about “just how lucky I am to have been a part of this extraordinary group … how lucky I am to have had this experience†(and, he adds, how lucky he is to have the friends in Chapel Hill who helped him finance the trip).
“The love and support I’ve felt here has re-charged my batteries in a way I simply could never have imagined,†he wrote in his blog from Vietnam. “And over it all, a sense of fun we shared then and we still share. F***ing Page, still crazy after all these years. Peter Arnett is 75 years old, 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….
“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.
“As with my original Vietnam experience, I leave here a changed, a better person.â€
Read The Citizen’s profile of Perry Deane Young at carrborocitizen.com/main/2009/10/24/perry-deane-young-on-the‘peculiar-obscenity’-of-war
It is so great to hear about this man who experienced the war in a very particular way. No one talked about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome back then, but chances are Perry has been experiencing that. Yet through all this suffering, he has continued to write, to connect with his family and friends, to cultivate his garden (literally and figuratively), and to be an original, authentic person. Let’s get Perry back to Vietnam in April.