Two Words, One Answer.
Sean Flynn
 Inherited Risk: Errol Flynn and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam $26.00 I don't feel that this book did the "man" Sean Flynn any justice. The author was filled with his own need to create a myth connecting Errol Flynn and his son in some tableau of doom. The title "Inherited Risk" says it all, that Errol lived his life with a sense of danger and that Sean was trying to follow in his father's footsteps by living a life that put him in constant danger. The object of a journalist or writer is to be objective not subjective. Mr. Meyers seems like he is doing a lot of guesswork, and trying to put it together in a biography of two people that he does not even begin to understand. I don't know much about Errol, except that my father was a big fan of his movies. Sean was always the one who caught my interest, the combat photographer, like so many others in his field at the time, risked all for the truth. He was known as a generous, kind man to all his friends. As far as Sean having a deathwish, I don't believe this. One would have to understand the times, to understand the insanity going on over in Vietnam and Cambodia. Thousands of people were being killed and Sean wanted to show this. He was burned out on the Vietnam war, on the atrocities being committed on both sides. Just before he disappeared, he had planned to buy land in Bali and live out his life there. Bali was where he went when he needed to find peace. If he was going on a suicide mission into Cambodia, why would he be making plans for the future? Sean wanted to go into Cambodia and talk to the people and get their side of the story. He already had done some film for the documentary that he wanted to do. Sean and Dana Stone figured that they could ride into the jungle and get the story. What they, like the other journalists that were captured, hadn't figured on was the Khmer Rouge. Sean and the other journalists were victims of circumstance, and if rumors are to be believed among the first victims of the "Killing Fields." Sean Flynn was a man trying to do something he believed in, and he had the courage to go out and try to accomplish something that would get at the truth of what was really going on in Cambodia. Cambodia was a dangerous place, and the U.S. involvement there at the time, was little known. The Khmer Rouge was beginning to rise to power and the Cambodian government was beginning to fall. Sean knew that the Cambodian people were suffering. He wanted to get their story. If he and the other journalists had been able to do this, maybe something would have been revealed about the Khmer Rouge and all the genocide might have been prevented. Alas, that was not to be. I like to think of Sean being a man of principals and courage, who risked his life doing what he believed, not as someone with a deathwish.  Two of the Missing: Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone $19.95 This book was written in the mid-1970s and mainly concerns the lives of photojournalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone. They were captured in Cambodia in April 1970 while taking what was clearly a foolish risk of approaching a Viet Cong roadblock. They are assumed to have died in captivity. I first read an account of Sean, Dana, and Tim Page (who also figures in the narrative) in Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and searched for this book for many years. (My tag line comes from Herr's comment about Vietnam being, for this group, "the happy childhood they never had.") Now, fortunately, the book is back in print. Those interested in the lives of the members of the journalistic community who become "war junkies" in Vietnam will find this a compelling read. Perry Deane Young probes the lives of Sean and Dana along with his own war experiences. He does not shrink from portraying his subjects as sometimes not particularly likeable. And he grapples with the fact that the members of this band of photographer brothers were caught in as many contradictions as the war they covered: they had to project the proper "war is hell" stance, but at the same time they were hopelessly emeshed in the romance of being young (non-combatant) participants in an exhilarating adventure in an exotic land. And there in lies the rub: Young returned to Vietnam during the last stages of the American involvement as a coda for his book. He writes of being upset at the human damage (mutilated Vietnamese veterans begging on the streets) as if it were a personal affront to his memories of the great times he had half a dozen years before. But that, after all, is simply a reflection of the honesty that permeats this account. The new edition includes a "What happened to..." chapter. Add this to the list of books that help illustrate how America, in it's perpetual haste to forget its past, seems doomed to never learn any lessons from its foreign misadventures.  Out of Gas $1.99 this is a great show. i can't believe there is only one sesion of it. it combines the 1800's with the furture... and english with manderin chinese. |
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