Easy Riders

Always in search of the best photos, Vietnam War-era US photographers Sean Flynn and Dana Stone wound up being captured, and possibly buried, in eastern Cambodia

On 6 April, 1970, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone rode off into oblivion.

The two young American photographers had already made a name for themselves in Vietnam, covering the ongoing war. Part of a celebrated crew of Saigon-based photogs that included the likes of Tim Page, Larry Burrows, and Henri Huet, they repeatedly braved the front lines, embedding with US forces as they captured images of a conflict that was rapidly souring for the US. Incredibly brave but perhaps equally as foolhardy, they were thus described in writer Michael Herr’s gonzo journalism book Dispatches:

“I don’t have any pictures of Dana, but there’s not much chance I’ll forget what he looked like, that front-line face, he never got anything on film that he didn’t get on himself, after three years he’d turned into the thing he came to photograph. I have pictures of Flynn but none by him, he was in so deep he hardly bothered to take them after a while.”

I was reminded of these names when I recently re-read Requiem, the most amazing photography book which was co-edited by Page and Horst Faas, in memoriam of their fellow photogs who died in the conflicts in Indochina (a list that included Burrows and Huet, who perished in the same helicopter accident over Laos). You begin with the earliest images of the doomed French war to re-establish colonial control in the 1950s, then their quick departure after Dien Bien Phu only to be rapidly replaced by American military advisers then GIs in their hundreds of thousands, as the USA tried to prove it could do what the French couldn’t - defeat the North Vietnamese army.

Dana Stone

I originally picked up Requiem in a small secondhand shop in Leicester, UK, where I attended university. As part of my history degree, I’d studied the Vietnam War under an American professor who had specialized in the study of the awful My Lai massacre (it wasn’t all doom and gloom though: the American Film course was very interesting. For instance, did you know that little people actors were used in the climatic scene of Casablanca? They played the aircraft engineers stood around the waiting plane, which was in fact a scaled down model. Don’t believe me? Watch it again. Anyway, I digress).

I’d read Requiem again, because I’d just finished reading Herr’s Dispatches, which I’d bought at a secondhand sale in downtown Phnom Penh, and it rekindled my interest in these tales of adventurous but tragic journalists who went down the rabbit hole in Southeast Asia, many to never return - two of them, not far from where I now live.

Sean Flynn photographed in Saigon, 1968 by Tim Page

Sean Flynn was the son of actor Errol Flynn, swashbuckler of the silver screen in the 1930s in movies like Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Charge of the Light Brigade. The younger Flynn had dabbled in acting himself, including the 1964 film Son of Captain Blood, but - after a short spell in east Africa as a big-game hunting guide - arrived in Saigon in January 1966 to begin a new career as a photojournalist.

Dane Stone had arrived in Vietnam the year previously, the Vermont native landing in Saigon with a Nikon camera purchased in Hong Kong during transit, and with no idea how to even load film into it. Falling in with the collegial crowd of photographers, the experienced Henri Huet showed him the ropes, and Stone quickly became a combat photographer of note, regularly going on missions with the US Special Forces ‘Green Berets’. While in Saigon, he’d hang out at the historic Hotel Continental, close to the Opera House, or at Frankie’s House, an impromptu ‘clubhouse’ for foreign journalists.

Dana Stone, seated. Sean Flynn back right.

On 28 March 1970, Stone was sent by CBS to Phnom Penh to cover the fallout from the military coup led by Lon Nol that had overthrown the popular Cambodian leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Flynn quickly joined him, with the pair - known amongst press colleagues as the ‘easy riders’ after the Dennis Hopper movie of the same name - exploring the city. A week later, perhaps bored with the lack of action and in search of a story, they rented red Honda motorbikes and went out in search of the front lines.

Heading down Route One, the highway took them southeast towards Saigon, until they reached what they were looking for, an impromptu checkpoint manned by enemy soldiers, possibly Viet Cong who had encroached across the border. A white, four-door sedan blocked the road - it had been abandoned there recently when another group of journalists had been captured. Flanked by Cambodian government soldiers, who were taking up positions in the ditches besides the road, the American pair made the fateful decision to ride up to the enemy to get an interview and better photos.

Remarkably, this was caught on camera by a French TV crew (above), which spoke with Flynn just before the pair drove off down the road. Tragically but somewhat inevitably the ‘easy riders’ were immediately taken prisoner and marched off to the nearby tree line, never to be seen again. While their bodies were never found, it is believed they were eventually handed over to the Khmer Rouge and then summarily executed. With blurry boundaries between both sides, more than 25 journalists were captured within three weeks, some being let go, others killed, many just disappearing.

Their old friend Tim Page, who had been medevacked to the US following his fourth major injury, never gave up the hunt for Flynn and Stone, spending decades looking, without success. Somewhere, out in the Cambodian borderlands, their bodies still lie.