Tag: Cambodia

On a Missing Photojournalist

Photographers who choose to go into war zones and risk their lives to capture the horror and realism of war have always fascinated me. These women and men who willing go into battle do so knowing that they will be facing death through their camera lenses without any desire or ability to fight or defend themselves. I am mystified by that level of bravery. The list of famous journalists killed in wars is long and distinguished. People like Gerda Taro (killed during a battle in the Spanish Civil War) and Robert Capa (survived the D-Day invasion only to step on a land mine in Vietnam) carry a certain aura about them, a panache that is both frightening and attractive at the same time.

This is a story of one of the lesser known photojournalists from the Vietnam War period. His name was Sean. Sean was a handsome young man from California who went to Vietnam to document the conflict there. It was not Sean’s first war, however. He had extensive experience shooting the action in some of the Arab-Israeli conflicts of the 1960s, for example, and had seen heavy action and faced danger there that proved his mettle.

However, photojournalism wasn’t Sean’s first career. No, his striking good looks had caught the eye of Hollywood talent scouts, and he had accumulated several largely forgotten screen credits in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He can be seen in an uncredited scene in the famous beach movie, Where the Boys Are. But acting bored Sean, and he longed for a job where he could make a difference, have an impact. So, he chose photojournalism, and that led him to the biggest war story of the day, the Vietnam War. There, he quickly gained a reputation for being a risk taker if that risk meant getting a picture that no one else could capture. In fact, Sean was injured in his leg during one of his risky ventures.

In 1970, Time magazine hired Sean based on his previous war experience and his dramatic photographs to shoot photos for their publication. As stated above, he and another photographer, a young man named Dana, weren’t interested in the behind the lines pictures. They wanted to get the photos from the front lines, even behind the enemy lines, and the pictures that “safe” war photojournalists were too busy at the hotel bars to take. Towards that end, both Sean and Dana even parachuted into neighboring Cambodia with American troops to show what was happening in a part of the war where America wasn’t even supposed to be fighting.

The two young men decided in Cambodia to get on a couple of motorcycles and strike out into the countryside. No other photographers had tried to show the impact of the war on the civilians of Cambodia, and the two impulsive young men felt driven to get that story told. That drive led them to strike out on the machines one day in April of 1970 towards a checkpoint on the highway that they knew was manned by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge forces.

It would be the last anyone would ever see of the pair. No trace has ever been found of either young man.

In one of his last letters home, Sean wrote this to his mother: “I just want to say ‘thanks’ for home, the car, and just the fact that you are the best mother that I could ever want; and although you never hear me say it, I love you very much! I actually tried to be with you a lot, but everything just didn’t seem to go together.”

Interestingly, Sean didn’t speak of his father. Actually, his father had died a few years earlier. And Sean’s acting career was, in part, because of his father–a father who was also an actor and whose good looks Sean so strongly resembled. Perhaps Sean chose to be a photojournalist as a rejection of his father and that acting lifestyle. He never felt comfortable in a career where he was trading not on his own name and talent but rather on those of his father.

And while you probably didn’t know about Sean, you probably have heard about his dad.

Errol Flynn.

On a Complex Occupation

Imagine stumbling upon a large complex of buildings, so vast and so beautiful, that words to describe it would fail you. Imagine architecture so complex and intricate that it surpassed anything you’d ever seen in your lifetime. Well, such a place exists in this world today. It’s visited by thousands each year, and all of the visitors come away from the encounter stunned and awed.

One of the first men from Europe to bear witness to such a place wrote of it saying, “The pen cannot describe what it is like; there is nothing like it in the world.” Another early European visitor said that something so vast and exquisite could only come from the hand of someone like Alexander the Great, or, he argued, perhaps the Romans could have conjured such grandeur but no one else.

Wrong on both counts.

Some Europeans saw it as something like an ethereal palace compound that was built for some special, holy king. Others insisted that the place was a palace constructed especially for one of the gods himself. In the early 1860s, a French explorer and naturalist said it was grander than anything designed by Europe’s greatest architects, decorated by painters and artists greater than Michelangelo, and that the entire place made all of the buildings in the rest of the world appear to be “barbaric.”

It was, and is, none of these things.

What we know for certain is that this complex was constructed using about 7,000,000 sandstone blocks. the largest of which weighs almost two tons. More stone was used in this place for construction than in all of the pyramids combined, while the area of the complex is larger than the area of modern-day Paris, France. What’s more, almost every square inch of this monstrous place features intricate carvings. It rises in parts to over 200 feet above its base, and, incredibly, records indicate that this amazing complex took place over 28 years to complete. We also know that it was constructed using rudimentary tools in the early 1100s A.D.

Yet, no one lived there. There’s not a trace of houses or household artifacts or anything used in daily living. And that is by design. The Europeans were largely clueless as to the complex complex’s purpose, the meanings of its decorations, and the intent of its planners. They didn’t realize that it was built first as a Hindu and then eventually turned into a Buddhist temple complex.

But Angkor Wat so captivated the French imagination that, under the pretext of saving the temple complex and its artistic treasures, the French government launched a military campaign that led to the occupation of Cambodia and Vietnam and the eventual establishment of French Indo-China.