Vietnam War photographer Tim Page still seeking answers in the jungle

Tim Page’s life sounds like a film script – indeed, it has been two so far – but there is a final scene he wants to still wants to see.

From Nam Contact: Survivors of an attack on a camp in 1965. Picture: Tim Page

Tim Page’s 77 years have been extravagantly festooned with incident and accident – and he has more than once peeped through the keyhole of eternity.

Photographing the Vietnam War – to which he drove in a Kombi van from Europe – he was seriously injured four times.

While there he ran with Errol Flynn’s son Sean and legendary Australian cameramen Neil Davis, both of whom would be killed while working.

He took a break in 1967 to cover the Six Day War. The following year he was arrested and thrown in a cell with singer Jim Morrison after the legendary Doors’ concert in New Haven.

At their Saigon “headquarters” in the mid-60s, Page and other correspondents occupied a premises on Bui Thi Xuan – Frankie’s House, as it became known – where photographers, reporters, friends and hangers-on settled their wartime nerves by taking commercial quantities of drugs. A film and television miniseries has been made of those days.

While in Vietnam he bumped in to the Nobel prize-winning author John Steinbeck, whose last dispatches were sent from there.

And he once met actor Dennis Hopper at a Los Angeles wedding where Hopper handed Page a joint. Which is only appropriate: Francis Ford Coppola based Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now on Page.

And when Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner suggested to gun-wielding gonzo columnist Hunter S. Thompson that Thompson and Page cover the last days of the Vietnam conflict, Thompson – once described by Norman Mailer as “a legend in successful self-abuse” – refused on the grounds that Page was far too dangerous.

Aged 16, Page had a motorcycle accident and – far from the last time – almost died, losing most of his blood and being declared dead on his arrival at hospital. He wrote later: “I had died. I lived. I had seen the tunnel. It was black. It was nothing. There was no light at the end. No afterlife … A liberation happened at that intersection. Anything from here on would be free time, a gift from the gods.”

For 61 years it has been free time. And what a time.

RAR 105th Field Battery at Nui Dat in 1966. Picture: Tim Page

Perhaps Page’s closest call came in August 1966. He was aboard the American cutter Point Welcome in the Vietnamese demilitarised zone when it came under friendly fire from the US Air Force – including a B57 tactical bomber – killing two crew, including the captain. Seeing this attack, South Vietnamese gunners on shore opened fire assuming the boat was hostile. Not wanting to miss out, the North Vietnamese on the opposite bank of the wide inlet joined in. One of the US fighters used all its 1100 rounds of 50-calibre, armour-penetrating bullets as it strafed the Point Welcome. Everyone on board was injured, one American pulling shrapnel from his leg bone with pliers.

Page’s archives of images is approaching one million and he has recently pulled together the best of his Vietnam work in a book, Nam Contact, a 448-page survey of those years.

He has been back to Vietnam dozens of times and there remains important unfinished business for him. For decades he has been trying to discover the fate – and remains – of Flynn and fellow photographer Dana Stone who, on hired motorcycles, rode into Cambodia on April 6, 1970, and were never seen again. Flynn’s mother had tried to get him involved in films, and he starred in The Son of Captain Blood, a shameless remake of his dad’s 1935 Captain Blood, and he half-heartedly worked on a few others, but the call of real gunfire beckoned.

“When you are the son of somebody famous, it is hard to come across as yourself,” Page explained Page. “People wouldn’t take him seriously until he started taking images that were crackers. He was ballsy, too.”

Flynn and Stone were kidnapped the day they entered Cambodia, and moved about before the country before being passed to the Khmer Rouge who at some point murdered them.

Page has gathered information, some very recently, about Flynn and Stone’s last days, from hospital archives, some locals and long retired Khmer soldiers. He has tracked their last movements and is keen to check these leads.