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Remembering Sean Leslie Flynn–5-31-1941–04-06-1970

06 Apr

 

— ILIKEFLYNN

 
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  1. shangheinz

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    April 10, 2023 at 7:20 am

    [img]https://www.theerrolflynnblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/AE2F8529-9A65-406B-AB00-A1CD994CAFF5.jpeg[/img]

    TX for the tribute. Paris Match hasn‘t forgotten Sean either and published this only recently.

     

    • David DeWitt

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      April 11, 2023 at 5:54 am

      Thanks for ths …

       

      • shangheinz

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        April 11, 2023 at 7:07 pm

        [img]https://www.theerrolflynnblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/11B2C943-8E32-492D-AF64-9B986168C7E0.jpeg[/img]

        Very welcome, David. Pardon their French, here is part 2.

         

  2. Karl

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    April 13, 2023 at 1:20 am

    Thank you (for)ever MOST resourceful Shang…

    And… for those a little rusty on their high school (or later) french here in the States… parts 1 & 2 roughly decoded:

    Sean Flynn “Missing in Action” By Patrick Mahe´

    How many soldiers have registered their name on the pediment of the Virtual necropolis of fighters of return? A thousand, according to the association Viva (Voices in Vital America), missing in Vietnam or Cambodia: “missing in action”.

    Sean Flynn was not a Green Beret of the Special Forces, even a la John Wayne, performer and co-director of the film “The Green Berets”, If he liked to follow in the footsteps of the U.S. military, bringing back his weight of burning memories of blood and sweat, fear and courage, he was first and foremost a photo-reporter inhabited by the instinct of adventure.

    He had inherited the fiery temperament of his father, the great actor Errol Flynn, who made many hearts waver from “Gentleman Jim” to the hell of Macau. From his mother, the French Lili Damita, who broke the screen and the heart of Errol in the 1930s, he had the panache. At the age of 20, he had become an actor in his turn, and had taken over his father. But it was still only cinema…

    He dreamed of real action, as in Indochina where, starting from Phnom Penh. The photo apparcil slung over his shoulder, he went to meet the Viet Cong whose presence was officially denied in Cambodia since the fall of Prince Sihanouk in 1970. All the scoop hunters were on the lookout.

    “Who holds the Mekong, holds Asia.” Long before the First Indochina War, the adage made the fortune of military strategists. Convinced, the reporters never tire of guessing the number of staff generals who worked on this belief pegged to the body of the Vietnamese Giap, the tombeur of the French paratroopers and the Legion in the bowl of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954.

    Sixteen years later, while the Americans are fighting to hold Saigon, the Viet Cong is, discreetly, and even secretly, at the gates of Cambodia, following the removal of Sihanouk. A predictable incursion, but not recognized by Hanoi, which makes the Khmer capital a target.

    Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh. vestige of French Indochina, A is the 0G of war reporters. Gilles Caron, from Gamma, Jean Durieux and Daniel Camus, from Paris Match, put their bags among the gratin of the international press.

    Heavy atmosphere, this evening of April 4 1970. The hunt for the scoop smacks of fatality. At the pool bar, we clear our throats with ageless cognac, commenting with gravity on the tragic odyssey of confreres who disappeared some time earlier, at the end of an equipment marked by the authorities The official bus and its driver with pockets yet filled with passes never returned to the port. Missing in action!

    As if to give the change, Sean Flynn, Hollywood bellatrix known for the most intrepid challenges multiplies the aerial figures by throwing himself from the diving board in front of his peers. Extras of hotel life, beautiful Asians, with apsaras undulations, admire the blond giant with golden muscles. Real moviegoers, even fans of B-movies, have already seen Sean Flynn roll his shoulders in “Captain Blood’s Son” (I was broke,” he apologized to explain giving in to the temptation of this half-turnip), draw his revolver in “The Seven Colts of Thunder-Nerre”, ride a thoroughbred in “The Sign of Zorros, play the Special Agent in Venice, s, bow to “The Temple of the White Elephant” or embark with “Five Guys for Singapore,

    Amused applause around the pool, small reflex lamp of amber alcohol – “the last for the road!” – between colleagues to better forget that, the next day, they launch an assault on the scoop. The square of reporters breaks up by throwing manly “good luck!”, They do not know it yet, but the lende-main, indeed, is a day that will remain in History.

    Gone for Sean and Dana Stone, his TV buddy (CBS channel), the wild outfits à la Marion Brando on vicilles motorcycles swaying in the suburbs of Phnom Penh. Terry Koo, cameraman for the American channel ABC, had immortalized the two “riders of the early morning” posing on their gleaming Honda. Wearing Ray-Bans with wide mounts under the bush hat, having his camera – the mythical Leica around his neck – fed for friends some sequences of frills. Now only fate commands.

    Journalists disperse. To each his tip, his informant, his appointment, his endless track… Durieux, Camus, Caron have theirs: “to the north”, guide. t-on the reporters of Match, accompanied by a special envoy of IFP and a radio reporter of the ORTE – Vers l’est”, for the photographer of Gamma.

    The sequel, later told by Durieux* is the capture of the quartet – Caron is already no longer with them – by the Khmer rebels, in a landscape of rice fields and sugar palms, in the middle of a sheaf of machine guns. These Khmer Rouge are subject to the Viet Cong.

    A Vietnamese officer in a green helmet, strapped in a well-made fatigues, emerges, commands, maneuvers and conducts the interrogation in a dry but nagging tone: “Who are you? Where are you going? What for?” It is so for hours, night, day, until the improbable but providential liberation.

    We will never know, however, in what fatal ambush Caron fell to disappear forever. And even less the one from which Sean Flynn and Dana Stone will not return. even if longtime friend Tim Page. then wounded, repatriated from Vietnam and therefore absent from the fatal odyssey, was able to reconstruct years later the ordeal of his “brothers” walking between the camps of pri-sonniers, barefoot, in 40 ° C, on the melting tarmac. Nearly ten months passed between their abduction on April 5, 1970, by a section of the 40th Reconnaissance Battalion. North Vietnamese execution, and their probable execution, with spades, around mid-June.

    Spoiled child of Hollywood by his father, of Palm Springs, of the San Francisco Bay and the Parisian nights or of Saint-Tropez by his mother, Sean Flynn, breaking with Western society, is not just a fade of adventures. He is rather a kind of mystical reporter. In the round of utopias of 1968, which made a youth in motion a universal revolt, he immersed himself in Eastern spiritualities, whose Zen philosophy contradicts his fascination with action.

    Between Jim’s songs Morrison and Jimi’s solos Hendrix on guitar, he came to the former drummer ama. Match The blues clubs of New Orleans find ecstasy in a riff of the best guitarists, while carelessly having fun with his talisman. He wore a.51-caliber machine gun bullet with these engraved words around his neck: “War has a life / In combat / If the shooter follows his truth / There is murder without sin”

    What chimera was Sean Flynn riding? How did the dashing motorcycle rider, riding his Honda and describing in the bursts of laughter ample arabesques in the middle of the halos of dust, throw himself into the mouth of the wolf?

    The site of his broken destiny is called the Parrot’s Beak, on the outskirts of Chi Phu on the Vietnamese border. The black shirts of the Viet Cong patrolled it in all directions. Many journalists turned back within firing range of the roadblocks. At the sight of an old Mercedes with flat tires, sensing the imminent danger, Dana Stone would have been tempted to return, at the risk of getting angry with Sean. Flynn was not only a beautiful mouth, he was also a strong head. Betting on probable secret missions of the American aviation to discover, he felt the scoop within reach of Leica. No question of giving up! The rest is no more than a funeral song…

    One wonders: what dialogue, if only for his survival, Sean Flynn. Flamboyant and captive silhouette fragile. Like all hostages, was he able to feed with his jailers? Durieux recounted the mechanical interrogation in front of villagers gathered in clusters under the threat of Kalashnikovs circling in the air like spinning tops, while the dull rumble of B52 bombers added to the morbid atmosphere. What thoughts, then, assailed the blond giant targeted at the end of the gun. machine gunner?

    Does he cling to the sacred memories of the temples of Angkor, drawing on the spinner. Buddhist rituality of such vain forces What desperate? Is he trying to break the wall of the icy dialectic of an impene? Soldier who was brainwashed? What visions Does Sean have this haunting Asia that led him to bear witness to the plight of the Burmese minorities, Laos and Yunnan? Why this relentless cruelty?

    Errol Flynn, who died in 1959, escaped the throes of unanswered questions. Not Lili Damita. She will never give up in her quest to find her son defeated only at the sunset of his life, in 1994, by illness. She went so far as to keep intact her apartment in her own, transformed into a sanctuary, with tiger skins and hunting trophies. It will only open the doors for Paris Match, whose boss, Roger Thérond, had signed Sean’s first mission order, the January 12, 1966.

    From Sean Flynn, we still have his films and especially his photos. And, of course, the beautiful and serious evocation of the writer Jean Lartéguy in his novel “Enquête sur un crucifié”, which celebrates the missing war correspondent. We still find him in the guise of Dennis Hopper, the image hunter of the film “Apocalypse Nows”, then in a Clash song, in the pure tradition of “rebel rock”.

    Tim Page retired with his grief to an Australian bush. He dreamed of putting his bag in Bali, in a beach house they would have built with friends, under the foliage of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars and in front of these solcil sunsets that look like red lacquer paintings. In 1990, driving an expedition for the British television channel Granada, Tim thought he was returning to the place of execution of Sean and Dana, behind the village of Bei Met, Cambodia. For their wandering souls, those of the deceased without burial and deprived of the last rites, he planted a sacred tree, given by the Buddhist monks of Phnom Penh. But the mystery remains: Sean Flynn and Dana Stone are still “missing in action”.

    For more information:
    The Heros of Photojouralism
    text by Patrick Maht, Iconography
    by Didier Rapand (ed. of Che´me(?), 2014). –
    Sean Flynn, The instinct of
    adventure by Päilippe Lombard (ed. Of Recher, 2011).
    Enquiry about a crucified John Larte ́guy (ed. Flammarion, 1973.

    Could not make out the words IN the “letter” but here’s what the caption about it says:

    “Letter of accreditation from Paris Match, allowing Sean Flynn to realize his first report in Vietnam”

     

  3. Karl

    The Real Person!

    Author Karl acts as a real person and verified as not a bot.
    Passed all tests against spam bots. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.

    April 13, 2023 at 1:21 am

    Thank you (for)ever MOST resourceful Shang…

    And… for those a little rusty on their high school (or later) french here in the States… parts 1 & 2 roughly decoded:

    Sean Flynn “Missing in Action” By Patrick Mahe´

    How many soldiers have registered their name on the pediment of the Virtual necropolis of fighters of return? A thousand, according to the association Viva (Voices in Vital America), missing in Vietnam or Cambodia: “missing in action”.

    Sean Flynn was not a Green Beret of the Special Forces, even a la John Wayne, performer and co-director of the film “The Green Berets”, If he liked to follow in the footsteps of the U.S. military, bringing back his weight of burning memories of blood and sweat, fear and courage, he was first and foremost a photo-reporter inhabited by the instinct of adventure.

    He had inherited the fiery temperament of his father, the great actor Errol Flynn, who made many hearts waver from “Gentleman Jim” to the hell of Macau. From his mother, the French Lili Damita, who broke the screen and the heart of Errol in the 1930s, he had the panache. At the age of 20, he had become an actor in his turn, and had taken over his father. But it was still only cinema…

    He dreamed of real action, as in Indochina where, starting from Phnom Penh. The photo apparcil slung over his shoulder, he went to meet the Viet Cong whose presence was officially denied in Cambodia since the fall of Prince Sihanouk in 1970. All the scoop hunters were on the lookout.

    “Who holds the Mekong, holds Asia.” Long before the First Indochina War, the adage made the fortune of military strategists. Convinced, the reporters never tire of guessing the number of staff generals who worked on this belief pegged to the body of the Vietnamese Giap, the tombeur of the French paratroopers and the Legion in the bowl of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954.

    Sixteen years later, while the Americans are fighting to hold Saigon, the Viet Cong is, discreetly, and even secretly, at the gates of Cambodia, following the removal of Sihanouk. A predictable incursion, but not recognized by Hanoi, which makes the Khmer capital a target.

    Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh. vestige of French Indochina, A is the 0G of war reporters. Gilles Caron, from Gamma, Jean Durieux and Daniel Camus, from Paris Match, put their bags among the gratin of the international press.

    Heavy atmosphere, this evening of April 4 1970. The hunt for the scoop smacks of fatality. At the pool bar, we clear our throats with ageless cognac, commenting with gravity on the tragic odyssey of confreres who disappeared some time earlier, at the end of an equipment marked by the authorities The official bus and its driver with pockets yet filled with passes never returned to the port. Missing in action!

    As if to give the change, Sean Flynn, Hollywood bellatrix known for the most intrepid challenges multiplies the aerial figures by throwing himself from the diving board in front of his peers. Extras of hotel life, beautiful Asians, with apsaras undulations, admire the blond giant with golden muscles. Real moviegoers, even fans of B-movies, have already seen Sean Flynn roll his shoulders in “Captain Blood’s Son” (I was broke,” he apologized to explain giving in to the temptation of this half-turnip), draw his revolver in “The Seven Colts of Thunder-Nerre”, ride a thoroughbred in “The Sign of Zorros, play the Special Agent in Venice, s, bow to “The Temple of the White Elephant” or embark with “Five Guys for Singapore,

    Amused applause around the pool, small reflex lamp of amber alcohol – “the last for the road!” – between colleagues to better forget that, the next day, they launch an assault on the scoop. The square of reporters breaks up by throwing manly “good luck!”, They do not know it yet, but the lende-main, indeed, is a day that will remain in History.

    Gone for Sean and Dana Stone, his TV buddy (CBS channel), the wild outfits à la Marion Brando on vicilles motorcycles swaying in the suburbs of Phnom Penh. Terry Koo, cameraman for the American channel ABC, had immortalized the two “riders of the early morning” posing on their gleaming Honda. Wearing Ray-Bans with wide mounts under the bush hat, having his camera – the mythical Leica around his neck – fed for friends some sequences of frills. Now only fate commands.

    Journalists disperse. To each his tip, his informant, his appointment, his endless track… Durieux, Camus, Caron have theirs: “to the north”, guide. t-on the reporters of Match, accompanied by a special envoy of IFP and a radio reporter of the ORTE – Vers l’est”, for the photographer of Gamma.

    The sequel, later told by Durieux* is the capture of the quartet – Caron is already no longer with them – by the Khmer rebels, in a landscape of rice fields and sugar palms, in the middle of a sheaf of machine guns. These Khmer Rouge are subject to the Viet Cong.

    A Vietnamese officer in a green helmet, strapped in a well-made fatigues, emerges, commands, maneuvers and conducts the interrogation in a dry but nagging tone: “Who are you? Where are you going? What for?” It is so for hours, night, day, until the improbable but providential liberation.

    We will never know, however, in what fatal ambush Caron fell to disappear forever. And even less the one from which Sean Flynn and Dana Stone will not return. even if longtime friend Tim Page. then wounded, repatriated from Vietnam and therefore absent from the fatal odyssey, was able to reconstruct years later the ordeal of his “brothers” walking between the camps of pri-sonniers, barefoot, in 40 ° C, on the melting tarmac. Nearly ten months passed between their abduction on April 5, 1970, by a section of the 40th Reconnaissance Battalion. North Vietnamese execution, and their probable execution, with spades, around mid-June.

    Spoiled child of Hollywood by his father, of Palm Springs, of the San Francisco Bay and the Parisian nights or of Saint-Tropez by his mother, Sean Flynn, breaking with Western society, is not just a fade of adventures. He is rather a kind of mystical reporter. In the round of utopias of 1968, which made a youth in motion a universal revolt, he immersed himself in Eastern spiritualities, whose Zen philosophy contradicts his fascination with action.

    Between Jim’s songs Morrison and Jimi’s solos Hendrix on guitar, he came to the former drummer ama. Match The blues clubs of New Orleans find ecstasy in a riff of the best guitarists, while carelessly having fun with his talisman. He wore a.51-caliber machine gun bullet with these engraved words around his neck: “War has a life / In combat / If the shooter follows his truth / There is murder without sin”

    What chimera was Sean Flynn riding? How did the dashing motorcycle rider, riding his Honda and describing in the bursts of laughter ample arabesques in the middle of the halos of dust, throw himself into the mouth of the wolf?

    The site of his broken destiny is called the Parrot’s Beak, on the outskirts of Chi Phu on the Vietnamese border. The black shirts of the Viet Cong patrolled it in all directions. Many journalists turned back within firing range of the roadblocks. At the sight of an old Mercedes with flat tires, sensing the imminent danger, Dana Stone would have been tempted to return, at the risk of getting angry with Sean. Flynn was not only a beautiful mouth, he was also a strong head. Betting on probable secret missions of the American aviation to discover, he felt the scoop within reach of Leica. No question of giving up! The rest is no more than a funeral song…

    One wonders: what dialogue, if only for his survival, Sean Flynn. Flamboyant and captive silhouette fragile. Like all hostages, was he able to feed with his jailers? Durieux recounted the mechanical interrogation in front of villagers gathered in clusters under the threat of Kalashnikovs circling in the air like spinning tops, while the dull rumble of B52 bombers added to the morbid atmosphere. What thoughts, then, assailed the blond giant targeted at the end of the gun. machine gunner?

    Does he cling to the sacred memories of the temples of Angkor, drawing on the spinner. Buddhist rituality of such vain forces What desperate? Is he trying to break the wall of the icy dialectic of an impene? Soldier who was brainwashed? What visions Does Sean have this haunting Asia that led him to bear witness to the plight of the Burmese minorities, Laos and Yunnan? Why this relentless cruelty?

    Errol Flynn, who died in 1959, escaped the throes of unanswered questions. Not Lili Damita. She will never give up in her quest to find her son defeated only at the sunset of his life, in 1994, by illness. She went so far as to keep intact her apartment in her own, transformed into a sanctuary, with tiger skins and hunting trophies. It will only open the doors for Paris Match, whose boss, Roger Thérond, had signed Sean’s first mission order, the January 12, 1966.

    From Sean Flynn, we still have his films and especially his photos. And, of course, the beautiful and serious evocation of the writer Jean Lartéguy in his novel “Enquête sur un crucifié”, which celebrates the missing war correspondent. We still find him in the guise of Dennis Hopper, the image hunter of the film “Apocalypse Nows”, then in a Clash song, in the pure tradition of “rebel rock”.

    Tim Page retired with his grief to an Australian bush. He dreamed of putting his bag in Bali, in a beach house they would have built with friends, under the foliage of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars and in front of these solcil sunsets that look like red lacquer paintings. In 1990, driving an expedition for the British television channel Granada, Tim thought he was returning to the place of execution of Sean and Dana, behind the village of Bei Met, Cambodia. For their wandering souls, those of the deceased without burial and deprived of the last rites, he planted a sacred tree, given by the Buddhist monks of Phnom Penh. But the mystery remains: Sean Flynn and Dana Stone are still “missing in action”.

    For more information:
    The Heros of Photojouralism
    text by Patrick Maht, Iconography
    by Didier Rapand (ed. of Che´me(?), 2014). –
    Sean Flynn, The instinct of
    adventure by Päilippe Lombard (ed. Of Recher, 2011).
    Enquiry about a crucified John Larte ́guy (ed. Flammarion, 1973.

    Could not make out the words IN the “letter” but here’s what the caption about it says:

    “Letter of accreditation from Paris Match, allowing Sean Flynn to realize his first report in Vietnam”

     

  4. David DeWitt

    The Real Person!

    Author David DeWitt acts as a real person and verified as not a bot.
    Passed all tests against spam bots. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.

    April 13, 2023 at 2:46 pm

    Karl Holmberg sends this translation:

    “Thank you (for)ever MOST resourceful Shang…

    And… for those a little rusty on their high school (or later) french here in the States… parts 1 & 2 roughly decoded:

    Sean Flynn “Missing in Action” By Patrick Mahe´

    How many soldiers have registered their name on the pediment of the Virtual necropolis of fighters of return? A thousand, according to the association Viva (Voices in Vital America), missing in Vietnam or Cambodia: “missing in action”.

    Sean Flynn was not a Green Beret of the Special Forces, even a la John Wayne, performer and co-director of the film “The Green Berets”, If he liked to follow in the footsteps of the U.S. military, bringing back his weight of burning memories of blood and sweat, fear and courage, he was first and foremost a photo-reporter inhabited by the instinct of adventure.

    He had inherited the fiery temperament of his father, the great actor Errol Flynn, who made many hearts waver from “Gentleman Jim” to the hell of Macau. From his mother, the French Lili Damita, who broke the screen and the heart of Errol in the 1930s, he had the panache. At the age of 20, he had become an actor in his turn, and had taken over his father. But it was still only cinema…

    He dreamed of real action, as in Indochina where, starting from Phnom Penh. The photo apparcil slung over his shoulder, he went to meet the Viet Cong whose presence was officially denied in Cambodia since the fall of Prince Sihanouk in 1970. All the scoop hunters were on the lookout.

    “Who holds the Mekong, holds Asia.” Long before the First Indochina War, the adage made the fortune of military strategists. Convinced, the reporters never tire of guessing the number of staff generals who worked on this belief pegged to the body of the Vietnamese Giap, the tombeur of the French paratroopers and the Legion in the bowl of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954.

    Sixteen years later, while the Americans are fighting to hold Saigon, the Viet Cong is, discreetly, and even secretly, at the gates of Cambodia, following the removal of Sihanouk. A predictable incursion, but not recognized by Hanoi, which makes the Khmer capital a target.

    Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh. vestige of French Indochina, A is the 0G of war reporters. Gilles Caron, from Gamma, Jean Durieux and Daniel Camus, from Paris Match, put their bags among the gratin of the international press.

    Heavy atmosphere, this evening of April 4 1970. The hunt for the scoop smacks of fatality. At the pool bar, we clear our throats with ageless cognac, commenting with gravity on the tragic odyssey of confreres who disappeared some time earlier, at the end of an equipment marked by the authorities The official bus and its driver with pockets yet filled with passes never returned to the port. Missing in action!

    As if to give the change, Sean Flynn, Hollywood bellatrix known for the most intrepid challenges multiplies the aerial figures by throwing himself from the diving board in front of his peers. Extras of hotel life, beautiful Asians, with apsaras undulations, admire the blond giant with golden muscles. Real moviegoers, even fans of B-movies, have already seen Sean Flynn roll his shoulders in “Captain Blood’s Son” (I was broke,” he apologized to explain giving in to the temptation of this half-turnip), draw his revolver in “The Seven Colts of Thunder-Nerre”, ride a thoroughbred in “The Sign of Zorros, play the Special Agent in Venice, s, bow to “The Temple of the White Elephant” or embark with “Five Guys for Singapore,

    Amused applause around the pool, small reflex lamp of amber alcohol – “the last for the road!” – between colleagues to better forget that, the next day, they launch an assault on the scoop. The square of reporters breaks up by throwing manly “good luck!”, They do not know it yet, but the lende-main, indeed, is a day that will remain in History.

    Gone for Sean and Dana Stone, his TV buddy (CBS channel), the wild outfits à la Marion Brando on vicilles motorcycles swaying in the suburbs of Phnom Penh. Terry Koo, cameraman for the American channel ABC, had immortalized the two “riders of the early morning” posing on their gleaming Honda. Wearing Ray-Bans with wide mounts under the bush hat, having his camera – the mythical Leica around his neck – fed for friends some sequences of frills. Now only fate commands.

    Journalists disperse. To each his tip, his informant, his appointment, his endless track… Durieux, Camus, Caron have theirs: “to the north”, guide. t-on the reporters of Match, accompanied by a special envoy of IFP and a radio reporter of the ORTE – Vers l’est”, for the photographer of Gamma.

    The sequel, later told by Durieux* is the capture of the quartet – Caron is already no longer with them – by the Khmer rebels, in a landscape of rice fields and sugar palms, in the middle of a sheaf of machine guns. These Khmer Rouge are subject to the Viet Cong.

    A Vietnamese officer in a green helmet, strapped in a well-made fatigues, emerges, commands, maneuvers and conducts the interrogation in a dry but nagging tone: “Who are you? Where are you going? What for?” It is so for hours, night, day, until the improbable but providential liberation.

    We will never know, however, in what fatal ambush Caron fell to disappear forever. And even less the one from which Sean Flynn and Dana Stone will not return. even if longtime friend Tim Page. then wounded, repatriated from Vietnam and therefore absent from the fatal odyssey, was able to reconstruct years later the ordeal of his “brothers” walking between the camps of pri-sonniers, barefoot, in 40 ° C, on the melting tarmac. Nearly ten months passed between their abduction on April 5, 1970, by a section of the 40th Reconnaissance Battalion. North Vietnamese execution, and their probable execution, with spades, around mid-June.

    Spoiled child of Hollywood by his father, of Palm Springs, of the San Francisco Bay and the Parisian nights or of Saint-Tropez by his mother, Sean Flynn, breaking with Western society, is not just a fade of adventures. He is rather a kind of mystical reporter. In the round of utopias of 1968, which made a youth in motion a universal revolt, he immersed himself in Eastern spiritualities, whose Zen philosophy contradicts his fascination with action.

    Between Jim’s songs Morrison and Jimi’s solos Hendrix on guitar, he came to the former drummer ama. Match The blues clubs of New Orleans find ecstasy in a riff of the best guitarists, while carelessly having fun with his talisman. He wore a.51-caliber machine gun bullet with these engraved words around his neck: “War has a life / In combat / If the shooter follows his truth / There is murder without sin”

    What chimera was Sean Flynn riding? How did the dashing motorcycle rider, riding his Honda and describing in the bursts of laughter ample arabesques in the middle of the halos of dust, throw himself into the mouth of the wolf?

    The site of his broken destiny is called the Parrot’s Beak, on the outskirts of Chi Phu on the Vietnamese border. The black shirts of the Viet Cong patrolled it in all directions. Many journalists turned back within firing range of the roadblocks. At the sight of an old Mercedes with flat tires, sensing the imminent danger, Dana Stone would have been tempted to return, at the risk of getting angry with Sean. Flynn was not only a beautiful mouth, he was also a strong head. Betting on probable secret missions of the American aviation to discover, he felt the scoop within reach of Leica. No question of giving up! The rest is no more than a funeral song…

    One wonders: what dialogue, if only for his survival, Sean Flynn. Flamboyant and captive silhouette fragile. Like all hostages, was he able to feed with his jailers? Durieux recounted the mechanical interrogation in front of villagers gathered in clusters under the threat of Kalashnikovs circling in the air like spinning tops, while the dull rumble of B52 bombers added to the morbid atmosphere. What thoughts, then, assailed the blond giant targeted at the end of the gun. machine gunner?

    Does he cling to the sacred memories of the temples of Angkor, drawing on the spinner. Buddhist rituality of such vain forces What desperate? Is he trying to break the wall of the icy dialectic of an impene? Soldier who was brainwashed? What visions Does Sean have this haunting Asia that led him to bear witness to the plight of the Burmese minorities, Laos and Yunnan? Why this relentless cruelty?

    Errol Flynn, who died in 1959, escaped the throes of unanswered questions. Not Lili Damita. She will never give up in her quest to find her son defeated only at the sunset of his life, in 1994, by illness. She went so far as to keep intact her apartment in her own, transformed into a sanctuary, with tiger skins and hunting trophies. It will only open the doors for Paris Match, whose boss, Roger Thérond, had signed Sean’s first mission order, the January 12, 1966.

    From Sean Flynn, we still have his films and especially his photos. And, of course, the beautiful and serious evocation of the writer Jean Lartéguy in his novel “Enquête sur un crucifié”, which celebrates the missing war correspondent. We still find him in the guise of Dennis Hopper, the image hunter of the film “Apocalypse Nows”, then in a Clash song, in the pure tradition of “rebel rock”.

    Tim Page retired with his grief to an Australian bush. He dreamed of putting his bag in Bali, in a beach house they would have built with friends, under the foliage of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars and in front of these solcil sunsets that look like red lacquer paintings. In 1990, driving an expedition for the British television channel Granada, Tim thought he was returning to the place of execution of Sean and Dana, behind the village of Bei Met, Cambodia. For their wandering souls, those of the deceased without burial and deprived of the last rites, he planted a sacred tree, given by the Buddhist monks of Phnom Penh. But the mystery remains: Sean Flynn and Dana Stone are still “missing in action”.

    For more information:
    The Heros of Photojouralism
    text by Patrick Maht, Iconography
    by Didier Rapand (ed. of Che´me(?), 2014). –
    Sean Flynn, The instinct of
    adventure by Päilippe Lombard (ed. Of Recher, 2011).
    Enquiry about a crucified John Larte ́guy (ed. Flammarion, 1973.

    Could not make out the words IN the “letter” but here’s what the caption about it says:

    “Letter of accreditation from Paris Match, allowing Sean Flynn to realize his first report in Vietnam”

    Thanks, Karl!

     

    • shangheinz

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      April 13, 2023 at 7:33 pm

      Merci Charles XIV.