He was one of the most famous, respected and non-committal photojournalists of the Vietnam War. His pictures of brutal violence and brutal death helped turn Americans against a war he knew from the start of his coverage could not be won by the mighty US military. Mr Page died at his home in Bellingen, New South Wales, Australia, on Wednesday. His partner, Marianne Harris, said he quickly succumbed to the liver and lung cancer that had overwhelmed his body. It was 78. He was a Briton born in Tunbridge Wells, England in 1944 who made his name in the Vietnam War, taking photographs first for United Press International and, later, for Look, Life and Time magazines, among other high-profile publications. Mr. Page, who was a friend of mine, had no filter in his conduct, his speech, or his professional dedication. His photographs depicted the true horrors of war, although some of his shots had a cinematic, artistic quality that made them particularly compelling. “Any good picture we made was an anti-war picture,” he once told me. The late Michael Herr, the American author of Missions, one of the most famous books on the war, called him one of the “crazed madmen running around Vietnam”. Mr. Page is one of the recurring – and most entertaining – characters in the book. Mr. Page is said to be the model for the mad photographer played by Dennis Hopper in Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning film. Revelation Now. Mr. Page was not fearless and came close to fleeing Vietnam several times after dangerous experiences with the gang of young adventure photographers, including Sean Flynn, son of Hollywood heartthrob Errol Flynn. Captain Blood reputation. Fueled by drink and drugs and a desire to tell the truth, he overcame this fear to create some of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War and other conflicts and humanitarian disasters, such as the UN mission in Cambodia at the beginning of the decade of 1990. sought to establish peace and a democratic government in a country ravaged by years of civil war. He is perhaps the most injured photographer to have survived the Vietnam War. Wounded no less than five times and once written off as DOA – dead on arrival. Page was injured while aboard the US Coast Guard cutter Point Welcome in December 1966 when it was accidentally fired upon by US planes off the coast of South Vietnam. Express Newspapers/AFP/Getty Images In August 1966, he nearly bled to death in the South China Sea after being run over by the US Coast Guard cutter he was on. Point Welcomeaccidentally attacked by US Air Force fighter-bombers. In notes left to me by Ms. Harris, Mr. Page recounted the horror of this incident: “We are slaughtered and bombed nine times by American jets and we all end up in the water with sharks circling. Watch the captain try to put out the fire with a fire extinguisher and the next bomb attack see his hands vaporize through my lens. I have to drop all my cameras to the bottom of the ocean. Get to the boat and the panicked soldier shooting the sharks has blown holes in our boat.’ The worst was yet to come. In April 1969, a piece of shrapnel from a land mine that exploded a few meters in front of him removed 20 cubic centimeters of his brain. By the time he reached the doctors, he was declared DOA, but a surgeon found a pulse and, during nine hours of surgery, fused his shattered skull together. Several years passed before it could function normally. “My war is over,” his notes say. Stephen Dupont, the Australian documentary photographer who was a close friend of Mr. Page’s and was with him in his final days, told me that Mr. Page passed peacefully, but not without some anguish. “The day before I arrived he was up and chatting – the steroids had kicked in – and he told our friend Ben [Bohane] that his biggest regret was that he didn’t find Sean Flynn, that he didn’t have closure for Sean, and he deeply regrets that,” Mr. Dupont said. The mystery of Mr. Flynn obsessed Mr. Page. he spent much of his post-Vietnam years trying to solve this mystery. Mr. Flynn and his girlfriend Dana Stone, who was also a close friend of Mr. Page, were photographers trying to deal with danger. The couple were last seen alive on April 6, 1970, leaving the Cambodian village of Chi Phu on rented red Honda motorcycles, heading for communist-controlled territory along Highway 1, not far from the border with South Vietnam . After years of research and travel to Cambodia, Mr. Page believed they were captured by Viet Cong guerrillas and handed over to the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist rebels loyal to Pol Pot, who would become the leader of the Cambodian genocide in 1975. They were certainly executed. after about a year of captivity in various parts of the country. Their remains were never found. Mr. Page wrote of his attempt to determine their fate in his book, Derailed in Uncle Ho Win Garden, published in 1995. It was one of several books he wrote or co-authored. His best-known book, made with German Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Horst Faas, was Memorialwhich is a collection of photographs taken by the 135 photographers from all sides who died covering the war before the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975. Among them are Mr. Flynn’s photographs and they have become a traveling exhibit. The photos can still be viewed at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Many of Mr. Page’s best friends did not make it out of Vietnam alive. Page’s photographs of the Vietnam War appeared in publications around the world during the 1960s. Above: ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) rangers, supported by helicopters, cross the long grass during an attack at the Plains des Joncs. Bottom: United States Marines go ashore at Tam Ky during Operation Colorado in Vietnam, page 1965.tim/Getty Images His deceased colleagues include Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Kent Potter and Sam Castan. Mr. Castan, a correspondent for Look magazine, was killed in 1966. He grabbed a gun and became a warrior in his final moments, trying to protect the US mortar team he was with. Mr. Page told me that he had to use a gun to protect himself many times and believed that he may have killed a Vietcong or North Vietnamese army regular at one point. Mr. Page was an orphan who, by his own account, had a wild, unruly youth that included bike races, motorcycle excursions—one of them, in 1962, a near-fatal one—and trips to Europe, Turkey, Iran, India and West Pakistan. , sometimes carrying opium. He took odd risks, was often broke and never took care of himself. In India in 1963, he ended up in hospital “weighing 105 kg, [with] seven diseases, including malaria, dysentery, and elephantiasis of the scrotum.” That same year, he ended up in Laos where, without training, he began his career as a photojournalist for UPI. In 1965, at the age of 20, he went to where the action was – South Vietnam – and became one of the youngest, and later, most influential and beloved photojournalists of the war. In a note she sent me Saturday, four days before she died, Ms. Harris said she knew Mr. Page would die soon, but that he was active almost to the end. “Such a force of nature,” he said. “But somehow over the past eight weeks, he’s unpacked most of his archive into the container and yesterday he spent the day there entertaining mates, siblings and other friends, telling them about the treasures he’s scattered around.” One of his last photos, posted on Facebook by a friend, shows him lying in bed, looking drawn but calm. He smokes a joint. Photojournalist Tim Page was 20 when he first arrived to cover the Vietnam War in 1965. Now he reflects on what he experienced during his years covering the conflict, and the toll it took on him. The Globe and Mail Eric Reguly is the author of Ghosts of War: Chasing My Father’s Legend Through Vietnam. The book contains a chapter on Tim Page.
