Tim Page, celebrated conflict photographer who captured the horrors of Vietnam War, dies at 78

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He was one of the Vietnam War’s most famous, respected and unbound photojournalists. His photos of savage violence and cruel death helped turn Americans against a war that he knew from the start of his coverage could not be won by the U.S. military.

Tim Page died at his home in Bellingen, New South Wales, Australia, on Wednesday. His partner, Marianne Harris, said he succumbed quickly to the liver and lung cancer that had riddled his body. He was 78.

He was born in Tunbridge Wells, England, in 1944, and made his name in the Vietnam War, shooting photos initially for United Press International and, later, Look, Life and Time magazines, among other high-profile publications.

Mr. Page, who was a friend of mine, had no filter in his behaviour, his speech or his professional devotion. His photos depicted the true horror of the war, though some of his shots had a cinematic, art-house quality that made them especially compelling. “Any good picture we did was an anti-war picture,” he once told me.

The late Michael Herr, the American author of Dispatches, one of the most celebrated books of the war, called him one of the “wigged out crazies running around Vietnam.” Mr. Page is one of the recurring – and most entertaining – characters in the book, and said to be the model of the crazed, motormouth photographer played by Dennis Hopper in Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning Apocalypse Now.

Mr. Page was not fearless. He came close to leaving Vietnam several times after dangerous experiences with his gang of young photographer adventurers, including Sean Flynn, the son of party-boy Hollywood heartthrob Errol Flynn. But, fuelled by booze, drugs and the desire to report the truth, he persevered, producing some of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War and other conflicts and humanitarian disasters, such as the UN mission in Cambodia in the early 1990s, which sought to create peace and a democratic government in a country that had been destroyed by years of civil war.

He is perhaps the most injured photographer to have survived the Vietnam War. He was wounded no fewer than five times and was once written off as DOA – dead on arrival.

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In August, 1966, he nearly bled to death in the South China Sea after the U.S. Coast Guard cutter he was on, the Point Welcome, was mistakenly attacked by U.S. Air Force fighter-bombers.

In notes given to me by Ms. Harris, Mr. Page recounted the horror of that day: “We are strafed and bombed nine times by American jets and all end up in the water with sharks circling. Watch skipper trying to put out fire with extinguisher and the next bombing run see his hands evaporate through my lens. Have to drop all my cameras to the bottom of the ocean. Get to dinghy and panicked soldier shooting at the sharks has put holes in our dinghy.”

The worst was yet to come. In April, 1969, a hunk of shrapnel from a landmine that exploded a few metres in front of him removed 20 cubic centimetres of his brain. By the time he reached the doctors, he was pronounced DOA, but a surgeon found a pulse and, during nine hours of surgery, pieced his shattered skull back together. It was several years before he 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 spent time with him during his last days, told me that Mr. Page went peacefully but not without some anguish. “The day before I arrived he was up and chatty – the steroids had kicked in – and told our friend Ben [Bohane] that his greatest regret was not finding Sean Flynn, that he had no closure for Sean and feels deeply saddened by this,” Mr. Dupont said.

The mystery of Mr. Flynn had obsessed Mr. Page; he spent many of his post-Vietnam years trying to solve it.

Mr. Flynn and his friend Dana Stone, who was also a close buddy of Mr. Page, were photographers hardwired for danger. The pair were last seen alive on April 6, 1970, leaving the Cambodian village of Chi Pou on rented red Honda motorcycles, heading into Communist-held territory along Highway 1, not far from the South Vietnamese border.

After years of research and travel to Cambodia, Mr. Page came to believe they were captured by Viet Cong guerrillas and handed to the Khmer Rouge, the radical Communist guerrillas faithful to Pol Pot, who would become Cambodia’s genocidal leader in 1975. They were almost certainly executed after about a year in captivity in various parts of the country. Their remains have never been found.

Mr. Page wrote about his effort to determine their fate in his book Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden, published in 1995. It was one of several books he wrote or co-wrote. His best-known, done with the German photojournalist and Pulitzer winner Horst Faas, was Requiem, which is a collection of photos taken by the 135 photographers from all sides who died covering the Vietnam War before the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975.

Mr. Flynn’s photos are among them. The whole book became a travelling exhibit, and the photos can still be seen at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

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Many of Mr. Page’s best friends did not make it out of Vietnam alive. His dead colleagues include Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Kent Potter and Sam Castan. Mr. Castan, a Look magazine correspondent, was killed in 1966. He grabbed a gun and turned warrior in the last moments of his life, trying to protect the U.S. mortar team he was with. Mr. Page told me that he himself had to use a gun for protection several times and believed he may have killed a Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army regular at one point.

Mr. Page was an orphan who, by his own account, had a wild, undisciplined youth that included bicycle racing, motorcycle tours – one of them, in 1962, almost fatal – and travelling across Europe, Turkey, Iran, India and West Pakistan, sometimes transporting opium. He took outlandish risks, was often broke, and never took care of himself. In India in 1963, he ended up in hospital “weighing 105 pounds,” with “seven diseases, including malaria, dysentery and elephantiasis of the scrotum.”

That same year, he ended up in Laos where, with no training, he began his career as a photojournalist, for UPI. In 1965, at age 20, he went to where the action was – South Vietnam – and became one of the war’s youngest and, later, most influential and beloved photojournalists.

In a note sent to me on Saturday, four days before he passed away, Ms. Harris said Mr. Page knew he wasn’t long for this world but remained active until almost the very end. “Such a force of nature,” she said. “But somehow in the last eight weeks, he has unpacked most of his archive in the container and yesterday spent the day there hosting mates, brothers and other friends, telling them about the treasures that he has scattered around.”

One of the last photos of him, posted on Facebook by a friend, shows him lying in bed, looking drawn but peaceful. He is smoking a joint.

Eric Reguly is the author of Ghosts of War: Chasing My Father’s Legend Through Vietnam. The book contains a chapter about Tim Page.