5th
Sean Flynn
In Dispatches, Michael Herr’s account as a correspondent in Vietnam, he tells incredible stories of his friend Sean Flynn. Flynn was a photographer covering some of the heaviest and least accessible fighting of the war. Flynn’s stories enrich the reader’s understanding of what the press corps experienced during Vietnam. The book is heavily indebted to the presence of Flynn - other journalists that Herr befriends - but Flynn in particular.
In the chapter “Colleagues,” Herr offers a throwaway sentence that Flynn and fellow correspondent Dana Stone rode off into the jungle on motorcycles toward the fighting in Cambodia, never to be seen again. It is typical of Herr to leave the story untold; to Herr, Vietnam is not really a tale that can be comprehended - its not something where the mind of the writer can apply the traditional chronology of narrative history. For this very reason, his book is considered to be the best on the subject. As literature, it is one of the best first-person narratives I’ve ever read.
I’ve thought about Flynn often (he was the son of the famous film star, Errol Flynn). Though I’m not a war correspondent, I’ve always been fascinated by other people’s travel stories. Those travel stories with tragic consequences are all the more compelling because I know that the tragic ones were helmed by great travelers. Flynn was probably excellent on his feet, able to negotiate sticky situations. Whenever I hear “Two hikers died today on the snowy peaks of…” or “Two journalists have gone missing in…” and especially the accounts of WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl, I know these stories turned tragic without any more than human unluck. I think, That guy was probably one hell of a traveler.
I searched for Flynn on Wikipedia. The details of what could have happened to him (discovered by Tim Page, who is chronicled to near myth in the pages of Dispatches ) are here.