Mourning Vietnam
Tim Page is one of the legends of Vietnam: he was
shot four times, lost a chunk of brain the size of an
orange and was the inspiration for Dennis Hopper's
acid-head snapper in Apocalypse Now. But it's his
haunting images of conflict, suffering and the survival
of the human spirit which will be his lasting legacy
Tim Page is a man made mythical before his time - the one
most likely to be martyred, who somehow ended up alive. When
Michael Herr, author of the classic Vietnam war book
Dispatches and one of the screenwriters on Apocalypse Now,
first met the photographer in the 1960s, he'd heard a lot about
him already.
Page was, in Herr's description, a 'wigged-out crazy', a
'stone-cold freak' who played The Mothers of Invention at full
volume and regularly put himself in the line of fire. The inscription
on his helmet was a lyric from a Frank Zappa song. Before the
war was over, Page was hit four times. The last time, the
shrapnel went straight through his head, and surgeons removed
tissue the size of an orange from his brain. 'Look him up,' friends
would suggest to Herr, 'if he's still alive.' When Herr finally met
him, he found a man who was 'bent, beaten, scarred'. Page was
only 23, but Herr remembered 'wishing that I'd known him when
he was still young'.
Tim Page is in his late fifties now. He has a swathe of grey hair,
a gentle growl of a voice, and blue eyes like little lasers. When I
arrive at his farmhouse in Kent, he offers me a cup of tea, and
cajoles me into breakfast, which he's busy making on the Aga.
At first sight, the scene is a rural idyll; Page is a perfect
gentleman - perhaps you'd call him a gentleman hippie - but still
nothing immediately suggests his past. The details creep up
slowly, and then you see clues everywhere. He asks me to
choose a teaspoon from a large pot - there must be a hundred of
them, all 'liberated' from different airlines. A camouflage vest is
slung over a chair beside the kitchen table, there's a Leica on
the worktop. He walks with a slight limp. A small sign in
Vietnamese has been stuck on the door to his office. We settle
down to eat; Page pours the tea, slashes open a free-range
boiled egg, and rolls the first of many menthol-flavoured spliffs.
He's trying to write a book the week I meet him - 25,000 words
on Vietnamese photographers, about how their photography
came of age in parallel with their struggle for liberation, from
1945 to 1975. Page has been doing the picture research in
archives in Vietnam for years, but writing doesn't come naturally
to him. 'There is no pleasure in it at all,' he drawls. 'I can't_ I
write two paras, three paras, I go off and masturbate, I bounce
around the ball park, I take a chainsaw out, I twitch around, I
clean the kitchen again - I can't settle. I write longhand, and I
can't ever get more than about 200 words out without something
going loopy inside my head. 'Dick!' he shouts to the gardener
outside. 'Here's your cuppa tea!'
It's strange to imagine the man at a loss for words. Though he's
famous for being a photographer, he has written two
autobiographies, and in his new book, The Mindful Moment, 30
years' worth of pictures are interrupted by long reflective
passages that go over some of the same ground. It's almost as
if writing is something he can't help doing. His very first book of
photographs, Tim Page's NAM , was accompanied by a manic
flow of prose. Like the language of Dispatches , it spoke of the
war as if there were no way to tell it other than this battleground
transferred to the page - a stream of consciousness blast of
guns and choppers and drugs and rock'n'roll. Page describes
himself at one point in our conversation as a 'Gonzo
photographer', and gonzo, it seems, was more than just a style
for him. By all accounts, it was a way of life.
The character in Apocalypse Now played by Dennis Hopper - a
mad snapper, high on acid, the fool at Colonel Kurtz's court -
was based on Page. Page has been fictionalised countless
times. But there's nothing you can do about the myth, he tells
me, you've got no control over it. All you can do is try to sort out
your life.
Page's life began in the London suburb of Orpington, where he
dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot. At the age of six, he
discovered he was adopted; he knew nothing about his birth
mother, but found out that his biological father had died in a
torpedo attack on a Russia-bound convoy during the Second
World War. Page was a curiously accident-prone child: his first
visit to Orpington hospital was at the age of two, with
third-degree burns that prevented hairs from growing on those
parts of his chest later. At 16, he had a near-death experience,
a motorbike accident that left him so damaged he was
pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. His left hand and
pelvis were crushed. The limp he still has is from that accident,
not a wound from the war.
A year after the accident, he ran away from home in search of
adventure, leaving a message for his parents that reads more
like a ransom note than a fond farewell. 'Dear Parents,' he wrote,
'Am leaving home for Europe and perhaps navy and hence the
world_ Do not contact authorities as I shall write periodically.' He
added as a postscript: 'Pay postage on parcels and cancel
driving test.' He tried to get to South America, but instead found
himself in Laos, facing a coup d'état, with a Pentax camera in
his hand. In 1965, he was sent to Saigon by UPI; he didn't go
home until he was 34. Unlike most of the 600 or so accredited
correspondents in the Vietnam, Page actually lived there, he
says, for about three and a half years.
Photography was another accident for Page, a happy one, and
he learned on the job. When he got his first Leica, he says, 'I
hadn't got a dicky bird - I couldn't load the bloody thing!' His first
bureau chief was the half-French, half-Vietnamese photographer
Henri Huet. His mentor for colour photo-graphy was the British
Larry Burrows. Both were exceptional war correspondents; both
were killed in Vietnam.
In Saigon, Page shared a flat with another photographer: Sean
Flynn, the charismatic son of Errol, who had been sent to
Vietnam on an assignment for Paris Match ('A Playboy Goes to
War' it was entitled). The pair, Page says, were like brothers,
and in 1970 Flynn and another reporter, Dana Stone, went on
their motorbikes to eastern Cambodia, and disappeared. Page
spent the next three decades trying to solve the mystery.
While many war correspondents spend their lives seeking out
new battles, Page has devoted the years since the war to
immortalising those who found themselves on 'the other side' in
both senses: the Vietnamese photographers, on the other side
of the lines of battle, and the photographers who died. He
returned to Vietnam in 1980, on an assignment for The
Observer, with the first British tourist trip since the war. It was
this journey, he said, that allowed him to face some of his
survivor's guilt, that 'drew a curtain away from the pain of
believing I should be dead'. In 1991, he went to Cambodia to
make a documentary about the disappearance of Flynn and
Stone, and found that they had been captured by the Vietcong
and later handed over to the Khmer Rouge. They ended up in a
POW camp, and were executed. Page returned home with their
teeth.
Later that year, Page founded the Indochina Media Memorial
Foundation, which sells prints by the correspondents who
covered Indochina over the 30 years of conflict, in order to raise
money to train young Vietnamese photographers. With the AP
photographer Horst Faas, he put together an extraordinary book,
Requiem , made up of work by 135 correspondents who
disappeared or lost their lives in Vietnam. The work is on
permanent display in Saigon, and soon will be in Hanoi as well.
Huet and Burrows are among the photographers in Requiem : it
was Page's way of 'ploughing something back in', he says, 'it
paid homage to those who had taught me.'
Page leans out of the window to talk to Dick, who's mowing the
lawn. 'I'm going to grow different types of grass right in the
middle of that field to make a giant H for a helicopter landing
pad,' he says. 'Like the cargo cult of New Guinea during the
Second World War.' He turns back to me. 'Do you know about
the cargo cult? All the supplies for the troops who were working
against the Japanese were parachuted in, so they built dummy
airstrips on hilltops to attract airplanes to bring supplies.'
'And what will they bring you?' I ask.
'Well. I dunno. I can see the electricity helicopter landing to see
if I haven't got hydroponic dope in the basement... an air
ambulance, maybe... ummm...'
He trails off. His speech is getting slower. (I remember a
passage from Dispatches where a friend turns to him and says:
'Don't smoke that, Page. Your brain is already about the
consistency of a soggy quiche Lorraine.')
I ask him if he thinks the famous picture of Kim Phuc, the
burning girl, really did help to end the war. 'It was one of the final
nails in the coffin. Because,' he says, 'all war photography is
anti-war photography.'
'Is that true?' I ask. 'What if it's about the glamour and the
helicopters and The Ride of the Valkyrie stuff?'
'Well, OK, but it's about the wastage of the human race. It might
look glamorous, it is glamorous - but how many people see a
dead person, very few. We're told to look away when there's
reality on TV now. What's the point of having it? It's to stop us
doing it to each other - be mindful. Sure, you can make it look
like a movie - you can make a tableau vivant out of it - but then
you turn your camera, no matter how many degrees, and all you
see is pure suffering. Who are the victims? Everybody who's in a
war is a victim. And probably 90 per cent of them never imagined
that.'
When the war ended, Page was in a mental hospital in California
with 200cm of his brain missing, and six psychiatric
dissertations being written about him. It wasn't clear what effect
the shrapnel had had, or indeed the war in general. For a while,
Page was totally paralysed on the right side of his face and
body. 'It's hard to say exactly when the ability to do certain
things came back on line,' he remembers. 'A very good old friend
of mine who I lived with back in Vietnam in the 70s, he saw me
just after I'd had surgery and his definition of recovery was,
"Page, you're gonna be OK when you can roll a joint, ride a
bike, and fuck on top",' he smiles. 'I guess I learned to roll a joint
within about six months.'
Page moved back to England in 1979. He split up with his first
wife Janice, and married Lindsay in 1987. Their son Kit was born
in 1993, and the couple have since separated. He now lives with
his partner Martina, and is working on a number of different
projects. Some pictures he took recently of his mother dying in
hospital are, he says, 'some of the strongest pictures I've ever
shot in my life'. He spends a lot of time on the Kent coast,
taking photographs for a book. He's thinking about going to the
Middle East in the pick-up truck that's parked outside, which he
drove back from Sarajevo. And wherever he goes, his Leica
hangs around his neck.
Robert Capa - probably the most famous war photographer of all
time - died in Vietnam in 1954, on Page's 10th birthday. His
pictures, Page said, 'left indelible stains on my mind'. The last
photograph he took before he stepped on a land mine is
reproduced in Requiem . Capa was a man who couldn't settle
down outside of wartime. He was at a loss after the Second
World War and moved to Hollywood, where he was invited to
write a screenplay based on his memoirs. Page, too, thinks
movies are his future. He'd like to write fiction - he's been the
subject of it often enough, and his life, he tells me, 'is turning
into a novel' - but he can't seem to manage the shift. He calls it
a 'change of tense' - not from past to present, but from fact to
fiction. All these years later, the man who worked so hard to
document Vietnam has a problem: he just can't take the reality
out of war.
In the line of fire
Tim Page recalls the horror of being hit in the face by a grenade.
It was the middle of 1966 and a group of a dozen journalists had
been lured to the rebel buddhist headquarters in the Tien Giang
Pagoda, a few blocks from the market in downtown Da Nang.
For three days, there had been raging street fighting between
the local disgruntled insurgents and the ARVN (the South
Vietnamese army) marines and airborne sent in from their
palace-guard duties in Saigon.
The rebels had little hope of success in their protest for
autonomy; their only last straw was to take hostages. A
wounded woman and her child were the bait. They let us walk
out of the trap without being shot in the back, the weapons
cocking, putting one up the spout, raising the hair on the nape.
They allowed us a 200m start before opening up. The ARVN
paras and marines lines responded with a volume of heavy
automatic armoured-vehicle fire. We were caught in the middle.
We dove for cover in a house, the door having been forced,
hugging the floor. A petrified family shared our prone positions.
Eventually the firing eased up and we cautiously opened the
back door of the house before slipping out. Occasionally thumps
and cracks could be heard; odd tracer rounds skipped into the
sky, though not on this street. We edged further into the side
street, two photographers and an AP reporter. We didn't hear
the M-79 grenade's bloop as it left its giant shotgun-like
launcher; we didn't hear the blast three metres up in the peepul
tree; we just felt the blinding blast and sensed the searing coils
of wire and casing. One second we were standing, the next we
were blown over with shock, like walking carelessly into a
lamppost - 'felled' is a better word. Panic followed as blood
gushed into my eyes.
A photographer's worst fear has to be that of being blinded. An
arm or a leg is not a good choice for a loss, but one's eyes are
virtually sacred. Head wounds weird you, instant disorientation,
leaving no means to assess damage, save touch, just. Anything
in the eyes assumes catastrophic proportions. The upper part of
my face felt shredded and wet, there was no vision, the left hand
felt as though it had been dunked in acid. All around, the din of
battle had resumed over the cries of my buddies and the
panicking Vietnamese family. We were dragged back inside and
mosquito netting was torn up to bandage our wounds. Sean
Flynn crept out a back window, criss-crossed backyards and
streets to get to the press centre to bring help. It came within an
hour, an hour of listening to the ebb and flow of the battle
outside. An American press corps jeep, white faces at the wheel
and Flynn in the back, ran the gauntlet to pull us out and took
us to the airforce-base hospital, where a chunk of grenade was
dislodged from my nose, a spiral coil from my temple, and four
more bits from lower down.
• The Mindful Moment by Tim Page will be published by Thames
& Hudson on 1 October
By Gaby Wood - The Guardian unlimited network - September 23, 2001.
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