Sean Flynn
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Sean Leslie Flynn, born May 31, 1941, was an American actor and freelance photojournalist, believed to have been killed in Cambodia in 1971. Flynn was the only child from the marriage of actors Errol Flynn and Lili Damita.
During the Vietnam Conflict, Sean Flynn was working as a freelance photo journalist under contract to Time Magazine. On April 6, 1970, he and fellow journalist Dana Stone (working for CBS) left Phnom Penh on rented Honda motorbikes to find the front lines of fighting in Cambodia. Traveling southeast on Route One near a eucalyptus plantation in eastern Cambodia, the two men were stopped at a check point at grid coordinates XT171209 in Svay Rieng Province, Cambodia, and led away by elements of the Viet Cong Tay Ninh Armed Forces and elements of the combined North Vietnamese-Viet Cong Ningh Division based in Cambodia.
Information obtained from indigenous sources indicated that Stone and Flynn were executed in mid-1971 in Kampong Cham Province, Cambodia. Various sources, including an intercepted radio message from COSUN, the Viet Cong high command, indicate that Flynn and Stone survived. One source reported that he had seen a group of very long haired, bearded, tall prisoners near Minot, Cambodia who were identified as 'imperialist journalists'.
Over the years, meanwhile, there has been occasional word from isolated Cambodian villages that someone saw the "movie star" who is being held prisoner by the Khmer Rouge.
Although his mother Lili Damita spent an enormous amount of money searching for him, he was never found. In 1984 he was declared legally dead (at age 29). He is among the 22 international journalists missing in Southeast Asia, most known to have been captured.
The story of Sean Flynn was immortalized by The Clash in the song "Sean Flynn" from the album Combat Rock. Sean Flynn is a major character in Michael Herr's Dispatches, one of the most acclaimed American literary treatments of the Vietnam War. Herr's friendship with Flynn during his years in Vietnam is vividly described.