This frankly gorgeous man was Sean Flynn, the son of the actor Erroll Flynn.

Some Facebook posts today reminded me of him.

Sean, Australian, became a combat photographer in Vietnam–that extraordinary color photo is his, and I first “met” him in the book Dispatches, Michael Herr’s vivid account of that war. Flynn, indelibly drawn by Herr, became unforgettable to me.

The Clash wrote a song about him.

Dennis Hopper’s character in “Apocalypse Now” is said to have been inspired by Flynn, although Flynn could also have played one of Robert Duvall’s surfers in the scene so tastelessly referenced recently [“I love the smell of deporations in the morning.”] by the president.

In April 1970, Flynn disappeared somewhere in Cambodia. He was 29. The best guess is that he and a fellow photographer were executed by Khmer Rouge guerrillas, also made indelible to me in the 1984 film “The Killing Fields.”

His mother spent years coordinating the search for Flynn, until, in 1984, he was officially declared dead. This reminded of a line from a poet, once upon a time a soldier in the North Vietnamese Army:

The bullet that kills a soldier/Passes first through his mother’s heart

Flynn carried a Nikon with him the day he vanished, but his favorite camera was the Leica he’d left behind in his lodgings, with a parachute cord in place of a leather strap, secured to the camera’s body with a grenade pin’s ring.

The camera disappeared, too.

Until 2018, when a photographer bought the Leica at auction; it eventually proved to be Flynn’s.

I am not a Vietnam scholar, but Herr’s book remains one of the most influential of my life.

I think the State of California now allots three days for teaching Vietnam. When I was lucky enough to teach U.S. History at AGHS, I took ten days, and this is because students were hungry to learn about their grandparents’ war.

Their favorite guest speaker was a Marine pilot who had flown hundreds of missions in various aircraft. He was approachable and self-effacing, but he made their eyes widen when he described some of his experiences.

He was my best education, but here are a few of the books I have read, all of them vividly written, even if great pain came with the reading.