Dana Stone

Biography

Stone went to Vietnam in 1965. Before arriving he bought a Nikon, his first camera, in Hong Kong. After arriving in Saigon he met Henri Huet who showed him how to load film into the camera. He became friends with fellow photographers and journalists including Sean Flynn, Tim Page, Henri Huet, John Steinbeck IV, Perry Deane Young, Nik Wheeler, Chas Gerretsen, and others. Dana started freelancing for UPI and later became a staffer with the AP. He soon became a combat photographer of note while going on missions with the Green Berets from his base in Da Nang.

He and his wife Louise Smizer left Saigon for Europe in 1969, driving a VW Camper from India overland to Lapland in Sweden where, for a short time, he became a lumber jack.

In 1970, on hearing of the US military incursion into Cambodia, he flew to Bangkok, Thailand and waited there impatiently with many other journalists until the new, pro-US government allowed the press to enter Cambodia.

On April 6, 1970, Stone and his colleague Sean Flynn were captured by the Viet Cong after leaving Phnom Penh on rented red Honda motorbikes to find the front lines of fighting in Cambodia. Investigations by fellow photojournalist Tim Page, reported in the UK Sunday Times on 24 March 1991, indicate that Stone and Flynn were taken first to the village of Sangke Kaong, and then to other villages before being handed over to the Khmer Rouge. Page and a TV documentary maker tracked down an empty grave in a village known as Bei Met that had allegedly been the final resting place of two foreigners. Forensic examination of the few remains left in the grave suggested they belonged to a tall man and a short man – consistent with the appearance of Flynn and Stone respectively – and that both had died violently. In 2003, the Pentagon's Central Identification Lab in Hawaii confirmed by DNA testing that the remains found by Tim Page were actually of Clyde McKay, a boat hijacker and Larry Humphrey, an army deserter.

Disappearance

Stone and Flynn's disappearance is chronicled in Perry Deane Young's 1975 memoir, Two of the Missing. A 1991 film, Darkness at the Edge of Town, recounted Tim Page's "search to discover the fate of his friends Sean Flynn and Dana Stone".

Stone's younger brother, John Thomas Stone, joined the U.S. Army in 1971, soon after graduating from high school, reportedly due in part to a desire to discover what had happened to his brother. He later served as a medic in the Vermont National Guard, and was killed by friendly fire on March 29, 2006 in Afghanistan on his third tour.