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Gentle Daredevil. Before going to Viet Nam in 1965, Sean Flynn was a game warden in Kenya, a fashion photographer in Paris, a big-game hunter in Pakistan, and had starred, uncomfortably, in a film, The Son of Captain Blood. In Viet Nam, he made infantry operations his photographic forte, slogging through jungles for weeks on end with Special Forces troops, invariably attired in a French Foreign Legion camouflage suit complete with flowing scarf. He also shot 10,000 ft. of film for a documentary on the war, shipped it to his home in Paris, and twice left to edit it between combat assignments. Recalls a friend: "He said that his documentary never would be finished until he had pictures of the other side."
During the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War —one of his sidetracks—Flynn and another reporter scavenged a Soviet recoilless rifle in the Sinai desert, hitched it to their Volkswagen and took off, with visions of donating it to a Tel Aviv discotheque. The Israeli patrol that intercepted them had other uses for it. On assignment covering Richard Nixon in Indonesia last July, Flynn rented a beach house in Bali. A remarkably gentle man, despite his daredevil reputation, he had fallen in love with the serene simplicity of the island and decided to remain there indefinitely. He returned to Saigon last month merely to wind up affairs in Viet Nam before returning to Bali, where he had already taken an option to acquire some land.
Diplomatic Efforts. Flynn's Saigon roommate, Cameraman Stone, 30, a short, sardonic Vermonter, was once a lumberjack and merchant mariner. When he went to Viet Nam in 1966, Stone took up photography as a means of seeing the war. A veteran of many hair-raising operations, he soon gained a reputation that gave him as many assignments as he could handle. "There may be other, more famous photographers with greater technical skill in Viet Nam," says TIME Correspondent David Greenway, "but there are none with more courage and initiative than Stone and Flynn."
Why the Viet Cong suddenly seemed intent on holding captured journalists remains unknown. The leading speculation is that the Communists hope to scare journalists away from reporting their activities in the border area. Intense diplomatic efforts are being made for the release of all ten captives, and North Vietnamese representatives in Paris have agreed to make inquiries.
* The known others: German-born NBC Photographer Dieter Bellendorf; French Photographers Gilles Caron, Guy Hannoteaux, Claude Arpin; Michel Visot, a Phnom-Penh professor of law acting as a guide; and two Japanese television newsmen, Reporter Akira Kusaka and Cameraman Yujiro Tagaki.