Sean Flynn and Dana Stone were freelance photojournalists during the Vietnam War. Along with collegues like John Steinbeck IV, Michael Herr and Tim Page (who really deserves his own entry) they quickly gained reputations for getting closer to the action than anyone else, sending back photos and dispatches that brought home the gravity of the slaughter. When they were unable to take army transports, they would commandeer Honda motorcycles and ride into battle with their cameras, notebooks and balls the size of grapefruits.

In the spring of 1970, King Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown and Cambodia collapsed into civil war. Flynn and Stone took two bright red Honda 125s across the border to find out what was happening (this was before Twitter, after all), but they were stopped at a Viet Cong roadblock somewhere along Route 1. Nobody ever heard from them again.

Conclusive evidence was never found, but Tim Page keeps looking. According to people who lived in the area during the war, they were held in a makeshift prison for about a year before either being executed or dying of malaria. The two are commemorated, along with other photographers who died or went missing in Vietnam, in Page’s photo book Requiem. The two are also characters in Michael Herr’s amazing memoir Dispatches, which is probably the best Vietnam book ever written (Herr later co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, everybody’s second favorite Vietnam movie). There’s also Two of the Missing and a documentary called “Danger on the Edge of Town,” which I can’t find anything at all about.

Interestingly, three other journalists entered Cambodia at the same border crossing on the same day as Flynn and Stone – Claude Arpin, Akira Kusaka and Yujiro Takagi. They didn’t come back either, but nobody ever wrote a tribute to their bravery.

Maybe it’s because they didn’t ride motorcycles.