M1 Garands in Viet Nam

Here is an article and 1968 photo that was in today's News and Observer in Raleigh, NC. Note the stack of M1 Garands and BARs, along with many cases of ammo. The article is about the writings of Perry Young, a North Carolina native, who in 1975 wrote the book "Two of the Missing." The book was based on his experiences as a reporter in Viet Nam.
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CHAPEL HILL -- The heady spring of Perry Deane Young's life sprawled over nearly a full year.

Talented, beautiful and just 26 years old, he landed in Vietnam in early 1968 and was quickly embraced by a band of iconoclastic young writers and photographers who became a journalism legend.

It was an all-to-brief flash of intense friendships, extraordinary experiences and hard lessons for the young reporter from North Carolina's mountains.

Now, more than four decades later, Young's acclaimed but nearly forgotten 1975 book about those friends has just been re-issued, and a Hollywood director who owns the movie rights has begun casting. Young's third play premieres in July. And a film group is raising money to send him and others from

his days in Vietnam back to that country for a documentary.

Suddenly it's springtime again in the improbable life of the 68-year-old Vietnam war correspondent, author, playwright, bookseller, professional gardener, historian, raconteur and handyman. And it's all the sweeter after a winter that included two months of radiation therapy for prostate cancer.

"Having a book, a play and these two movies floating around, yeah, it's a good year already and getting better," Young said.

Chapel Hill has never been short of people who do things on their own terms, but few of them have lived a life as accomplished -- or just plain interesting -- as Young's. Or as hard to describe.

Even friends who craft words for a living struggle to find the right ones for Young.

"He's very much a moving target," said Wayne King, a longtime reporter for The New York Times who is now director of the journalism program at Wake Forest University. "I don't think he likes to be bound by a place, or a thing, or a job. Of course, one result of that is that he's never going to be rich."

There is little evidence that Young was ever much interested in riches. Since 1993, he has lived in the basement of the Women's Center, a nonprofit group that offers counseling and support programs. He gardens, does the occasional repair and keeps an eye on the place in return for free rent. He walks most

everywhere he goes. Until he visited The Streets at Southpoint in December, Young said, he had never been inside a big shopping mall.

Yet he has traveled the world, and his writing has appeared in a long list of American magazines and newspapers. Two of his books have been optioned for movies and his Vietnam book -- "Two of the Missing: Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone" -- drew gushing reviews from sources as diverse as

Truman Capote ("moving and engrossing"), The Washington Post ("magnificent ... unforgettable") and The Army Times ("a tapestry of reality ... brilliant"). The collection of his papers at UNC-Chapel Hill takes up nearly 16 feet of shelf space in the archives of Wilson Library.

Appalachian roots

Young was born and raised near Asheville on the family farm, the 13th child in a family he said was wildly dysfunctional. He still is drawn to the people and landscape of the North Carolina mountains, and his plays -- all written in collaboration with William Gregg, director of the Southern Appalachian

Repertory Theatre at Mars Hill College -- and some of his books are set there.

The most recent play, "Home Again," is about the consequences of Thomas Wolfe's going home again. Wolfe, an Asheville native and a celebrated son of UNC-Chapel Hill, wrote the classic novel "You Can't Go Home Again."

Young was the editor of his high school newspaper and followed Wolfe's path from Asheville to Chapel Hill on a scholarship in 1959, moving into his first basement apartment.