Southeast Asia: Shot, Shell and Shutter : PAGE AFTER PAGE: Memoirs of a War-Torn Photographer <i> by Tim Page (Atheneum: $19.95; 238 pp., illustrated; 0-689-12088-5) </i>

Tim Page’s memoirs, “Page After Page,” begin most appropriately at a reunion of Vietnam journalists in New York in 1985. Like Gloria Emerson, who was given a mock Purple Heart for her several “tours of duty” covering the war for the New York Times, Page demonstrates that he and his fellow war correspondents never really left that lovely, ravaged nation. As much as the veterans themselves, they have carried its scars with them throughout their lives.

Page is known throughout the world for his powerful photographs of the war in Vietnam, often shot from the very heart of the hottest action (he was wounded severely four times, and actually brought “Dead on Arrival” to Long Binh Hospital in 1969 after stepping on a mine, his heart stopping and starting three times) and for his magnificently lush, bucolic images of post-war Vietnam. But few people knew the cost--both physical and psychic--of producing his enormously valuable documentary art.

Time-Life Inc., like the other publications that paid for his work, cared mainly that his photographs were sufficiently graphic and lurid to attract readership; and when Page no longer could work--half his body paralyzed from the severe damage inflicted by the mine explosion, and his mind crippled by post-traumatic stress disorder--they saw fit to compensate him a mere $200 a week.

Page retaliated by suing The Inc. (as he called it) for alleged damages incurred on the job. The landmark case was settled out of court, largely because, as he writes, “the press roots for the press,” and also because the case was being heard in the late 1970s, a time when “newsmen were going MIA and KIA (missing in action and killed in action) like ninepins” during the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia. But what the “war-torn correspondent” wanted, as his book makes clear, was not so much financial restitution as the chance to tell his story to the world.

That need to talk about the war is just one of the many striking similarities between Page and the Vietnam veterans--a resemblance all the more notable since Page took a route to Vietnam far different from that of most of the vets.

The son of a British sailor killed during World War II, Page was adopted by a childless accountant and his wife in Kent, England, where he had a placid if somewhat lonely childhood, and chess and bicycling were his two greatest passions. There is little in these early years to hint at the origins of his subsequent heroism. He was definitely tuned in to American rock ‘n’ roll, which was beating down some of the stuffy walls of respectability about him, and reading Orwell made him dream of being a forestry officer in Burma.

At 17, he dropped out of school to study forestry in Wales, but a serious motorcycle accident laid him up for months. By the time he could walk again, he longed for adventures greater than planting trees. With his pregnant girlfriend in tow, he took the ferry to Belgium, intent on seeing the world. Undaunted when the girl was dragged home by her aunt, he ended up buying a VW bus and setting off like Captain Ahab on a monomaniacal trek across Asia, bound for Australia.

The first third of Page’s book is interesting not so much for the things he did--though it is an amazing odyssey of countries, tropical diseases, drugs and jobs ranging from light-bulb salesman to black marketeer--as for the age at which he did them. At 18, he could swing a drug deal in a variety of languages and had a keen eye and ear for the multifarious corruptions of the Orient.

The same compulsion for detail that later enhanced his photography translates into a precise, sharply focused prose alive with the nuances of both British and veterans’ slang (known as Namspeak), which Page uses to bring to vivid light a panoply of colorful people and places. Though it is a small quibble, there is almost too much detail of the illicit drug world that comprised so much of Page’s formative experience. One could live without knowing how to measure opium in cartridge caps or how to smoke it with a bamboo stem.

When a journalist friend, Martin Stuart-Fox, went on leave from the UPI office in Laos, Page slipped into his job simply as another adventure: “I had caught the media bug,” he writes. “Journalism in the Third World is a knot of intrigue and camaraderie. The handful of miscreants that made up Vientiane’s corps were privy to front-line state councils of the kind novels are made of. We were sitting on the scene of ‘The Ugly American,’ the philosophies of Malraux. I knew the whole cast of characters, had started to playact myself.”

In early 1964, the man who was later to become “the legendary Tim Page” was just an unusually naive and compassionate kid with a 35mm Nikon camera. Although he had a sensitivity to things Asian--stopping, for instance, to absorb the tranquility of Buddhist temples while other Westerners kept mostly to the fancy hotels or sleazy brothels--he had virtually no sense of the mortal implications of international power plays then taking place in Southeast Asia. It was “an insane situation which at first seemed just like having a good time, making a largish wad of money and playing at dangerous big boys’ games.”

When the military attempted a coup in Vientiane, Page hopped on his new Cotton 250cc street scrambler and rode heedlessly through a hail of bullets to photograph the revolution in progress. He then carried the film through 25 kilometers of embattled countryside to the UPI office in Bangkok. As a result of the scoop, his future “was printed in seven lines”--a cable from UPI beginning “PLEASE OFFER TIM PAGE FIRM DEAL FOR THREE MONTHS AS PHOTOGRAPHER IN VIETNAM . . . .”

Page arrived in Vietnam in February of 1965, just a month ahead of the U.S. Marines. On his first assignment, he witnessed the bayonetting of a Viet Cong suspect and got so sick he couldn’t use his camera, for which UPI gave him a “public bollocking.” From that time on, he “never turned away again.”

Fired allegedly for laziness and smoking dope, Page switched to an assignment for Paris Match just in time for Operation Starlight, the first big action in which the Marines were supposed to crush a main-force VC regiment but instead took a beating. For Page, it also brought the shock of his own pierced neutrality. Trapped in an overrun firebase, with the supposedly friendly forces changing sides and firing into the American compound, Page picked up a rifle and killed his first Viet Cong.

To keep from going crazy, Page, like the veterans themselves, has to numb himself completely--and again like many of the vets, he uses ample quantities of booze and drugs to achieve this end. The second half of the book tells a progressively sadder and darker story as more and more of his journalist friends disappear or are killed. After his fourth major wounding, he is shipped to the States for extensive rehabilitation in Walter Reed Hospital, but away from Vietnam, he is so depressed that he longs to return to the adrenaline high of the life-or-death situations he has just come from.

Like the classic PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) victim, he alternates between bouts of suicidal despair and violently destructive rage. No one wants to hear his tragic tales of a war that Americans preferred to forget, and when he tries to force his wife to listen, she too wants to shut him up. He beats her, and his marriage breaks down. There are probably half a million American veterans who could fit their lives easily into Page’s profile.

After a countercultural romp in California that is rather self-consciously out of Kerouac with more than a good measure of Hunter S. Thompson-style decadence thrown in, Page returns to England in the late 1970s. His true recovery from the war begins only when he is given an assignment by the Observer, in 1980, to photograph the five-year-old Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Back in Saigon, now dubbed Ho Chi Minh City, Page begins to discover the deepest horror of the American invasion, the way it has time-warped the Vietnamese out of their own culture. Where the rest of Vietnam is attempting to build an equitable future for most of its citizens, the rootless Americanized Viets in Ho Chi Minh City still are playing the rock ‘n’ roll tapes made from Armed Forces Radio, still are caught in the endless spiral of flourishing black markets and universal shortages. Meanwhile, Amerasian children scuttle hungry and scorned, a burden to both sides.

The healing comes for Page--as for so many American veterans who have returned to Southeast Asia--in learning to appreciate the humanity of his former enemy. He meets the Viet Cong commander of the unit that had ambushed him while he accompanied the 173rd Airborne, and instead of hostility he finds a comradeship that can only come from shared experience: “He showed me black-and-white frames, liberated wire-service prints, which I had taken on assignment in those initial years of the war. We ended up as brothers, arms entwined, commiserating on common losses, half-dissipated in nostalgia. It was all rushing back, not then painfully, but I could feel the seeds of exorcism being sown, the light of understanding dawning, a relief, a fascination to dig deeper.”

Page feeds his growing curiosity about the area that has so changed his life through extensive photographic explorations of Sri Lanka, especially of Buddhist shrines, and a second expedition back to Vietnam in 1985, on the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. His second time back after the war, Page finds the final key to his past. This time he avoids the pitfall of mere nostalgia--the vice of supercilious Westerners--and attempts to see “a familiar place now stilled, the people at peace. It was now possible to see how incredibly beautiful the country was, to see the Confucian heritage, the layers and veneers of various colonial powers, the core of what had drawn me to the region originally.”

In a way, Page’s book of memoirs is its own climax, for like the two collections of photographs he has previously published, it is clearly a way for him to lay to rest the ghosts of his own complicity in what has been one of the greater human tragedies of this century.

Above all, this remarkable memoir is an unqualified assertion of the human spirit’s endless power of self-transformation: “The ones who did not make it are still with us all in spirit, their collective karma echoes in our minds, an inspiration. We grieve not, we smile with life.”