Tim Page has passed away, aged 78, from pancreatic cancer. ‘Bent, beaten, scarred' by the age of 23, as a result of his fearless coverage of the American-Vietnam War in the mid to late 1960s, Page was indisputably the most rock'n'roll combat photographer of them all.

Nobody, least of all Page, expected him to live so long.

His first brush with death came at the age of 16, when – as a young English tearaway – he crashed his motorbike and briefly passed to the other side. Later he would write: "I had died. I lived. I had seen the tunnel. There was no light at the end. There was no afterlife."

Page considered his existence from that point on to be 'free time, a gift from the gods'. Aged 17, and already walking with a permanent limp, he left his family home in Turnbridge, Kent and travelled on a whim through Europe and into Asia, working odd jobs, and experimenting with drugs along the way.

In 1965, he blagged his way into the world of photography when, armed with a Pentax camera, he ended up covering an attempted coup d'état in Laos, the landlocked nation that borders China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

After revealing a flair for being in the right place at the right time, Page landed a gig with UPI (United Press International) in Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam. By 1965 the Vietnam-American War had escalated into a vicious conflict, with the US military and South Vietnam joining forces to battle the People's Army of Vietnam, or what the Yankees called the 'Viet Cong' (literally, 'communist Vietnamese'), who hailed from North Vietnam.

Tim Page.

WOUNDED SOLDIERS

His peers would later recall that the 20-year-old Page was green in terms of his photographic capabilities. When he got his first Leica – the legendary small, light, precision German camera brand – he didn't even know how to load it. What set him apart was that he dared to tread where others would not. “I would always try to go to the extreme frontline. You can’t get the spontaneity of action if you’re not there… you can’t see the faces [of the soldiers], the expressions on the faces,” he'd say many years later in the documentary, Frontline.

But Page paid a heavy price, physically, and emotionally. He was repeatedly injured on the battlefield — and once left for dead at sea. When the American author of Dispatches, Michael Herr, first arrived in Vietnam, he was told: "Look [Page] up — if he's still alive." When Herr tracked him down he met a 'wigged-out crazy' and a 'stone-cold freak' with a couple of cameras swinging from his neck (the inscription on his helmet was a lyric from a Frank Zappa song).

Page’s persona, and fashion sense, would later inspire the manic, drug-addled photographer played by Denis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, the seminal anti-war satire directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It was a sideways tribute that Page never complained about, even if he was more of a 'gentleman hippy' at heart.

When asked about his own penchant for consuming narcotics while living in Saigon, where he decompressed with other correspondents, Page would later reason: "Everybody in a war needs some way to opt out, to somehow uncouple the madness which you’ve just participated in, and somehow put yourself to sleep, without insanity running through your head…"

In 1969, Page's time covering that war ended after jumping off a US helicopter to help evacuate two wounded soldiers, somewhere northwest of Saigon. A sergeant, just ahead of him, stomped on a mine and a two-inch piece of shrapnel pierced Page's skull. Legend has it that Page got back to his feet, returned to the helicopter to change his lens and shoot a few more frames. Other, more likely, accounts state that he was pronounced dead, not once but twice, at the hospital where he underwent emergency surgery.

Tim Page by Barat Ali Batoor.

HAUNTED MAN

Having cheated the grim reaper again, Page began supplementing his rehabilitation in the US with LSD and, perhaps inevitably, became associated with the 'Gonzo journalism' scene, working alongside Hunter S. Thompson for Rolling Stone. Over time, Page began to write more and more, producing a total of nine books, most of them about the war in Vietnam and its regrettable legacy. For decades he never gave up on the hope of finding the remains of the many photographers and journalists (Vietnamese and foreign), who went missing during the war.

In particular, he was obsessed with establishing exactly what happened to two of his best friends, Sean Flynn (the son of Errol) and Dana Stone, who jumped on motorbikes and drove to the Vietnam-Cambodia border in April 1970, never to be seen again. They were most probably executed by the Khmer Rouge.

This survivor's guilt never relented for Page. Perhaps it was even compounded over the years. “I don’t like the idea of [Flynn's] spirit out there tormented. There’s something spooky about being MIA," he is reported to have said on one of his return trips to Vietnam and Cambodia.

But there were happier moments when Page revisited the region in recent years, not least when he had a chance to reunite with the 'Old Hacks’ – a group of correspondents who all covered the American-Vietnam war, at various stages between 1965 and 1975.

On April 30, 2015, Page and the other 'Old Hacks' convened at a hotel rooftop bar in Ho Chi Minh City (née Saigon) to witness the celebrations being held to mark the 40th anniversary of Vietnam's reunification. As an honorary member of the group, I had quietly slipped into the event. When Page arrived at the party, I felt like he had the look of a haunted man – but, on reflection, maybe he just needed to take the edge off.

After unwinding with a joint, and a few Saigon Special beers, Page grinned at some of his old brothers in arms and said: "Hey, who would have thought we'd live so long.”

Who indeed?

• Connla Stokes is a writer and editor based in Vietnam.