Photo Gallery from
Ghosts of war: My journalist father’s
Vietnam odyssey, revisited
Robert Reguly’s war reporting delivered a fearless, first-hand look at the brutality of Vietnam.
Fifty years later, his son Eric Reguly retraces his footsteps
'I was always envious of Dad,' Globe foreign correspondent Eric Reguly writes of his father, Robert, shown here in South Vietnam in 1967, wearing U.S. Army fatigues he bought shortly after arriving in the country as a war correspondent. 'He went to Vietnam and covered history; I only heard the stories.'
Robert Reguly's tools of the trade in the Vietnam war: His Olympia typewriter, Nikkormat camera and green U.S. Army knapsack.
Eric's first stop in the Vietnamese capital is the Majestic, a French colonial-era hotel frequented by journalists, officers and other foreign visitors during the war. Robert stayed there in 1967.
SAIGON, JANUARY 2018
Eric poses for a picture with Frank Tapparo, 80, a former U.S. Army major also staying at the Majestic.
Robert Reguly's visa for entering Vietnam, stamped by the Vietnamese embassy in Washington, D.C., where he had been based as a Star bureau chief.
Drafts of Robert's dispatches from Vietnam. His stories and editing notes were Eric Reguly's guide for his own Vietnam journey.
May 17, 1967: A U.S. Marine corpsman leads a wounded comrade, foreground, as others carry bodies toward a helicopter in Con Thien, Vietnam.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Robert Reguly made the Toronto Star's front page on May 19, 1967, with his report from the DMZ.
FRED LUM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Eric stands in an American trench at Khe Sanh. In 1968, the base near the DMZ was one of the most famous battlegrounds of the war, with U.S. forces besieged by the North Vietnamese and forced to withdraw.
A C-130 Hercules transport plane sits near a bunker at the Khe Sanh battle site.
Duc Co Special Forces camp, 1965: Wounded soldiers crouch in the dust as a U.S. helicopter takes off from a clearing. This was one of many images taken by photojournalist Tim Page that chronicled the Vietnam conflict.
TIM PAGE
Robert Reguly and his wife, Ada, on their wedding day in Sudbury in 1956. A decade later, they had three children and lived in Chevy Chase, Md., where Robert rubbed shoulders with Washington's power brokers. Ada recalls the family's time in Chevy Chase as the happiest of her life, Eric recalls, but her husband's long absence during the war nearly destroyed her.
HANDOUT
Feb. 6, 1968: D.R. Howe treats the wounds of Private First Class D.A. Crum during Operation Hue City. The fighting in Hue, a rare example of street-to-street combat in the Vietnam War, was the model for fighting scenes in the film Full Metal Jacket.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
CENTRAL VIETNAM, EARLY FEBRUARY, 2018
Robert, far right, spent time with the Saskatchewan Smoke Jumpers, a firefighting force that leapt into fires at low level. His parachuting experience with the Smoke Jumpers would come in handy in Vietnam, where he flew in a Skyraider.
U.S. Air Force Captain James Thyng stands in front of his Skyraider, loaded with napalm. In June, 1967, he would take off with Robert Reguly from Pleiku to look for Viet Cong targets.
FRAMES & THYNGS
PLEIKU, EARLY FEBRUARY, 2018
An oil painting by David Rider shows EC883, the Skyraider plane that Captain James Thyng and Robert Reguly flew in over Pleiku.
DAVID RIDER
Eric Reguly stands in front of a Skyraider, like the one his father flew in, at the War Remnants Museum in Saigon (left)
Robert Reguly's Star report on the Montagnards (right)
Beng, formerly called Plei Beng, is a rural village surrounded by cashew and rubber trees. It was a challenge for Eric and his interpreter to find it.
Kpuih Doan, a Montagnard villager in Beng who remembers the evacuation and destruction of his village, holds a Robert Reguly newspaper report of the event.
Robert Reguly in the Toronto Star newsroom in March, 1966.
Ray Wilkinson in 1968, just outside Khe Sanh, site of one of the biggest battles of the war. HANDOUT
Ray Wilkinson, now 70, lives in Dong Ha, Vietnam, and teaches English.
Through the charity organization Project RENEW, Chuck Searcy has helped to save lives in Vietnam by clearing unexploded ordnance left over from the war.
HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES