Re: Digest for vietnam-old-hacks@googlegroups.com - 4 updates in 2 topics

[Dawson]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2025 at 3:13 AM <vietnam-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

NYT piece on Al Rockoff.

Carl Robinson <robinso...@gmail.com>: Nov 23 09:38AM +1100 I knew Rockoff extremely well, us both being Vietnam war army veterans and so on, and I'm not finding much that's familiar in that New York Times piece that seems written to aggrandise people who are not Al Rockoff --  including the extreme error pointed out by Carl and we know, don't we, that there won't be a correction even on that? Sorry, Steve Heder, that's what I see.

Rockoff discovered photography more  by accident than by design. As a Spec 4, happened to be assigned to a mopic unit and some second looee handed him a camera one day and pointed him out to the boonies. Al discovered he rather liked that job. and he never liked anything else as much.

I never found Al as an extremist. If anything, his character in The Killing Fields movie, played by Malkovich was kinda, sorta close. Al loved war, and he was obsessed with battlefield bodies. He had a wicked sense of events and humour. He was the source of the title for Lon Nol --  The Mayor of Phnom Penh. He was killed twice in Cambodia, which provides huge larfs for the joke (true story)... When the ammo dump next  to  Pochentong airport came under fire and everything was  blowing up such as artillery rounds and bullets, Neal Ulevich screamed at Rockoff, "Al, Al fer crissake get down, you're gonna get killed!" Rockoff turned and said, "What, again?"

73

[Donald Kirk]

The NYT Magazine put the head,  “Why They Call Lon Nol ‘The Mayor of Phnom Penh'" over a lengthy piece by me in mid-1971 about the fighting around the country. Included interviews with Sosthene Fernandez and In Tam, whose names may be remembered by those of us who were there. I don't recall seeing Rockoff then, had no idea he was the source of that title.

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