1969: The Island of the Coconut Monk, Vietnam

8mm silent film footage shot in January 1969 by Roger Steffens. He shot this on his first trip to the Island of the Coconut Monk, a mile-long sandbar in the middle of the Mekong River. Errol Flynn’s son Sean and John Steinbeck IV brought Roger there to meet the monk, who led a community of several thousand Taoists and dropouts from both the North and South Vietnamese armies.  The north bank of the river was controlled by the Americans and the south bank by the Communists, who fired rockets and mortars over the island, but never touched it.  The monk’s adherents prayed to Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tse,  Sun Yat Sen, Victor Hugo and Winston Churchill. The Island of the Coconut Monk was a refuge for six thousand pacifists who had dropped out of the Vietnam war. Everything on the island had a double or triple symbolic meaning. At the island's eastern end was a huge relief map of North and South Vietnam, built on stilts over the swirling muddy river, with two giant columns sunk into each end, joined by an "Arch of Reunification." On the map itself were tiny buildings and roads. Roger brought journalist Richard Boyle to the Island in October of 1969, and a few months later Richard helped save the pacifist community from annihilation. The Vietnamese Navy had been dispatched up the Mekong to wipe it out, but Richard and the Monk and several of his followers boarded an ancient Chinese junk and headed off the Navy flotilla in a dramatic confrontation, after which the Navy turned around and decided not to level the island. This amazing story is told in his Ramparts Press book, “The Flower of the Dragon.” -Kate Steffens/The Family Acid