A Salute to Fallen Stars : Memorial: Former combat photographers hope their restaurant ‘headquarters’ will soon house a shrine honoring colleagues who died covering the Vietnam War.

Autographed 8-by-10 glossies hanging on the wall of a restaurant opposite CBS Television City don’t belong to Hollywood stars.

They’re pictures of shooting stars--combat photographers who documented the Vietnam War in a freewheeling way that may never be seen again.

The framed photos near the front door of the Chao Krung restaurant mark the spot that soon may become the world’s first shrine to 58 Western correspondents killed during the bitter fighting.

It’s a tribute that is long overdue, according to former combat journalists who use the Fairfax Avenue restaurant in Los Angeles as an impromptu headquarters when other correspondents from out of town pass through.

“We like coming here,” said magazine photographer James Caccavo of Los Angeles, who was in Vietnam for Newsweek at the height of the fighting. “For a lot of us, it’s like going back over there.”

The Vietnam conflict, in Caccavo’s view, “is the most traumatic thing that’s happened to the U.S. since our own Civil War. Nothing affected this country, tore it up so much, as that war.”

It was especially schizophrenic for news correspondents.

They were based in comfort in Saigon, where they lived in hotels and had free access to bars and nightclubs where they socialized nightly with friends.

“Even at the height of the war one led a very normal life. I was married over there and had a son . . . an apartment and a maid,” remembers 55-year-old Nik Wheeler, now a Hollywood-based travel photographer who was there from 1967 through 1970 for United Press International.

“If you wanted some action or something was happening, you changed into your military gear and asked ‘Which way is the war?’ and found a flight.”

The flash of an ID card would get a correspondent aboard a military helicopter headed directly to where the action was. For photographers, that was particularly important.

That’s how Wheeler’s buddy, Time magazine photographer Tim Page, came an inch from dying in 1969. A booby-trapped artillery shell left Page with severe head injuries after the helicopter he was riding made an unscheduled landing to pick up wounded GIs and he jumped out to take pictures and got hit.

Page, 50, now a British author and photographer who is legendary among Vietnam journalists, has called Vietnam “a war covered by civilians rather than civilians in uniform enlisted to distort the news.” When he stopped at Chao Krung on his most recent Los Angeles visit, former combat photographers and writers filled the place.

Chao Krung owner Khwannapa Noochlaor says she is pleased that correspondents picked her 18-year-old Thai restaurant as their headquarters. The photos on the wall are inscribed with thank-yous written to her mother, former owner Supa Kuntee, for approving the proposed shrine, Noochlaor said.

“Customers have a lot of questions about the pictures,” Noochlaor said. “People think they are pictures of celebrities. They think they are actors because they are autographed. I say they are journalists and people say, ‘Wow.’ ”

One Hollywood actor, fresh from filming a war movie, stopped at the restaurant and offered an 8-by-10 glossy “of himself dressed up in his soldier costume” for the wall, said Caccavo, 51. “We had to apologize that these are real people, not actors.”

Caccavo said the idea for a correspondents’ memorial has been in the back of his mind since 1971, when he headed an Indochina Affairs Committee for the National Press Photographers’ Assn. That group was trying to get information about correspondents missing in action in the then-raging war.

At the time, journalists were particularly worried about the fate of two friends--free-lance photographer Sean Flynn and CBS cameraman Dana Stone--who had disappeared after being in Cambodia in 1970. Flynn, the son of actor Errol Flynn, was from Los Angeles; both he and Stone were later listed as dead.

Initially, Caccavo and the others proposed placing a large mural opposite the Chao Krung bar that would include pictures and list the names of all 320 combat journalists killed in the war.

But Noochlaor’s family was against pictures of war dead for religious reasons. And some Vietnamese involved in the project were opposed to including the names of North Vietnamese, Russian and other Eastern Bloc correspondents, Caccavo said.

Vietnamese artist Linh Vo of Monterey Park has designed a shrine that will list the fallen correspondents’ names inscribed on individually carved leaves, he said. When it is finished, Noochlaor plans to close the restaurant for a day so a Buddhist monk can bless the shrine.

So far, there have been donations from the Southern California chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers and the Press Photographers Assn. of Greater Los Angeles to help pay for materials for the memorial.

The restaurant, meantime, is a busy place when visiting war correspondents come to town.

Paul Brinkley-Rogers, now a 54-year-old reporter for the Arizona Republic who worked in Vietnam between 1968 and 1975 for Newsweek, saw ex-colleagues for the first time in nearly two decades when he dropped in from Phoenix the other night.

Wheeler hadn’t changed much, he decided. And he said former Time correspondent David DeVoss, now 47 and living in Sherman Oaks, merely looks “more prosperous.” DeVoss, badly wounded in 1972 by a North Vietnamese mortar, now writes for a Hong Kong business magazine called Asia, Inc.

Few war stories were being swapped as the small group dined on gai yahng and satay , though. The talk centered instead on how Vietnam has emerged from the war--and they say the Vietnamese seemingly have no animosity toward Americans who fought there.

DeVoss has returned to Vietnam nine times since the war ended 20 years ago. On one visit he dined with the former North Vietnamese military officer in charge of the rocket that wounded him. “He didn’t apologize,” DeVoss said. “But he picked up the lunch check.”

Many of the correspondents are planning return visits April 24-28 to Saigon, as they still call Ho Chi Minh City, for a reunion marking the 20th anniversary of the city’s fall.

Entrepreneurs, meantime, are courting U.S. tourists by turning the infamous Viet Cong enemy tunnels into tourist attractions, said Nick Ut, a Vietnam-born photographer for Associated Press’ Los Angeles bureau whose brother was killed covering the war for AP.

Ut is famed for his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a badly burned Vietnamese girl running screaming from a U.S. napalm attack. But he said today’s Vietnamese love Americans. “They say, ‘Come home,’ ” said Ut, 47, of Monterey Park.

Caccavo, who suffered leg and foot wounds in a North Vietnamese rocket attack, agrees. He said a return visit three years ago showed the impact that the country has had on his life.

“When I went back to Lam Son Square where I used to live, it was like yesterday. I felt the same emotions--I’m not exaggerating--that I felt when I went back to visit my grandparents’ house I hadn’t seen in some 25-odd years, where I spent my early childhood,” he recalled.

“I felt like I was going home.”