Dana Stone (North Pomfret, Vermont, 1939) worked as a lumberjack and a postal worker, before he bought his own ticket on a freighter to Vietnam in 1965. Upon arriving in Saigon, he learned himself to photograph with a Nikon camera he had bought in Hong Kong. He started working as a stringer for United Press International and later became a staff photographer for The Associated Press. From his base in Da Nang, he went on missions with the U.S. Army Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets. In 1968, he and his wife Louise Smiser, traveled to Europe overland, with a camper, ending in Lapland, Sweden.
Stone returned to Indochina in 1970, when he learned from the U.S. Incursion into Cambodia, a series of military actions to drive out the Vietcong and the People's Army of Vietnam from their trenches in the eastern border regions of Cambodia. He was working as a CBS cameraman, when he and his colleague and friend Sean Flynn dissappeared after having left Phnom Penh on 6 April 1970 by motorbike. They would never return and their bodies would never be found. Most probably, Stone and Flynn were stopped and executed by the Khmer Rouge or Vietcong.