CHAPEL HILL - CHAPEL HILL -- Ask Perry Deane Young what his newly republished "Two of the Missing" is about, and he goes for the laughs.

"Lots of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll," he nervously told a standing-room-only crowd at Wilson Library on Sunday. "It was the '60s, what can I tell you?"

Ask military correspondent Jay Price what Young's Vietnam memoir is about, and he describes it in a word.

Addiction.

Not drugs, though there was plenty of that in Vietnam and in Young's book, now being made into a movie.

Addiction to war, or in the case of "Two of the Missing," addiction to the journalist's thrill of covering war.

It is an addiction Young and Price never surrendered to. Young, a former reporter, eventually left Vietnam. Price, on trips to Iraq and Afghanistan for The News & Observer, never went "looking for trouble."

But both men understood those who did, and do.

"There is a terrible sense of adrenaline," Price said.

"It's an addiction, like an addiction to heroin, and you can carry it too far."

"Two of the Missing," tells the story of Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, who disappeared behind a communist road block in Vietnam on April 6, 1970.

Neither Price nor Young said the two journalists carried it too far. But their implication was clear. Sunday would have been Flynn's 68th birthday.

Young was the first to write about his friends' disappearance in a story for The New York Post.

"All my life, my response was to write a story and get drunk," he told the Wilson audience. "Only the sequence changed as I got older." More laughs.

But Young wasn't joking.

And the story, and a later article in Harper's that became the basis for the book, wasn't therapy.

In those days CIA agents sometimes posed as journalists. Young and others wanted to make sure the communists knew their prisoners were newsmen, not government operatives. If the North Vietnamese saw the stories it didn't matter. Flynn and Stone were never seen again.

Young didn't write everything he knew in the first book.

Now, nearly 40 years later, he says he's convinced the journalists crossed into enemy territory deliberately.

"We had this myth they were accidentally captured by the communists," he said. But the men saw the road block and went around it. "They were going to get pictures from the other side."

Flynn, the handsome son of swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn, lived on the edge. He once told Young the only great adventure was war. He had enough plastic explosives in his Vietnam apartment to blow up a small village. Young never knew what for.

He says the wire service would rewrite his dispatches and that he did his best reporting in letters home. He includes some in "Two of the Missing." Short, staccato observations like a scene from an army hospital: 31 dead. Donovan singing on the radio. A medic sweeping a floor.

He left Vietnam, but it never left him.

"How do you come back and then have an ordinary life?" he asked. "I really felt like my life was all in the past. I was 28 years old."

Even now, he downplays his work.

When Price called him a hero for resisting war's addiction, Young responded, "You call it courage. I call it being a chicken." But Young did not leave the fighting when he returned stateside. He became a pacifist, marching for peace.

Young and a partner wrote the screenplay for "Two of the Missing" in six weeks.

The late Heath Ledger was offered $5 million to star and had agreed to read the book before he died. Now producers are trying to attract another star.

Young long ago traded the front line for the small basement apartment of the Orange County Women's Center on Henderson Street, where he works as a handyman. He's written eight books and had a bestseller in 1977 with "The David Kopay Story," about a gay ex-NFL star.

He told the audience Sunday how one day a woman saw him working outside and tapped him on his shoulder.

"The Women's Center has a man do the gardening?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," he replied, the Southern gentleman. "I also scrub the toilets and do the vacuuming."

The story got more laughs.

"I haven't had a lot of success in my career," he said. "But I've done a few things that I'm very proud of."

mark.schultz@nando.com or 932-2003