Tim Page, a wandering Brit who rose to fame as a photographer of the Vietnam war, died Wednesday of liver cancer in Australia. He was 78 and surrounded by friends.

That Page, whom I encountered during the war in Saigon and in the field, survived at all is a kind of miracle. He was wounded four times, the last in 1969 by a mine that injured part of his brain.

“I bumped into him a few times in the battlefield and the Danang press center,” recalled the AP’s star correspondent, Peter Arnett, at a forum for one-time Vietnam correspondents.

“He was already establishing a legendary reputation for his photography skills and for his indifference to battlefield injury, sustaining several serious wounds before he left in a stretcher for the duration in 1969.”

Mr. Arnett, in a message to Marianne Harris, Page’s long-time partner, told her he admired Page “for his audacity, and for his charm and friendship.”

Charm was definitely one of Page’s most endearing attributes, but he also was fiercely loyal and, recovering after months of rehabilitation from the brain injury, turned to writing books that featured his photographs and his thoughts on the suffering of all those who joined in the war.

Page showed his loyalty by leading searches for two other photographers, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, who disappeared in Cambodia in April 1970. They were last seen in April 1970 driving their motorcycles down the main road from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh toward the Vietnam border. 

Page was greatly saddened never to be able to find them after chasing down numerous rumors and stories.

Possibly his greatest accomplishment, after his adventures as a combat photographer, was churning out books, including one,  “Page by Page,” on his exploits and those of so many others he encountered among colleagues, GIs and the Vietnamese for whom they were sent to fight.

Page’s most enduring work may be “Requiem,” which he put together with Horst Faas, the Associated Press photo chief, featuring the work of photographers killed in the war.

Page was as colorful as he was daring, often wearing a checkered Khmer scarf long after the war was over. His “craziness” made him the ideal role model for the war photographer played by Dennis Hopper in the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola film, “Apocalypse Now.”

But he was more than a war-freak photographer. There was a deeply thoughtful side, as when he remarked in an interview with the New York Times, “I don’t think anybody who goes through anything like war ever comes out intact.”