Paul Colliton was born in 1951 into a military family on Long Island. Named after his mother’s cousin, a B-24 bomber pilot shot down over the English Channel and never recovered, Paul grew up carrying a name that meant something heavy. By eighteen, he was working on Wall Street, buying drugs in Harlem by noon, and drinking until four in the morning. When the draft letter arrived, his mother had three doctor’s notes ready to get him out. He never showed them. “I thought maybe I could use some discipline in my life,” he says. “It took me about a month to realize I’d made a mistake.”
What followed was something Paul never expected: he excelled. The dyslexic kid who sat in the corner with a dunce cap in Catholic school became a platoon leader at Fort Dix, a sharpshooter, and a drill team standout. When the Army pulled him out of a training exercise one day and told him he had the highest IQ on base, he nearly laughed. Then they gave him a choice — MP school or the bush. He took the badge. After AIT at Fort Gordon, Georgia, he deployed to Vietnam in 1971 as a combat Military Police officer, landing first at Cam Ranh Bay and eventually making his way north to Phu Bai, just outside the ancient imperial city of Hue. He was nineteen years old, and nobody told him much of anything about what he was supposed to do there.
Paul’s year in Vietnam was defined less by pitched battles than by the grinding, disorienting reality of a war in its final chapter — one that nobody on the ground quite believed in anymore. He patrolled Hue on twelve-hour night shifts, sometimes with a South Vietnamese MP who knew the streets and sometimes barely at all. He came face to face with fifteen enemy soldiers in black pajamas at twilight — both sides locked and loaded, neither side firing. He ran a makeshift customs station at an in-country airstrip, built it with one other guy, watched that guy leave for emergency leave the day it was finished, and promptly used the drug amnesty box to sample the confiscated inventory with friends. Through it all, he was a heroin addict — smoking it, not shooting it, a distinction he credits with saving his life. The hardest thing that happened to him wasn’t enemy fire. It was a twelve-hour hospital shift watching a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese girl die after taking rat poison — a girl whose family he’d been looking after, who had been raped by a soldier Paul despised. “That one hurt,” he says, simply. “That one really hurt.”
Coming home was its own ordeal. Paul landed at JFK on a Sunday morning in 1972, in his dress greens, and a kid with a ponytail said something to him and spit in his face. Paul knocked him out, threw his uniform in a trash can, and hitchhiked home. What followed — the Dear John, the years of chaos in New York’s photography world, the night he sat on the ledge of his 31st-floor apartment and decided not to jump — is the second act of a life that somehow kept finding its way back. He got sober at 36. He became Annie Leibovitz’s assistant, then a sought-after photographer in his own right. He cried with Muhammad Ali over Vietnam and sobriety in a hotel suite at the Pierre. And eventually, he and his wife Jackie flew to Ohio and brought home a premature baby boy named Billy from a dark apartment with no electricity — a boy who, years later, would be diagnosed with autism, find his voice through Beach Boys songs, and teach Paul more about honesty than anything else in his life. “Vietnam confirmed that I wasn’t weak,” Paul says near the end of the conversation. “But Billy — Billy’s my real teacher.”
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