My father was the first to say it: “You should write a book.”

I’d just returned from America, bursting with tales of coffee plantations and bandits on the Mexico- Guatemala border and meeting the future president of Mexico, Díaz Ordaz in Tapachula.

 At twenty-one, I shrugged—what was there to write about? But my father knew. He built his own wire-recorder to preserve my stories. I didn’t yet understand they were only the prologue.

I’d left the Netherlands at eighteen, chasing Hollywood-fueled dreams.

Became Sydney’s youngest cab driver. A jackaroo in Northern Queensland’s dust. A hunter stalking crocodiles in Cape York. Then America called: I rode as a Texas cowboy, hawked car polish dealer-to-dealer, slung diner coffee—and briefly, became a U.S. Army private at Fort Polk.

They discharged me with a verdict that shaped my life:

“Gerretsen has a severe history of nomad-ism. The army makes him nervous.”

Nomad-ism became my compass.

At twenty-three, I followed the movie’s “Bridge over the River Kwai” death railway into Burma’s jungles—smuggling myself past borders with rebel fighters. Then Laos. Cambodia. And Vietnam, where I arrived in February 1968, during the Tet Offensive with $0.75 in my pocket. Broke, I traded a battlefield pistol for a Nikon F. That swap birthed my career: from UPI TV cameraman to freelance photojournalist, trading security for freedom.

Chile’s 1973 coup. South America’s unrest. A year documenting blood, death and hope from Argentina to Venezuela. In 1973 I won the Robert Capa Award for "best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise"

Then Hollywood’s siren song—the very dream-machine that launched my restlessness. When Apocalypse Now became my unlikely canvas, I’d come full circle: from silver-screen fantasies to forging cinema’s nightmares.

After 14 years, I quit.

Bought a 44-foot sailboat and spent 34 years charting oceans—I traded my cameras for open seas.

“You’re full of shit,” people said when I shared my life.

“I read the papers—that never happened.”

So I wrote it all down. Penned in English, published in Dutch (2021), my autobiography thundered in the spirit of “Hemingway, Tintin, and Jan Cremer” (NRC Handelsblad). Now, with photo books like Apocalypse Now: The Lost Photo Archive and Chile: The Photo Archive 1973-1974 celebrated worldwide, hundreds ask: “When will the English version come?”

I’m now seeking a publisher to bring this journey to readers worldwide—where a U.S. Army-diagnosed ‘nomad’ evolved into an unforgettable artistic legacy.