Everingham began his career in photojournalism in the mid-1960s, as a teenager trekking through Indochina and learning languages.
Everingham published a story with graphic photos of bombed out villages in the Washington Monthly, a story that helped break open the secrecy surrounding the war in Laos and shed light on the innocent rural Lao and Hmong hill tribes being killed.
[citation needed] Everingham gained international fame when he sought asylum for his Laotian wife, Keo Sirisomphone, by swimming her out of Laos under the Mekong River near Vientiane using scuba equipment.
Though successful in getting Keo out of Laos safely, he was arrested back on the Thai side of the Mekong and jailed for bringing an illegal into the country.
[3] John Everingham was the founder and managing director of Artasia Press, a publisher of English language magazines in Thailand between 1985 and 2007.