Apocalypse Now Banks On Nostalgia For Vietnam War

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - Ton That Diep has seen the future, and it looks a lot like this city's tawdry past.

He figures there is good money to be made in Vietnam War nostalgia. With foreigners trooping to Vietnam - including a fast-growing number of Americans, despite the U.S. trade embargo - Diep reasoned that they will want a congenial place with a wartime theme, where they can slake their thirst for nostalgia with a Saigon 333 or Tiger beer and listen to '60s music as they tell tales about the Big Green Machine.

So, in April, Diep opened a bar called Apocalypse Now, and already it's the place to be when the rest of the city shuts down. It appears to be even more popular than its rival, the B 475, as in Before '75, perhaps because Apocalypse Now's name and logo are emblazoned on T-shirts sold by every downtown street vendor, along with shirts bearing the words "Lift the Embargo NOW. Good Morning Vietnam."

The walls and ceiling at Apocalypse Now are entirely black, except for the paintings of helicopters, positioned so that the shafts of the ceiling fans are the rotors. The beer is cold and the music deafening, just like in the good old wartime days at the enlisted men's clubs. Local color is provided by Vietnamese children who push through the crowd selling cigarettes, postcards and day-old copies of the International Herald Tribune.

The bar is open to the street, so the noise and the visibly well-heeled foreigners attract crowds of locals hoping to cash in: cyclo drivers, fruit vendors, prostitutes.

Apocalypse Now's clientele on one recent night included three doctors from Colorado on a medical aid mission, two young men from Massachusetts planning a bicycle trip from here to Hanoi, a group of Europeans who described themselves as "travelers" and a two-man television crew from Cleveland.

Not the same as pilots for Air America, the CIA airline that carried advisers and supplies during the war, or contractors from the RMK-BRJ Construction consortium, which built airfields and other facilities used by the U.S. military, but dollar-paying customers nonetheless. And as the lyrics of old favorites floated above the smoke, they all seemed to be having a grand time.

Perhaps they would find the war less amusing a few doors away, in a makeshift art gallery upstairs from yet another bar, the Rhythm and Booze. In the gallery hang Thai Khac Chuong's photographs from the spring of 1975, when South Vietnam fell to the Communist North.

Chuong was working for United Press International then and shot some of the most memorable pictures of South Vietnam's final agony, including the one of desperate Vietnamese clinging to the skids of departing helicopters.

Chuong even had someone take a photo of him, with a big grin, surrounded by North Vietnamese troops. It turned out that he didn't have much to laugh about. UPI kept its Saigon bureau open for weeks after the "liberation" of the city, but when its last American staff member left, Chuong was sent to a "re-education" camp, where he was confined for several years.

Now he's free, but he has to make a living. So he is selling reproductions of the photos on the wall for $20 apiece. He said he isn't worried about whether he has the legal right to sell reproductions of UPI's pictures.

When the bureau closed, he said, "UPI owed me $2,000, and they never paid it."