APOCALYPSE NOW -- AND THEN

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 tall tales about the Big Green Machine.

So, in April, Diep opened a bar called Apocalypse Now, and already it's the place to be in the late hours, when the rest of the city shuts down. It appears to be even more popular than its next-door 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."

Advertisement

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 on motorbikes ready to pursue pedestrians.

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, perhaps, 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.

Advertisement

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, which features videos of women in skimpy leather outfits. In the gallery hang Thai Khac Chuong's photographs from the spring of 1975, when South Vietnam fell to the Communist North.

The voluble Chuong was working for United Press International then and shot some of the most memorable pictures of South Vietnam's final agony: panic-stricken troops and refugees fleeing the approaching North Vietnamese army; residents of Da Nang and Ban Me Thuout stampeding in a vain quest for safety; desperate Vietnamese clinging to the skids of departing helicopters; an American official punching a Vietnamese trying to clamber aboard an airplane pulling out of Nha Trang; pith-helmeted North Vietnamese troops entering the grounds of Saigon's presidential palace.

Chuong was present when South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh -- only in office one day -- surrendered to the invading army. One of the most poignant of Chuong's photographs shows a dazed Minh and members of his government sitting on a couch in the palace as troops come up behind them. No caption is necessary: The looks on the faces show that after more than 10 years, after the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and unimaginable destruction, it was all over.

Advertisement

Chuong's depressing archive shows only too clearly that when order breaks down and survival is on the line, the normal rules of behavior are easily jettisoned.

Outside the presidential palace, Chuong had someone take a photo of him, with a big grin on his face, surrounded by North Vietnamese troops. It turned out, though, 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 remained behind to be sent to a "reeducation" camp, where he was confined for several years.

Now he's a free man again, but he has to make a living. So he is selling enlarged 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."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zr8eirZ5noKS5qsDInKpoaWluf3B9kGhqaWeRpbykrcuyp6ydXaO8uHnAp5tmrJiau3CFkG9sb2tlbXqmg5drZG1uk2t6ooSYn2SabmhohnF8lZuZnW5f