Most families vacation in Florida because of the warm weather and abundance of theme parks. You can shake hands with Mickey Mouse at Disney World, feed the dolphins at SeaWorld…and duck and cover in New Vietnam. Well, at least that was the idea.
In 1975 Reverend Carl McIntire, a New Jersey fundamentalist preacher and pro-Vietnam War activist, began construction on what was to be “New Vietnam.” Spread out over 300 acres of land in Cape Canaveral, Florida, McIntire and his partner, former Green Beret Giles Pace, envisioned a theme park where people could get a glimpse of the Vietnam War.
What would the theme park look like? Here are a few of the attractions McIntire planned:
• Sampan ride. A sampan is an Asian sailboat. Tourists would take a sampan ride around a moat that encircled a recreated Vietnamese village with a neighboring Special Forces camp.
• Special Forces camp. The camp would be made up of simple concrete barracks displaying weapons “used by the Commies in Vietnam.” Around the barracks would be trenches and mortar bunkers complete with sandbag walls and sham machine guns.
• The perimeter. The camp would be surrounded with row upon row of barbed wire, punji stakes, and fake Claymore mines to add to the atmosphere. “We’ll have a recording, broadcasting a fire-fight, mortars exploding, bullets flying, Vietnamese screaming,” McIntire explained, while hired GIs shoot blanks at the enemy. Visitors would be encouraged to take cover in the barracks or station themselves behind a machine gun and get in on the action.
• A Vietnamese village. The village would be made up of 16 thatched huts and four concrete upper-class Vietnamese homes that would double as retail shops and snack bars serving traditional Vietnamese cuisine. So after working up an appetite manning the machine guns, park visitors could stop in for a bowl of rice and noodles. The village was to be completely authentic, with irrigated paddies, water buffalo, cows, chickens, ducks, and palm trees.
That little statue on the grill of every Rolls Royce car has a name: “Spirit of Ecstasy.”
• Vietnamese people. Vietnamese people—real refugees from the real war—would travel through the village in traditional outfits and make New Vietnam come to life. McIntire planned this as a make-work program for Vietnamese refugees arriving in Florida at the end of the war. “Every penny will go back to the Vietnamese. The Bible says love your neighbor.”
“They’ll work anywhere for a paycheck,” Pace commented. “And this will be work that won’t be in competition with anyone else. There’s nothing offensive about it.”
The idea bombed and the park was never completed. Vietnamese refugees, having just experienced the horrors of a real war, weren’t about to participate in a fake one. “My wife won’t walk around that village in a costume like Mickey Mouse,” refugee Cong Nguyen Binh told reporters. “We want to forget. We want to live here like you. We don’t want any more war.”
• The rare red coral of the Mediterranean is actually blue.
• The gray whale is actually black.
• Whalebone is actually made of baleen, a material from the whales’ upper jaws.
• The Atlantic salmon is actually a member of the trout family.
• Heartburn is actually pyrosis, caused by the presence of gastric secretions, called reflux, in the lower esophagus.
• The Caspian Sea and the Dead Sea are both actually lakes.
• The horseshoe crab is more closely related to spiders and scorpions than crabs.
• The Douglas fir is actually a pine tree.
• A steel-jacketed bullet is actually made of brass.
• Riptides are actually currents.
Eh? HEARING AID SALES ROSE 40% WHEN PRESIDENT REAGAN GOT HIS.