Combat Chic

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If movies like the 2001 Brad Pitt thriller Spy Game are to be believed, the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s and '80s made the perfect backdrop for romance, chilled beer and good surf. Now Beirut's club scene offers a choice spot to get a taste of that cinematic vision: 1975, a tiny bar named for the year Shi'ite, Sunni and Christian militias sparked the 15-year conflict that devastated the city and killed thousands, including 241 U.S. Marines.

It would be easy to miss 1975, tel: (961-3) 323 700, on Monot Street in Ashrafiyeh, one of Beirut's hippest quarters, but the life-size mannequin of a combatant climbing the military webbing near the window gives it away.

Inside, mortar shells and spent grenades are propped on ledges of the rough, bullet-pocked walls. Scrawled graffiti on the mezzanine level extols loyalty to armed factions, and the ceiling is lined with barbed wire. The music is not the techno pop blasting all night from most DJs' turntables across Beirut, but the nationalist crooning of wartime stars like Fayrouz.

Some might consider this bad taste in a city where massive bombs continue to go off, recently killing Lebanon's former Prime Minister and a prominent journalist. Yet the war is hot these days. A nightclub called B-018, tel: (961-1) 580 018, has seats fashioned like coffins that fold down to form a dance floor. T shirts for tourists boast, beirut: it's a blast.

But nothing seems to match 1975's dedication to martial morbidness. Here, you can sink into the bar's floor cushions that look like filled sandbags, and order a cocktail from a waiter dressed in combat fatigues who was born long after 1975 — like those sipping the drinks. So what draws the young and trendy Lebanese crowd? "Our parents tell us the war was a good time," says bartender Ali Ajami, 21. It can certainly seem that way from the comfort of 1975.