Old Indochina Hands of the Press Gather Again in ‘Haunted City’ of Phnom Penh : Media: A reporter calls Sihanouk’s return ‘the last act of the Vietnam War.’

Their hair is starting to thin. Some are beginning to show signs of a paunch, while others are obliged to wear eyeglasses to see their notebooks.

But these are the only visible concessions to the passage of time for the Old Indochina Hands, reporters and photographers who came of age covering the Vietnam War and the “sideshow” conflict in Cambodia.

For many of the journalists who reported on the war in the 1960s and ‘70s, the return of Prince Norodom Sihanouk to his homeland Thursday seemed like the end of an era--and an irresistible chance to return to their old haunts to cover one of the most enduring figures of Asia. In some ways, it seemed like a family reunion.

“It’s the last act of the Vietnam War,” said James Pringle, a soft-spoken Scotsman who covered the Indochina conflict for Newsweek magazine and the news agency Reuters. “There’s a sense of history turning full circle with Sihanouk returning.”

Al Rockoff, a war photographer who was portrayed by actor John Malkovich in the film “The Killing Fields,” was surprised to find a bicycle taxi driver who appeared in his famous 1975 photograph of a rocket attack outside the Monorom Hotel. The cyclo driver was standing in virtually the same position when Rockoff found him 16 years later.

“It’s deja vu all over again,” said Rockoff, who now lives in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. “Phnom Penh is like a haunted city.”

During a tour of Toul Sleng, the memorial to thousands of Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge when it ruled the country from 1975 to early 1979, Rockoff saw the photograph of a former girlfriend among those murdered.

But he said that if given the choice, he would do it all over again. “Cambodia was my graduate school,” he said.

Ron Moreau, who covered the war for Newsweek and is now its Bangkok bureau chief, said Phnom Penh has changed considerably since the final days of the conflict in 1975. Until the end, he said, the city retained its French colonial flavor.

“You really knew things were falling apart when people started complaining about the quality of the langouste flambe Armagnac,” Moreau recalled. “It was very seductive. You could get your adrenalin rush by driving out in a Mercedes to see a firefight and then return in time for an evening briefing and dinner at the Cafe de Paris.”

Moreau is still surprised to find himself enjoying a French lunch at the Hotel Cambodiana, a hotel started in 1972 but completed only last year. When Moreau was here in 1975, the uncompleted skeleton of the hotel housed thousands of refugees from the countryside.

The Cambodiana is a luxurious alternative to the Hotel Royale, the city’s press headquarters in Sihanouk’s day. Bats still skitter down the hallways at the Royale, which figured prominently in “The Killing Fields,” but the courtyard is filled these days with Vietnamese prostitutes, their faces painted alabaster white, sitting under Tiger Beer umbrellas.

Journalists no longer need haunt the central post office, where a maddeningly slow telex used to relay dispatches abroad. Reporters now send their stories back by portable satellite telephone stations brought in for the occasion by the wire services. Cambodia even has direct-dial phones in some buildings, thanks to Australian technology.

Some nostalgic photographers set off in search of Madame Chantal’s, the most notorious opium den in Southeast Asia. But all traces of both the building and the proprietress have long since disappeared.

Tim Page, a puckish British photographer who still walks with a pronounced limp from his Vietnam War wounds, said he cherishes memories of Phnom Penh as “the quintessential laid-back city. You came here because there was always an easy story. Cambodia always was a pleasant interlude.”

Page is also in the region to complete plans for construction of a memorial to journalists from both sides who were killed in the war. Page is chief fund-raiser for the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, which will raise its monument on the 17th Parallel, the so-called demilitarized zone between the former North and South Vietnam.

Brian Barron, a British Broadcasting Corp. television reporter who, with cameraman Eric Thirer, covered Sihanouk’s downfall in 1970 and the collapse of the successor government of Lon Nol in 1975, described Phnom Penh as “a place full of ghosts.”

“In 1969, I interviewed Sihanouk over a glass of champagne at the royal palace,” Barron recalled. “It was an autocracy then, and I’m sure it’s going back to that now. There are so many scores unsettled, I can’t believe even Sihanouk can turn the other cheek.”

Barron, now based in Hong Kong, said he believes that many correspondents literally fell in love in Asia and can’t avoid coming back. While Barron is married to a Singaporean, Moreau, Jean Claude Pomonti of Le Monde and CBS cameraman Derek Williams all married Vietnamese and have recently returned to live in Bangkok.

“Indochina always casts a spell on Europeans,” said Pringle, whose wife, Millie, is a Cambodian expatriate.

Many of the longtime Indochina reporters are extremely cynical, not only about the superficial changes in Phnom Penh but about the chances of survival for the new coalition government in Cambodia.

“Life is starting again, but I have seen life start again many times, in 1970, in 1975, in 1979, and it only meant deaths,” said Tiziano Terzani, an Italian who covered Vietnam for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “I am very pessimistic about what goes on.”

Denis Gray, 47-year-old Bangkok bureau chief for the Associated Press, has spent his entire reporting career in Southeast Asia, except for a one-year stint in Germany. Gray was among the last reporters to leave Phnom Penh in 1975 and was the first American newsman to return in 1979 after the Khmer Rouge was ousted by Vietnam.

Gray said he is heartened by the fact that two decades of war have not erased Cambodia’s strong sense of culture.

“It’s not all destroyed or eradicated,” Gray said. “The fact that everyone, from old Communists to evil royalists, are standing side by side paying homage to Buddhist monks is one of the finer aspects of returning here now.”

But Gray said that as soon as the media circus is over, he is planning to give up his room at the posh Hotel Cambodiana and move back into the Hotel Royale, despite its dilapidated condition.

“All this luxury is just not the old Phnom Penh,” he said.