By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

FRANK GIBNEY'S FIRST VISION OF Vietnam was postapocalyptic. "The ghosts of the war were everywhere," he recalls of his trip in March 1984. "The piles of Huey chopper parts at Tan Son Nhut airport, the musty bar of the Caravelle Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. In Hanoi rats scurried through the hotel; the water was cold." There was an air of huddled secrecy. "You couldn't get a straight answer out of anyone. The people who could articulate the state of affairs were diplomats, themselves grasping at bits of information."

Today Gibney is Time's Hanoi bureau chief, heading the first official bureau of an American newsmagazine to reopen in Vietnam since the war ended. The country, he discovers, is still caught up in an epic struggle, but this time a kind of Paradise Regained. "You have to strain to find the war now," he says. "And it's beside the point." Everywhere, the economy is booming, and, says Gibney, "everyone wants a piece of Vietnam's future." Even legendary war hero General Vo Nguyen Giap, now in his 80s, who used to talk of nothing but the war, is snapping up books about development. "Vietnam," Giap told Gibney, "will be one of the key topics of the 21st century."

In this century, however, the war remains a living memory, in both Vietnam and America. Senior writer George Church, who put together this issue's history of the last days of the war--as recalled by its survivors--remembers a personal dilemma. "Originally, I was a strong hawk," he says. "But the 1968 Tet offensive convinced me that we could fight forever and not win--certainly until my son, then six, reached draft age. Let's hope nothing ever tears us apart this way again." The Vietnamese too, Gibney notes, "are beginning to re-evaluate the terrible losses of the war."

Born in New York City and raised in Japan, Gibney has been in Asia since the early '80s, covering the region for Newsweek until last year. Last week he was filing reports on Vietnam to our offices in New York as he lay on his bed, suffering from a couple of herniated disks. (To work on his computer, says Asia editor Don Morrison, Gibney "had weights and pulleys rigged up.") The fact that he roams from a base in Vietnam, says Gibney, typifies today's mercurial, surprising Asia. "Five years ago, the story here was coups and authoritarianism. Now it is business. It's all new, and it's great to have a front-row seat." Even from flat on his back.