(FORTUNE Magazine) – Generation Xers are storming Vietnam. Some see it as the place to make their fortunes, others as a smart career move, still others as something cool to do after college. The one thing these adventurers all share: a total absence of baggage from the past. Those memories belong to their parents--and to the parents of Vietnam's own twentysomethings. "My father was Vietcong, a real Communist, but even he says the war is over," says Phan Minh Thu, 26, an ad saleswoman at the Vietnam Investment Review. Adds American George Mack, also 26, who works for a Caterpillar dealer: "The war means nothing to me."

A few lucky expats with jobs at the likes of IBM live like lords on full U.S. salaries. But even earning a more typical $1,500 a month, you can still afford an apartment with maid- cum-cook--and have enough left over for a savings account.

Despite Vietnam's official policy of doi moi, or economic renovation, some big foreign investors are backing off, spooked by shifting ground rules and accelerating crime and corruption. Even so, says Motorola rep Patrick Aronson, 26, "you're in the heart of it. It's not user-friendly, but that's the fun of it."

Interested? Get a tourist visa, come over, and start knocking on doors, advises a local headhunter. You can also check out the job listings in the American Chamber of Commerce's local newsletter. And be sure to ask other expats for help; they hang out at joints like Apocalypse Now, a bar with branches in both Saigon and Hanoi. Landing a job will pose other visa problems, but you can take them as they come.

--A year ago Brad Anger, 26, had given up on Vietnam and had bought his ticket home. He'd been fired from his job as a consultant to a Hong Kong investment bank, and he was banged up from a motorbike accident and feeling low. Then France's Pernod Ricard signed up the Rhode Islander as marketing manager to promote such brands as Wild Turkey bourbon and Jameson Irish Whiskey. "I now have a home, my own mobile phone, the biggest motorbike in town, my girlfriends, and enough money to go to Thailand or Indonesia on the spur," says the William and Mary economics grad, shown in a Saigon street and with a bar hostess.

Anger set his sights on Asia because "in Europe and the States it takes five years before you can have any say in the decision-making." Selling liquor in a country that's just kicked off a campaign against social vices adds to the intrigue of Anger's job: "It's the unpredictability that makes Vietnam so exciting."

--Working for a Caterpillar dealer takes George Mack all over, from an open-cast coal mine (left) near the northern port of Haiphong to a ferry terminal (above), and up and down Route 1, Vietnam's main north-to-south highway. "I'd never want this job in the States," says Mack, 26, who found the position through a friend. "It would be boring." Nor would the pay go as far. But here he can afford a cook and a maid, trips to Burma and Thailand, and a visit to his mother in Saratoga Springs, New York. He also has enough left over to invest in "hare-brained schemes in Vietnam"-- schemes he won't identify. "As a tall, blond male," Mack adds, "I'm the center of attention. It's pretty easy to get massively egotistical."

While studying economics at Hamilton, Mack spent a semester at Hanoi University and returned in 1993 to take advantage of "five million opportunities." Among them: tracking the number of doorknobs and toilets needed in new hotels.

--Hien Hoang was a small child when his parents reached Seattle by way of a long boat ride and a spell in a refugee camp in Malaysia. At 24, he's back in Vietnam. After teaching English to rich locals, Hoang is now a marketing director for Hilti, a Liechtenstein manufacturer of power tools that's capitalizing on a construction boom. The job, found through a local newspaper ad, takes Hoang to such spots as the roof of a new Saigon office and residential tower (right).

Fluency in Vietnamese and knowledge of Western ways (he studied international business and finance at the University of Washington) give him advantages. "I'm the one that goes to lunch with the boss," he says. At the same time, he gets the local "discount" when he visits tourist sites (30 cents, vs. $5).

Meanwhile, cousins who grew up in Vietnam keep his feet on the ground when they all go out to sample the nightlife. "They make me wear a long-sleeve Oxford instead of shorts and a T-shirt, so I don't stand out," he says.

But when Hoang gets homesick, he climbs back into his T-shirt and heads for Saigon's Burger Khan, where he meets his American friends for cheeseburgers and a few brews (below). Other times he plays host in his apartment, where everybody huddles around a VCR to see pirated versions of Hollywood movies. For munchies, forget about Vietnamese spring rolls; Hoang is much more likely to serve peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

--"Crazy American," laugh some of the 100 Vietnamese workers when designer James Wolf, 26 (taking a break at left), sings along with Jimi Hendrix over a boom box at the Bamboo Hardwoods factory outside Saigon. Founded by college dropout Doug Lewis, also 26 (above, doing lunch with Wolf and some of their employees), the place makes bamboo panels for furniture and flooring to be assembled and sold around the world. Lewis became a fan of bamboo as an ecologically sound alternative to hardwoods at the urging of his mom, "a botanical, hippie-ish landscape gardener," and the two ran a bamboo nursery in Seattle. Private investors enabled Lewis to open his factory. He met and hired Wolf, a New Yorker who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, at a bamboo trade show in Bali.

Lewis hardly looks like your typical CEO, and he claims he got a D in business class. Even so, he's confident of making a profit in 1996, less than two years after starting his business.

--Felicity Wood, 26, got no static from her parents when she left to work in Vietnam: They'd met and married there when her father was in the foreign service during the war and her mother a doctor. Wood, a University of Pennsylvania urban studies grad, is director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Saigon. She visited Washington in 1995, lobbying for normalizing relations. "That's one of the reasons I took the job," she says. "The U.S. and Vietnam were like a couple that hadn't talked for 20 years." Below, Wood with her landlady, who "sends photos of me to her children in California and France."

--Partners Steve Kullback, Tamara Richardson, and Liem Le ride the company wheels through Hanoi (right) and then find themselves in the countryside, checking out the future site for a $78 million golf course and residential community for expats. The partnership began in 1995 when Le learned that Barings bank, where he'd had ten interviews and which seemed keen to hire him in Singapore, had collapsed. Le, whose family fled Vietnam after the communist victory, had just completed his international relations studies at the University of California, San Diego. "It was like, Oh, my God. I had to ask what I wanted to do in life," Le, 26, recalls. Then he remembered an earlier trip to Vietnam and decided to return. He hit the E-mail, asking former classmate Kullback, 30, to go with him to help look for entrepreneurial opportunities. Kullback quit grad school and along with Richardson (they're an item), 26, made the trip. Says Kullback: "We each took $4,500 of our own money and threw it in a shoebox." Thus was born Pacifica Vietnam Ltd., a consulting firm that includes the golf club developer among its clients.

--His editing work on Zen and the Art of Resource Editing helped Noah Potkin put together $5,000--enough to set out to see the world. He hit England, India, and Thailand before reaching Vietnam in early 1993. He found work as a $40-a-day extra in a Korean movie about the Vietnam war. He played several roles, says Potkin, 25, including that of the helicopter pilot who evacuated the last Americans from the roof of the U.S. Embassy. He then opted to put his computer savvy to good use and got a job at Lotus Communications, a desktop publisher and design firm in Saigon. No relation to the U.S. outfit, this is Vietnamese owned. Potkin's business card shows a debonair Westerner in top hat and tails inscribed rich, successful american--rich enough to move out of the humble home shown here, where he showered with a bucket and a scoop, into one with hot running water. He remains a fan of Vietnam's fragrant cuisine.

--A week after collecting her diploma from Brown University, Julie Amato was on a plane to Vietnam. She'd already spent time at Hanoi University; her curiosity about Vietnam dates back to high school in Ithaca, New York, where many Vietnamese students joined the international club she headed. She worked hard at learning Vietnamese and remembers her first dinner out in Hanoi. "I was so nervous at getting the numbers right, I got up and forgot to pay." When she returned, she found a job teaching English. By now, she was also speaking great Vietnamese. In fact, when she called about a job at DMJM International, a U.S. architectural and engineering consulting firm, the secretary thought she was Vietnamese. "That's all we wanted to hear," said her new boss.

Amato's job includes surveying folks living along Route 1 on how rebuilding the highway might affect them. In this Hanoi scene, Amato, 24, accompanies a cyclo making an important delivery: her Lunar New Year gift for a client--a kumquat tree.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Amy R. Kover