RIVER OF TIME.<i> By Jon Swain</i> .<i> St. Martin’s: 282 pp., $22.95</i>

The night that Jon Swain arrived in Indochina in 1970, a colleague from Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, took him to dinner at the Cafe de Paris in Phnom Penh, which, like the Cambodian capital itself, was a place of faded elegance and Oriental charm.

“Indo-China is a like a beautiful woman,” the old Asian hand told Swain, then in his early 20s and fresh out of Paris. “She overwhelms you and you never quite understand why. Sometimes a man can lose his heart to a place, one that lures him back again and again.”

Those words would be prophetic, and for much of the next 30 years, Swain, now with the Sunday Times, would devote his distinguished journalistic career--and all of his heart--to Indochina, France’s old Asian colonial empire of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, a region that has captured the soul of so many Westerners for so many years.

Swain’s book, “River of Time,” a reference to the Mekong River that flows through Indochina, came at a perfect time for me. I read it in Hanoi, where I had just moved upon my own return to Indochina after an absence of 27 years. If I needed any reminder of why I had come back, Swain’s splendid memoir provided ample reason. Southeast Asia can lay claim to a traveler’s heart like no place I have ever been.

“River of Time” is Swain’s account of the war years from 1970 to 1975, which he spent in Vietnam and Cambodia. But more than a war story, it is a tale, at once tragic and beautiful, of love and loss, of coming of age and of witnessing the end of Indochina as the West had known it for more than a century. The war may well have been the last one we will ever know in which foreign correspondents helped shape history as surely as the military did.

Returning to Vietnam now with my laptop computer, mobile phone and seaborne container of household furniture, I admit to feeling some nostalgia for the journalistic era of which Swain writes so gracefully and which is no more. It was an era in which reporters, as we were then called, arrived in Vietnam to cover the war with a single suitcase. Our tools consisted of only two items: an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter and a Nikon 35-millimeter camera. Like Swain, we didn’t want to be editors, and other than wanting our stories and pictures from the field to shine with charity and truth, most of us weren’t particularly ambitious.

After all that has been written about America’s war in Vietnam and Cambodia, one would think there might not be much left to say. But Swain’s account is, in many ways, new and refreshing. Perhaps because he is a Briton, working for French and, later, British news organizations, he does not fall victim to the guilt and endless analysis that characterizes many American writers’ work. He admires the gutsiness of the Viet Cong as well as the inexhaustible energy of the American GIs. He respects some units of the much-disparaged South Vietnamese military, with whom he spent a good deal of time in the field, and he has boundless compassion for the Vietnamese and Cambodia civilians who suffered so greatly.

One of those civilians, a French-born Vietnamese named Jacqueline “became the person I loved most in the world,” and he weaves through his pursuit of the war the story of their love. She is the symbol of all that Swain found captivating in Indochina, yet twice when she needs him most--once at the fall of Saigon in 1975 and once after she has returned to France--Swain leaves her in favor of the Big Story.

“I fell into the trap of many foreign correspondents--not knowing how to turn down an assignment,” Swain says. Those who are destined to wander understand the lament well, and those who have experienced the cynicism and romance of war, who have known the adrenal rush of battle, will understand why Swain could not leave war alone and why he returned to Cambodia even as other Westerners were being evacuated.

Swain witnessed Phnom Penh’s fall to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, and his account of the events that paralleled the story line for the acclaimed film “The Killing Fields” still makes for riveting reading. His daring chronicle of those dangerous, wretched days with the New York Times’ Sydney Schanberg and Schanberg’s interpreter and guide, Dith Pran, should lay to rest the ill-conceived stereotype that correspondents covered the war in Indochina from the rooftop terrace of Saigon’s Caravel Hotel.

“I was still young enough to believe that death, even in Cambodia, happens mostly to others. Now I was faced with death myself,” Swain writes. But he and Schanberg were saved by Pran, who risked his own life arguing with the Khmer Rouge guerrillas for the lives of his friends. Phnom Penh was the scariest place on Earth when the American-backed Lon Nol government fell to the Khmer Rouge. Summary executions, tides of refugees, besieged embassies: This was the start of the Khmer Rouge’s “year zero,” in which cities would be emptied of their populations and more than a million Cambodians would die.

Swain took refuge at the French Embassy with Schanberg and Pran and hundreds of other Cambodians, who eventually were forced to leave, marched away into the countryside by the Khmer Rouge. Pran was among them, despite attempts to give him forged papers identifying him as a British passport-holder of Nepalese origin. The Westerners in the compound were sent in a convoy of trucks to Thailand. It took years for Pran to escape his Khmer Rouge captors and be reunited with Schanberg and Swain. Although many of us who saw “The Killing Fields” know about the terror of Cambodia, Swain’s personal account is so compelling and adds so much rich new detail that I never felt as though I were reading old history. Indeed, it is his words, and not the movie’s images, that will come to mind in future years when I think about Cambodia’s nightmare.

When the war was over and Swain had moved to Bangkok, he gathered regularly at the Oriental Hotel with other correspondents who had covered the war. But beneath their laughter and shared tales of sexual adventures and derring-do, there was a sense of melancholia and gloom.

“Life seemed pointless,” Swain writes. “Nostalgia for Indo-China gnawed at our hearts.” It is not surprising. For correspondents, wars in Angola and Lebanon and Ethiopia never quite matched Indochina for sheer drama, impact and exhilaration of lifestyle. If Indochina was to be the last war of its sort, Swain has given us a vivid portrait to remember it by, and I was not surprised to pick up a newspaper the other day and see the byline of Jon Swain, reporting once again from Cambodia.