A Triangle Comes Full Circle
Bernard Fall Loved His Wife but His Life Belonged to Vietnam

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer

The first sustained gunfire you hear on Bernard B. Fall's last tape recording is the rhythmic rat-tat-tat of a rifle somewhere far away.

"That's Charlie company firing," Fall explains, his voice rich and clear over the chasm of 40 years. An airplane can be heard in the background. Then the closer booming of a machine gun, followed by an explosion. "There's our mortar," he says.

Tension floats through the 1967 recording of the day when Fall, the legendary military historian, was killed in Vietnam. It seeps into his calm voice as he narrates the final moments of his life. It's in the shouts of the nervous Marines with whom he's on patrol.

And all these years later it escapes from the tape player in the basement of Dorothy Fall's Northwest Washington home, where until recently she kept much of the memory of her famous husband boxed up and shut away.

"Shadows are lengthening," he says quietly near the tape's abrupt end. "We've reached one of our phase lines after the firefight, and it smells bad, meaning it's a little bit suspicious. Could be an amb -- "

* * *

Bernard Fall's name is not one you will find on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, though he died like so many whose names are etched into its black granite. He knew better than most what a soldier, and an army, faced in that war.

His name is carved, instead, on his tombstone in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery, above the legend, "He believed in truth and sought it at its source."

He sought it, indeed. From the battleground, he detailed the agony of the French army's defeat in Vietnam in his 1960s books "Street Without Joy" and "Hell in a Very Small Place."

He wrote passionately, and when he was silenced by death his memory was set aside amid the pain of his passing and the new life his family was forced to begin. The haunting tape was still in the damaged tape recorder that Dorothy Fall received along with other personal effects: his smashed camera with film also still in it, his helmet and the clothes he had on when he died.

Fall, now 77, always wanted to write a book about her husband. And she began it in 1972 -- five years after he and one of the Marines he was with were killed that afternoon near Hue. But her emotions were still raw. She was not yet ready to relinquish him to history.

His death made front-page news around the world. Only 40 when he died, Fall was a celebrated and controversial scholar of the disastrous French war in Indochina in the 1950s, and he preached of the hazards of conflict there.

He was a man whose warnings could have changed U.S. policy -- if only the American presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, had read his work. That is what former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, who served as an officer in Vietnam, wrote of Fall years later.

Fall was an outsize figure. A member of the French underground during World War II and a professor at Howard University, his home, where his wife still lives, was visited by politicians, government officials and journalists seeking guidance on Vietnam.

He interviewed the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and was deeply moved by the heroism and sacrifice of the French military, which lost 95,000 soldiers during its struggle in Vietnam.

But he was sobered by the enemy's resolve and by the crushing hardship of fighting in the fastness of Southeast Asia.

For a time, he was thought by the U.S. government to be a French spy, and the FBI staked out the family home, tapped the phone and read the mail, his wife said.

* * *

Dorothy Fall, an accomplished artist, was 36 when her husband died, leaving her with an infant and two other small children. They had been married for 13 years.

She was the Dorothy to whom he dedicated one book and "the American girl who is now my wife" in the preface to another.

They met in 1952 at Syracuse University, where she was a student and he was a visiting Fulbright scholar.

He was a native of Vienna who had lost both parents in the Holocaust, but he fought in the French resistance and French army during World War II. He rarely told people where he was born; he considered himself French.

She was a sheltered girl from Rochester, N.Y., the daughter of an immigrant tailor who worked as a pocketmaker for a big clothing company.

The couple fell in love and married two years later. But Bernard had already come under the spell of a jealous mistress, as he and his wife both put it: Vietnam.

He had become fascinated with the country while studying in Washington at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1952. He decided to make it the subject of his dissertation.

Vietnam was a remote and exotic land caught up in the titanic struggle of the Cold War. It was a place where some of the fighting was still done with poison darts and blowguns, Fall would report, and where France was losing its battle with the communists.

Fall made his first research trip to Vietnam in 1953 and another in 1957. He went to Thailand, Laos and briefly back to Vietnam in 1959. He published "Street Without Joy" -- named after the same guerrilla-infested strip north of Hue where he would later be killed -- in 1961.

That same year, he and his family moved to Cambodia for six months. While there, Fall asked for and was granted permission to visit North Vietnam. He stayed for two weeks and landed rare interviews with Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong.

Back home in 1963, Fall found that he had become a sensation. He was interviewed on network TV, and wrote, lectured and taught incessantly. And he irritated the State Department, which considered him to be a "neutralist, crypto-communist," his wife learned later.

Dorothy moved the family into the house in Washington's Forest Hills neighborhood that would be her home for the next 40 years, and Bernard's for the next three.

It was airy and modern, and had a huge stone fireplace that was open on two sides. Bernard would set up his office in the front of the basement; Dorothy would take the back for her art.

But at that moment in 1963, Bernard got sick. He developed a rare disorder that was strangling his kidneys and colon with fibrous tissue. He wound up in the hospital for two months, and one of his kidneys had to be removed.

It was a hard time for the Falls, made worse by the obvious surveillance of the FBI, which was stationed outside the house observing the family's mundane comings and goings.

While the FBI watched, U.S. involvement in Vietnam deepened, the national debate over the war became poisonous and Fall's profile grew.

Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and George McGovern came to visit, along with CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and journalists Tom Wicker, Stanley Karnow and David Halberstam.

* * *

Fall returned to Vietnam in 1965 and began work on his book "Hell in a Very Small Place," a moment-by-moment account of the 1954 siege of the French outpost at Dien Bien Phu.

He finished it in 1966, won a George Polk Award for interpretive reporting the same year, and then a Guggenheim fellowship for a study of the Viet Cong.

Amid the crescendo of war and public protest, Fall had become one of the leading scholars of Vietnam.

And now he had to go back.

This time, his family would be close by. Dorothy and the children would move to Hong Kong to make visiting possible.

As he prepared to leave on Dec. 8, 1966, he and his wife were both worried.

Earlier, he had made a tape recording for her, to be played if anything should happen to him. She found it after his death. In it, he expressed his love but noted the "fairly rough five or six years of psychological pressure" he had been under, and he urged her to conduct a thorough investigation if there was anything suspicious about his demise.

That morning, all she could say, she would write later, was: "Bernard, don't go."

He said he had to.

Fall was in Vietnam before Christmas, but it was February by the time Dorothy rented out their home and moved the children to Hong Kong.

She had just enrolled them in school, and on Feb. 21, Dorothy had lunch with Annette Karnow, a fellow artist and the wife of the historian, who was then a Hong Kong-based reporter for The Washington Post.

Six hundred miles away, Bernard was on his last patrol.

He had jumped at the chance to go on, what was for him, a profound journey.

Fourteen years after the futile French assault on the "Street Without Joy" sector north of Hue, an attack that Fall had chronicled, at a place that he had made famous, the Marines were going back.

"February 19, comma, nineteen hundred and sixty-seven," Fall had begun his last recording three days before. "This is Bernard Fall in the Street Without Joy."

It was late at night when Dorothy heard the knock on the door of her home in Hong Kong. There, with two other friends, stood Annette Karnow, whose husband had been working late and had just heard the news: Bernard had stepped on an enemy land mine. He died instantly.

* * *

In 1995, Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense during much of the Vietnam War, published a memoir in which he lamented the lack of Vietnam experts who might have helped the U.S. avoid its mistakes there.

Dorothy Fall was incensed: She knew that one of the most renowned Vietnam experts had lived less than 10 miles from the Pentagon, and McNamara had never called.

She was then in her mid-60s. Her companion and housemate for more than 20 years, the Cold War national security analyst Arthur Macy Cox, had died two years before. Theirs was a rich life. But while he was living, she says, "I really didn't feel I could write about my previous husband."

Now, free and motivated, perhaps she could. Bernard was still there in those boxes in the basement.

But Vietnam was so long ago. How could she reconnect with those times and unlock a story that had been closeted for so long? She used the most familiar tool she had: her art.

Slowly she began to paint scenes of Vietnam -- kaleidoscopic images of lush landscapes, people, color, war. Many included renderings of a woman with burning red eyes, or a murky female face glimpsed as if under water.

The art opened the door to the writing. "I really was able to touch on my emotions," she said. "I had kept a lot of them sort of hidden . . . for all those years . . . subjugated."

A quarter-century after she packed them away, she dusted off her memories of Bernard and resumed work on the book.

Last year, four decades after he left their home for the last time, she published "Bernard Fall, Memories of a Soldier-Scholar." The paperback is due out any day, she says.

Earlier this month, as Vietnam veterans prepared to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Wall, Fall stood by the desk where her husband had worked and said she still has dreams of his return. "Where've you been hiding all these years?" she asks him. "Why did you leave us?"

And often in these dreams she senses the presence of the other woman. Vietnam.