Remembering a leading critic of the war in Vietnam

BERNARD FALL: MEMORIES OF A SOLDIER-SCHOLAR

By Dorothy Fall

Potomac Books, $24.95, 285 pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN GREENYA

In 1971, four years after the death of her beloved husband Bernard, Dorothy Fall set out to write this book. But after running into two problems — the FBI’s refusal to release his file and the demands of raising three young girls — she shelved the project. Twenty-four years later, heartened by the publication of Robert McNamara’s “In Retrospect” and President Bill Clinton’s directing the FBI to be “more forthcoming” in releasing files, she reapplied to the bureau, and five years later her request was granted.

By this point Dorothy Fall, an artist not a writer, was in her 70th year, but her resolve was as strong as it had ever been, perhaps even more so in light of the fact that in all those years no one had written a biography of this warrior-academic whose warnings about the quagmire known as Vietnam had fallen on deaf ears despite his singular expertise. So she began anew, and the result is a captivating book that is equal parts historical primer, personal love story, and eerie reminder of the folly of waging an unconventional war in an unfamiliar land.

The Falls met at the University of Syracuse in 1951 where Dorothy Winer was a senior and Bernard, a French student who’d won a Fulbright scholarship, was a graduate student. But to call Bernard Fall a graduate student is like calling Jimmy Carter a carpenter. Fall’s parents had been killed by the Nazis (his mother perished at Auschwitz, his father was killed by the Gestapo), he’d fought in the French Resistance as a teenager, and later in the French Army, and he’d worked for the Americans as an investigator/interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials.

As class vice president and co-chair of the Human Relations Committee, Dorothy was part of a group that had invited Bernard to give one of a series of lectures by foreign students; as a budding artist, she did the posters, which depicted “an entirely stereotyped Frenchman” with a twirling mustache, wearing a black beret and with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

When they met prior to his talk, Fall asked, “Who is that idiot who did those stupid posters?” After that, things improved. “I was soon in awe,” she writes. “Bernard was not like anyone I had ever met. The students I dated were still boys. Bernard spoke candidly of his life in France, his roles with the Resistance and with the French army, the fate of his family, and his work at the Nuremberg trials. I was both shocked and fascinated by this self-confident young man who had already experienced so much of life.”

In many ways, those two reactions, shock and fascination, were emblematic of their relatively short life together.

At the suggestion of one of his professors, who had given his paper “Political Development in Indo-China” an A+, Fall chose Vietnam as the topic of his doctoral thesis, a choice that would dominate — and shorten — his life.

As would be his wont for the entirety of his professional life, he decided that the only way to understand his subject was to go Southeast Asia and do his research on the ground, so to speak. What followed was a six-month period during which he conducted scholarly interviews in Paris and other cities and then spent several months on the move with the troops (“embedded” before the term gained currency). To the consternation of Dorothy, that would be the pattern of his work from then on.

“For me, the prospect of him 12,000 miles away, and in physical danger, was profoundly disturbing. I didn’t want him to risk his life and I didn’t want us to be separated for that long. I had to wonder if such a trip was compatible with his avowed love for me …”

That wonder would stay with her for the next 13 years, until late in 1966 when Bernard Fall took one trip too many. On Feb. 21, 1967, Fall was shot and killed as he marched with a group of Marines along Saigon’s Street Without Joy, which he had helped make famous in his 1961 book of the same name. He was 40 years old.

At the time of his death Bernard Fall was arguably the best-informed critic of the war in Vietnam. As his widow explains (and always with documented evidence) his opinion was not just valued but sought by any number of military leaders because he truly was, as the subtitle indicates, a soldier-scholar, but neither the White House nor the Defense Department wanted to hear what he had to say.

I won’t bother to list the number of times I was reminded of the Present Situation, except to note that when asked (by its American maker) what he thought of the prototype for the Commando, a small jungle warfare vehicle, Fall told them it was “… completely inadequate and it was quickly scrapped. His suggestion to incorporate more belly armor, as a protection against landmines, and interior cooling for the occupants were later incorporated into the plans for the vehicle.”

Nearing the end of the book, Dorothy Fall again laments her husband’s decision to go to the scene of the fighting in order to gather the “hard facts at first hand,” a justification he used frequently. Why? she wants to know: “Is this crazy or what? He has to do this to feel great? Was I to join him in saving the world? Was his mission to warn the country more important than his children and me? …”

Throughout history, men have gone to war and their women have waited, in fear or anger or both, for them to return, and now it is the turn of some men to wait while their women go off to war. As Dorothy Fall makes crystal clear it’s never easy, especially when the decision to go is entirely personal and not a mandate of the government.

It may seem a strange word to use, but this is a lovely book about an important man — important to his adopted country, important to his many friends and to his students at Howard University where he taught for a decade, and most of all important to his wife and children. It is that last importance that makes this book so sad.

John Greenya is a Washington writer.