A Triangle Comes Full Circle

Bernard Fall Loved His Wife but His Life Belonged to Vietnam

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 -- "

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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.