A Triangle Comes Full Circle

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.