A Triangle Comes Full Circle

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.

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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.