AFTER HIS FALL

The haunting tape was still in the damaged tape recorder that Dorothy Fall received along with other personal effects: his smashed camera with film inside, his helmet and the clothes he had on when he died. 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. From the battleground, he detailed the agony of the French army8217;s defeat in Vietnam in his 1960s books Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place.

For a time, he was thought by the US government to be a French spy, and the FBI staked out the family home, his wife said. Dorothy Fall, 77, an accomplished artist, was 36 when her husband died, leaving her with an infant and two other small children.

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 Joy8212;named after the same guerrilla-infested strip north of Hue where he would later be killed8212;in 1961.

That same year, he and his family moved to Cambodia for six months. He 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 but the State Department considered him a 8220;neutralist, crypto-communist,8221; his wife learned later. That same year, Bernard 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 their house.

Meanwhile, the US involvement in Vietnam deepened, the national debate over the war became poisonous and Fall8217;s profile grew. Sens. Edward Kennedy and George McGovern came to visit, along with CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and journalists Tom Wicker, Stanley Karnow and David Halberstam.

As Fall prepared to go back to Vietnam on Dec. 8, 1966, all Dorothy could say, she would write later, was: 8220;Bernard, don8217;t go.8221; Fall was in Vietnam before Christmas, but it was February by the time Dorothy moved to Hong Kong. On Feb. 21, while Dorothy had lunch with a friend, 600 miles away, Bernard was on his last patrol. Fourteen years after the futile French assault on the Street Without Joy sector north of Hue, an attack Fall had chronicled, the Marines were going back.

It was late at night when Dorothy heard the knock on the door. There, stood her friend Annette Karnow with the news: Bernard had stepped on an enemy land mine. He died instantly.

In 1995, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defence during much of the Vietnam War, published a memoir in which he lamented the lack of Vietnam experts. 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.

While he was living, she says, 8220;I really didn8217;t feel I could write about my previous husband.8221; Now, free and motivated, perhaps she could. Bernard was still there in those boxes in the basement. Slowly she began to paint scenes of Vietnam8212;kaleidoscopic images of lush landscapes, people, color, war. The art opened the door to the writing. 8220;I really was able to touch on my emotions,8221; she said. 8220;I had kept a lot of them sort of hidden8230;for all those years8230;8221;

Last year, she published Bernard Fall, Memories of a Soldier-Scholar. The paperback was released last Friday. She says in her dreams of Fall she still senses the presence of the other woman. Vietnam.

-Michael E. Ruane LAT-WP