[Infowarrior] - Bernard Fall: The Man Who Knew the War

[Richard Forno]

(Fall's books are must-read references for serious practitioners/scholars of low intensity/counterinsurgency warfare. They are mind-grippingly written and the military lessons are timeless....several of his works are on my bookshelf.  -- rick)

Bernard Fall: The Man Who Knew the War

Fredrik Logevall

VIETNAM '67 FEB. 21, 2017

Fifty years ago today, on Feb. 21, 1967, the journalist Bernard Fall stepped on a land mine while accompanying Marines on a mission near Hue, in South Vietnam. He died instantly. He was 40 years old.

The literature on the Vietnam War is enormous and growing, but Fall’s work still stands out for its insight and sagacity. He remains our greatest writer on the struggle, despite the fact that he died before the period of heavy American military involvement had reached its halfway point.

Fall wrote six books on the Indochina conflict, along with more than 100 articles in popular publications like The New York Times Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and The New Republic, as well as academic journals. Many an officer who shipped out to Saigon carried with him a dog-eared copy of “Street Without Joy: Indochina at War, 1946–1954,” published in 1961. In early 1968, when it seemed possible that American forces could be in for a disastrous siege at Khe Sanh, officers scrambled to get their hands on “Hell in a Very Small Place,” Fall’s searing account of the siege at Dien Bien Phu, 14 years earlier, in which the French suffered the decisive loss in their own struggle to control the country.

Born in Vienna in 1926, Fall moved to Paris after Germany annexed Austria, and as a teenager he fought for the French resistance. (His father, who also fought for the resistance, was executed by the Germans; his mother died at Auschwitz.) He came to the United States for graduate school in international relations and eventually became a professor at Howard University. He also began traveling to Vietnam in the 1950s and writing about what he saw. Passionate, tireless, intensely ambitious, Fall set out to become, as he put it, “the foremost military writer of my generation.”

Arguably, he succeeded, or came close. Always wishing to be seen as a soldier’s historian, from early on he earned the respect of French and American servicemen and their superiors for his close attention to their experiences, and for his penetrating and dispassionate analyses of strategic and tactical matters. Journalists and Foreign Service officers seeking to make sense of the war likewise devoured his books and articles, as did general readers drawn in by this transplanted Frenchman’s acute powers of observation and robust and engaging English prose.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/bernard-fall-the-man-who-knew-the-war.html