Last Reflections On a War

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1967. Book Club Edition. Hardcover. Good/Good. Bernard B. Fall and Dorothy Fall (Map). 288 pages. Illustrations. Map. Tabular data. Several pages creased. DJ has some wear, tears and soiling. Preface by Dorothy Fall. The author was killed in South Vietnam in 1967. After his death, his widow, Dorothy Fall, selected the pieces published in this book. Bernard B. Fall (November 19, 1926 - February 21, 1967) was a prominent war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s. He started fighting for the French Resistance at the age of 16 and later for the French Army during World War II. In 1950, he first came to the United States for graduate studies at Syracuse University and Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Howard University for most of his career and made regular trips to Southeast Asia to learn about changes and their societies. He predicted the failures of France and the United States in their wars in Vietnam because of their tactics and lack of understanding of the societies. He was killed by a landmine in South Vietnam while he was accompanying US Marines on a patrol in 1967. Fall was a political scientist but had been a soldier and so spoke the soldier's language and shared soldiers' lives at the frontline. He obtained his data on the war while he slogged through the mud of Vietnam with French colonial troops, American infantrymen, and ARVN soldiers. He combined academic analysis of Indochina with a infantry/grunt's perspective of the war. Noam Chomsky has called Fall "the most respected analyst and commentator on the Vietnam War." Bernard B. Fall was 40 years old when he was killed by a booby trap in northern South Vietnam on February 21, 1967. By the time of his death he had already authored seven books on Vietnam, most notably Street Without Joy, an indictment of French intrusion into Indochina and a warning to American forces just beginning their involvement. Last Reflections on a War was published shortly after Dr. Fall's death as is a tribute to his life's work. It contains the only known autobiographical account of his life, several previously unpublished articles, notes for "Street Without Joy Revisited", and transcripts of Dr. Fall's tape recordings, including his last recorded words. "Last Reflections on a War stands as a fine representative sample of Fall's work as a whole; as such, it is nearly as personal as an autobiography. . . . That the collection includes an excellent outline of Vietnamese history, a discussion of the basic issues of the war, and an emotive picture of Vietnam, 1967, speaks to the depth of Fall's knowledge and the scope of his concerns."- Frances FitzGerald.