Bernard B. Fall's Two Viet-Nams

 About a week ago, I reached the final page of The Two Viet-Nams by Bernard B. Fall, first published in 1963. The one I’ve read is its third edition (1965). The sole reason I thought about reading it is because Kaiko Takeshi mentioned it in one of his essays as a book he had read for his quick study of the situation in Vietnam before visiting the South as a special correspondent for a Japanese newspaper.

When I started reading the book, I didn’t pay much attention to the author’s name while feeling that the book should be quite valuable as Fall seems to have been one of the very few in the West, who actually had met people both in North and South for gathering information for his analysis, questioning the accuracy of the provided data, especially of the North, something that we probably can’t find in memoirs written by American journalists who reported on the war from the perspective of the South and its backer, the US.

I also thought I should check Embers of War by Frederik Logevall because both books cover the first Indochina War against France, which tried to recolonize the region. Then I found a photo of Fall in Logevall’s book, wearing a pair of teardrop glasses, and it was like, “It’s you!”

The Two Viet-Nams was written before the US Marines landed at Da Nang in 1965, and there are things which came to light only after the end of the war, such as the relationship between the North Vietnamese Government and the National Liberation Front (NLF), as told by Truong Nhu Tang, the man who played a key role as the Minister of Justice for the Provisional Revolutionary Government and, after the war, fled to France.

From the time of the publication of Fall’s book to the war’s end, a lot of things happened. The Tet offensive, a debacle for the NLF and the North but a deep psychological shock to the US, the Pentagon Papers, exposing lies made by US presidents and their administrations, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Johnson’s subsequent bombings in Hanoi and Hai Phong, Nixon’s downfall because of the Watergate scandal, etc.

Even with these post-The Two Viet-Nams events, and though Fall’s “alternatives” did not predict the course the war would take toward its end, it seems that his final analysis, “What is at stake in Viet-Nam in the 1960’s, and on both sides of the demarcation line, is freedom,” from oppressive government and foreign intervention, remained valid.

I’m now waiting for his wife’s memoir to arrive here.