Artist Dorothy Fall has written a book about her husband, military historian Bernard Fall, 40 years after his death in the country that fascinated him. To finally write about him, Dorothy used the artist in her to reconnect with the Vietnam that Bernard had come to know so well.

Washington ? The first sustained gunfire you hear on Bernard Fall’s last tape recording is the rhythmic rat-tat-tat of a rifle somewhere far away.

“That’s Charlie company firing,” Fall explains, his voice rich and clear over the chasm of 40 years. An airplane can be heard in the background. Then the closer booming of a machine gun, followed by an explosion. “There’s our mortar,” he says.

Tension floats through the 1967 recording of the day when Fall, the legendary military historian, was killed in Vietnam. It seeps into his calm voice as he narrates the final moments of his life. It’s in the shouts of the nervous Marines with whom he’s on patrol.

And all these years later it escapes from the tape player in the basement of Dorothy Fall’s Washington home, where until recently she kept much of the memory of her famous husband boxed up and shut away.

“Shadows are lengthening,” he says quietly near the tape’s abrupt end. “We’ve reached one of our phase lines after the firefight, and it smells bad, meaning it’s a little bit suspicious. Could be an amb – ” …

Bernard Fall’s name isn’t on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, though he died like so many whose names are etched into its black granite. He knew better than most what a soldier, and an army, faced in that war.

His name is carved on his tombstone in Rock Creek Cemetery, above the legend, “He believed in truth and sought it at its source.”

He sought it, indeed. From the battleground, he detailed the agony of the French army’s defeat in Vietnam in his 1960s books “Street Without Joy” and “Hell in a Very Small Place.”

He wrote passionately, and when he was silenced by death his memory was set aside amid the pain of his passing and the new life his family was forced to begin. 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.

Outsize figure

Fall, now 77, always wanted to write a book about her husband. And she began it in 1972 – five years after he and a Marine were killed in an ambush. But her emotions were still raw. She was not yet ready to relinquish him to history.

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, and he preached of the hazards of conflict there.

He was a man whose warnings could have changed U.S. policy – if only the American presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, had read his work. That is what former secretary of state Colin Powell, who served as an officer in Vietnam, wrote of Fall years later.

Fall was an outsize figure. A professor at Howard University, his home, where his wife still lives, was visited by politicians, government officials and journalists seeking guidance on Vietnam.

He interviewed the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and was deeply moved by the heroism and sacrifice of the French military, which lost 95,000 soldiers during its struggle in Vietnam. But he was sobered by the enemy’s resolve and by the crushing hardship of fighting in Southeast Asia.

For a time, he was thought by the U.S. government to be a French spy, and the FBI staked out the family home, tapped the phone and read the mail, his wife said.

Dorothy Fall, an accomplished artist, was 36 when her husband died, leaving her with an infant and two other small children. They had been married for 13 years.

New ‘Memories’

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.

In 1995, Robert 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, she published “Bernard Fall, Memories of a Soldier-Scholar.” The paperback was released Friday.

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.