*VIET NAM IN PRINT-
A mixed bag of books on Viet Nam published this year:
> LAST REFLECTIONS ON A WAR by Bernard Fall (Doubleday, $4.95), is a reminder of the business he left unfinished when a hidden Viet Cong mine killed Fall at 40 last February near the Demilitarized Zone. Beginning in 1952, Fall had dedicated 15 years to single-minded study of Viet Nam's bloody travail, had become a world authority on the baffling complexities of Communist-style guerrilla warfare. This posthumous collection of his last writings carries forward but adds little to arguments that he expounded tirelessly in Viet Nam during frequent trips into battle. He stresses the war's political nature. "When a country is being subverted," he warns, "it is not being outfought; it is being outadministered." And he ridicules ideas that Viet Cong guerrillas could be bought off with a massive infusion of material aid. "One can't fight a militant doctrine with better privies," he writes. Fall's perceptions of men at war permeate his last articles and a tape recording recovered from his body. "It smells bad," he commented moments before his foot triggered the mine. "Could be an amb . . ." >
> M by John Sack (New American Library, $4.50), a racy and vibrant chronicle of an American infantry company's preparation for combat and its baptism of fire in Viet Nam; and NO PLACE TO DIE by Hugh Mulligan (Morrow, $5.95), a catalogue of the many different varieties of fighting in Viet Nam, are both correspondents' books depicting war's unvarnished nastiness. Both also recall the long stretches of inaction between horrors, and each author has an ear attuned to the incongruities, the horseplay and simple compassion of fighting men that explain why soldiers do not turn into professional killers once their day in the front line is done.
>VIETNAM by Mary McCarthy (Harcourt, Brace & World, $5.95), is seen darkly through a bile-colored glass. The Viet Cong somehow do not make the scene; the G.I. is an unmitigated heavy. Novelist McCarthy confesses at the outset that her visit to the war last February for the New York Review of Books was to seek what was damaging to America. Written in corrosive prose, her book is a searing catalogue of squalor: rusting heaps of empty cans marking the progress of American divisions across the countryside, unwashed refugees and naive do-gooding Americans burbling enthusiastically of winning Vietnamese hearts and minds as they deepen the people's agony. Apparently, she looked for nothing else.
> THE NEW LEGIONS by Donald Duncan (Random House, $1.95), has emotional authenticity. Duncan has killed. A professional soldier, he served 18 months in Viet Nam with the Green Berets and then quit to join the antiwar chorus. His account of deadly jungle hide-and-seek by Special Forces "Sneaky Petes" in the Viet Cong's midst throbs with veracity. But it was not the killing that made Duncan change his mind about war, or scenes of murder and torture, or simply the mind-numbing training that preceded his Viet Nam hitch. The crisis came instead deep in Viet Cong territory when he was cut off and surrounded, sure he was about to die. With luck, he got out alive and the go-go editors of the anti-almost-everything magazine Ramparts hired him as military editor. The book says as much about the author's state of mind as about Viet Nam.
> THE VILLAGE OF BEN SUC by Jonathan Schell (Knopf, $3.95), a 24-year-old Harvard graduate student, unreels an unemotional chronicle of how Americans evicted Ben Sue's 3,500 peasants at gunpoint last January and demolished their homes in an effort to clear the area of guerrillas. He flew in with the G.I.s to Ben Sue, on the edge of the Viet Cong's Iron Triangle stronghold 30 miles northwest of Saigon; then he followed the uprooted villagers to a bleak camp behind barbed wire. He paints a picture of unremitting misery inspired by wanton cruelty--but he elects to omit details that would have colored it differently. For example, he has admitted to knowing that Propagandist Le Khanh Trung, one of the highest-ranking Viet Cong ever to fall into American hands, was found in Ben Sue; but he does not deem it worth mentioning in his book. Nor does he tell how Ben Sue's farmers were given new land and homes elsewhere, nor that the village was destroyed as part of an operation to deny the Viet Cong use of a jungle sanctuary where 720 guerrillas were killed, thousands of secret documents uncovered and hundreds of tunnels and bunkers destroyed. But all that might have spoiled his story.
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