The book gives a first-hand look at the French engagement, with an insider understanding of Vietnamese events, and provided insights into guerrilla warfare.
[1] Fall's book Street without Joy is a "sketch" or essay on the military-political history of the war largely fought between the French Army, who sought to reclaim Vietnam, and the Viet Minh, a force organized by Vietnamese communists, who resisted.
[2][3] Earlier during World War II, the Japanese Army had in September 1940 attacked and conquered French Indochina.
[8][9] Frances FitzGerald, the journalist and author of Fire in the Lake (1972), describes Street without Joy as, "[H]is major work on the French war [where] he argued that the nature of the conflict was political rather than simply military and described the trials of the French soldiers in vivid, human terms.
Fitzgerald recalled that "the [American] commanding general at Fort Bragg, who was training the elite Special Forces for counterinsurgency warfare in Vietnam, often invited its author to lecture."
Four decades later, she writes, Fall's book "reappeared on the reading list for officers during the Iraq War.
It was published in 1961 by Stackpole Co. in Harrisurg, PA. A revised text was issued in 1964 with an 'Author's Preface' of same date, and an added chapter, "The Second Indochina War".
[11][12] Subsequently, in 1994 Stackpole Books reissued it, evidently in the revised text, with a new 1993 Introduction by prof. George C. Herring, and an undated Foreword by Marshall Andrews (apparently from the first edition).
[13] Included are about thirty battlefield maps by the author, and numerous French Army and Viet Minh photographs.
Appendices: I, II, III, and IV.About the four chapters indicating the employment of a Diary, Fall here described his personal experiences of the war which animate his book.
He wrote hundreds of articles and seven books, including Communist subversion in the SEATO area (1960), Le Viet Minh 1945-1960 (1960), The Two Vietnams.
[8]<[18][19] As a journalist he wrote pieces about Vietnam, e.g., for The Nation, The New Republic, Ramparts, The New York Times, The Washington Post.
[20][6]: 714 In the late 1950s he taught for a U.S. government program in Indochina, and did fieldwork in South Vietnam for the administration reform sought by the Diem regime.
There, "about 14 miles northwest of Huế" the author himself, recorder of many Vietnam tragedies, was killed by a land mine on 21 February 1967, "along a desolate stretch of seacoast known as the Street Without Joy.