*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.