[In the following review, Parton considers the Vietnam experiences that are the basis of Fallaci's Nothing, and So Be It.]

"Life, what is it?" asked Oriana Fallaci's small sister the night before the well-known Italian journalist was to leave for Vietnam. "Life is the time that passes from the moment we're born to the moment we die … that's all" the older sister replied. Nothing, and So Be It is the harrowing account of Miss Fallaci's search, in the midst of man's utmost bestialities, for a better answer to that question.

The diary of her three trips to Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, which comprises the bulk of the book, reveals Miss Fallaci as a woman who is not only courageous but passionately honest as well. She admits to being terrified at Dak To, an American airstrip under constant fire by the North Vietnamese, but she unflinchingly faces mutilated corpses or the stray, detached hand—"yellow, stiff-fingered … Leftover from three days ago." The blood of dead Americans, South Vietnamese, and Viet Cong stains her pages, and Miss Fallaci tells us exactly how these people died. The screams of a three-year-old burned by napalm, a pregnant woman with her abdomen ripped open, a man undergoing the torture of electric shocks in the genitals are heard throughout this book. So be warned.

"I'm here to prove something I believe," she wrote in her diary near the beginning of the first trip: "that war is useless and stupid, bestial proof of the idiocy of the human race. I'm here to explain how hypocritical it is for the world to rejoice when a surgeon substitutes one heart for another but accepts the fact that thousands of strong people with healthy hearts are slaughtered like cattle for the sake of a flag." During her initial forty-day stay in South Vietnam her exploration of this thesis led Miss Fallaci not only to battle fronts but to a study of the futility of the Buddhist immolations and to an examination of the twisted mind of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the brutal head of the National Police and the man who, in a famous photograph, was shown firing into the head of a prisoner whose hands were tied. "I adore roses … with a pearl of dew in each," he told her.

In the United States Miss Fallaci experienced what the late Christopher Rand, another fine journalist, called "the law of diminishing reality." But when the Tet offensive exploded in February of 1968, she could not bear to be away. Returning to a hard-hit and badly shaken Saigon, she resumed her "terrible effort to understand what death was, what life was, and what it meant to be a man." It was on this trip that Miss Fallaci was given two diaries (which she here reproduces) by dead Viet Cong, full of love for the beauty of their country and longing for their young wives. In Hue, she nearly reached the end of her emotional resources, for there she saw children playing with corpses as if with toys, and the thought of belonging to the human race made her ashamed. Like other women correspondents who have seen more horror than they can bear, Miss Fallaci reached out for fresh life in a vain effort to adopt a Vietnamese child.

The Italian reporter had two interviews with then Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky before leaving once again for the United States. During the second of these, Miss Fallaci writes, she began to realize "something very simple" about the Vietnamese people:

These people don't hate each other, although they go on killing each other. It's we they hate. Because we are the ones who force them to kill each other in the name of a civilization that thinks it's superior because of its bigger bombs. We are the ones who invaded their rice fields; corrupted their conscience, destroyed their towns, and finally cut them into two: the North for you, the South for me. Not realizing that the same wind blows over the North as over the South, and the same dreams.

On her third visit, a few months later, she was shocked because the Viet Cong murdered several correspondents in cold blood. "Western journalists have always been generous to the Viet Cong," she writes, "… for years they've defended, and even praised them … I feel very disillusioned. I feel like crying." By the time she left Vietnam for the last time Miss Fallaci's bitterness toward mankind was profound, and she composed a prayer to express her discouragement:

Our Father who art in heaven, give us this day our daily massacre, deliver us from pity, love, and the teachings your Son gave us. As it has been good for nothing, it is good for nothing. Nothing and amen.

Only after witnessing an appalling massacre of the innocents in another part of the world—in Mexico City where, in the fall of 1968, "more than three hundred … boys, pregnant women, children" were killed by the police—did she discover the falsity of her prayer and find an answer to the question with which she had begun her search.

American readers of this moving book will have no cause to feel proud, for at the worst we emerge as savages and at the best as well-meaning, clumsy innocents. But Miss Fallaci is as critical of Russian guns in Prague as she is of American artillery in Vietnam, for she has learned that man's inhumanity to the poor and defenseless is the ultimate obscenity regardless of who displays it.