As a Marine Corps combat correspondent during World War II, Sergeant Bernard S. Redmont was hit in his arms and legs with shrapnel during a Marshall Islands battle in 1944. He was awarded a Purple Heart for his injuries, which left him with a slight limp, a lifetime of nightmares, and a profound appreciation for the challenges reporters face.

“Combat experience marks permanently the psyche of a journalist and leaves indelible scars in the mind and body,’’ he wrote in “Risks Worth Taking,’’ his 1992 memoir. “A reporter learns to arm himself with more skepticism in the face of official versions of events, becomes more aware that things rarely go according to plan, and more appreciative of the complexities of truth and the fragility of existence.’’

Mr. Redmont’s storied decades in journalism would also lead him through two other very different battlefields. In the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted after contentious testimony during which he refused to name a friend as a Communist. After moving abroad and resurrecting his career as an award-winning broadcast correspondent, he returned to the United States and became dean of Boston University’s College of Communication, only to resign after clashing with then-president John Silber over a plan to train journalists in Pakistan.

Mr. Redmont, who was honored in 1969 by the Overseas Press Club of America for reporting that helped spark the Paris peace talks that led to the end of the Vietnam War, died Jan. 23 in Canton, where he had lived in the Orchard Cove senior community after residing for many years in Brookline. He was 98 and his health had been failing.

In his memoir, he wrote he had been “a reluctant candidate’’ when Silber elevated him from the faculty to become dean of BU’s communications school: “I simply enjoyed teaching more than anything else and found no challenge greater and more fun.’’

As for Silber, “I found him to be a highly complex individual, and in many ways a paradox,’’ Mr. Redmont wrote. “Silber was a man of evident brilliance, although he was erratic. He presided over an undeniable improvement of academic standards, even if achieved at high cost in human wreckage.’’

Mr. Redmont joined BU’s faculty after serving as Paris bureau chief for CBS News, and Silber called him “one of America’s most accomplished and distinguished journalists’’ in 1982 upon appointing him dean. Less than four years later, Mr. Redmont resigned after lengthy disagreements with Silber and other administrators over what was called the Afghan media project.

In the mid-1980s, BU received about $500,000 in federal funds, mostly to help train Afghan refugees to be journalists at a site in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border. Mr. Redmont questioned whether BU’s academic standards could be sustained “in the turmoil of a volatile refugee center teeming with secret agents, tribal factions, and intense emotions.’’ He backed an alternate proposal to train the journalists at BU to ensure “the most rigorous standards of the profession and the highest academic integrity’’ could be met, the Globe reported.

In his memoir, Mr. Redmont recounted that after taking this stance, he was subjected “to a panoply of petty harassments, interference, obstruction, and delays’’ in his work as dean. In the summer of 1986, he met with Silber, who “praised my successes as dean, applauded my ‘major contributions’ ’’ – and asked for his resignation.

He was named dean emeritus, but a year and a half later, after CBS News aired an unflattering piece about the Afghan media project, Silber sharply criticized Mr. Redmont at a faculty meeting. “Silber charged that I had ‘fostered … the myth’ that I had resigned as dean in protest over the Afghan media project,’’ he recalled in his memoir.

Mr. Redmont responded the next day with a letter to the faculty explaining that his resignation “arose out of the position I took on the project and related matters of administration.’’ In his memoir, he added that “for once, Silber was silent. There were no further imprecations. I continued teaching to oversubscribed classes’’ and eventually retired “in the normal course of events.’’

Caryl Rivers, a BU professor of journalism who was on the faculty when the events unfolded, said Mr. Redmont “really stood up in the face of pressure from higher-ups in the university.’’

He also was a strong advocate for women at the college. “I found that Bernard was always respectful and appreciative of all the work women faculty were doing at the school,’’ she said. “That was a big, big plus for us.’’

Bernard S. Rothenberg was the second of three children born to Polish immigrants Morris Rothenberg, who worked in New York City’s garment district, and the former Bessie Kamerman.

Mr. Redmont changed his last name while doing graduate work at the Columbia School of Journalism at the suggestion of the dean, who thought his long, Jewish-sounding name could hamper work opportunities.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and a master’s from Columbia, from which he received the prestigious Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.That allowed him to report from Europe and Mexico before World War II.

He married Joan Rothenberg, whom he had known since high school, in 1940 in Mexico while finishing his traveling fellowship. She died last August.

After the war, Mr. Redmont was bureau chief in Buenos Aires and Paris for World Report, which later became US News & World Report. Then Elizabeth Bentley, who had been involved with a Soviet spy ring, named him first as someone she had encountered, and later as a Communist – an allegation he denied. The House Un-American Activities Committee called Mr. Redmont as a witness in a perjury trial of his friend William Remington, a government official. Mr. Redmont denied being a Communist and refused to name Remington as a Communist, but the harsh questions and innuendo led to Mr. Redmont being fired from his job.

Remaining in Paris with his family, he worked for Agence France-Presse and was a radio correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Co., according to his family, before becoming a correspondent for Westinghouse Broadcasting. In that role he broke a story that the North Vietnamese were willing to hold peace talks with the United States. Mr. Redmont later worked for CBS News in Moscow and Paris. He told the Canton Citizen that he had traveled to 55 countries as a correspondent or news executive.

In the 1970s, he was named a chevalier, or knight, of the French Legion of Honor, and in 2011 was elevated, at the age of 92, to officer.

Mr. Redmont leaves his son, Dennis of Rome; his daughter, Jane of Boston; two grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. April 21 in First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Canton.

“One can’t really talk about my father without talking about my mother,’’ his daughter wrote in a tribute, adding that “theirs was a great love story, and my father was ever the romantic, buying her roses for her birthday into her 90s.’’

He kept up that tradition under trying circumstances. As his wife’s birthday arrived in 1968, she and their family were vacationing in Italy while he was trying to get into Czechoslovakia to cover the Soviet invasion, their daughter recalled, “but by God, those roses were on the table when momma got there for breakfast.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.