Tobias Wolff - In Pharaohs Army

Terse, mesmerizing. Each of Wolffs 13 chapters reads like a rigorously boiled-down short story. He portrays life as both desperately serious and perfectly absurd.

Time

Wolff draws insight from the silhouette of his own folly. As self-aware as it is bruisingly ironic, the resulting portrait captures a soldiers interior reality with a candor and humility that only age delivers.

Boston Globe

Part of Wolffs genius as a memoirist is his alertness to the role of accident. He honors inertia, luck, and confusion, and thats what makes his humorous, shapely narratives revolutionary. Theyre chaos fables. Such candor has a freshness and immediacy that, oddly, only hindsight can create. Wolffs restoration of his war experience seems more accurate than most originals. Its also funnier.

New York magazine

One of the genuine literary works produced by the war finely distilled, ironic out of Wolffs distances comes an unexpected tremor, a phrase that rips like lightning, a design that completes itself in sudden revelation.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Lucid, painfully honest. Wolff has given us something true.

Nation

Wolffs strategy is to tell his story in an elegantly simple style with a deceptively casual voice. The tension between this form and the horror of the wars content made this reader feel by the books end as if somehow I had gone out of my mind without noticing. No one is better on how it felt to be an American in Vietnam.

Judith Coburn, Washington Post Book World

In Pharaohs Army has the freshness of a splash of cold water in the face.

Detroit Free Press

For my brother, who gave me books

I WOULD LIKE to give special thanks again, and again, to my wife, Catherine, and to my editor, Gary Fisketjon, for their patient and thoughtful readings of this book. My gratitude as well to Amanda Urban, Geoffrey Wolff, and Michael Herr. Their help and friendship made all the difference.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

FORD MADOX FORD ,
The Good Soldier

S OME PEASANTS WERE blocking the road up ahead. I honked the horn but they chose not to hear. They were standing around under their pointed hats, watching a man and a woman yell at each other. When I got closer I saw two bicycles tangled up, a busted wicker basket, and vegetables all over the road. It looked like an accident.

Sergeant Benet reached over in front of me and sounded the horn again. It made a sheepish bleat, ridiculous coming from this armor-plated truck with its camouflage paint. The peasants turned their heads but they still didnt get out of the way. I was bearing down on them. Sergeant Benet slid low in the seat so nobody could get a look at him, which was prudent on his part, since he was probably the biggest man in this part of the province and certainly the only black man.

I kept honking the horn as I came on. The peasants held their ground longer than I thought they would, almost long enough to make me lose my nerve, then they jumped out of the way. I could hear them shouting and then I couldnt hear anything but the clang and grind of metal as the wheels of the truck passed over the bicycles. Awful sound. When I looked in the rear-view most of the peasants were staring after the truck while a few others inspected the wreckage in the road.

Sergeant Benet sat up again. He said, without reproach, Thats a shame, sir. Thats just a real shame.

I didnt say anything. What could I say? I hadnt done it for fun. Seven months back, at the beginning of my tour, when I was still calling them people instead of peasants, I wouldnt have run over their bikes. I would have slowed down or even stopped until they decided to move their argument to the side of the road, if it was a real argument and not a setup. But I didnt stop anymore. Neither did Sergeant Benet. Nobody did, as these peasantsthese peopleshould have known.

We passed through a string of hamlets without further interruption. I drove fast to get an edge on the snipers, but snipers werent the problem on this road. Mines were the problem. If I ran over a touch-fused 105 shell it wouldnt make any difference how fast I was going. Id seen a two-and-a-half-ton truck blown right off the road by one of those, just a few vehicles ahead of me in a convoy coming back from Saigon. The truck jumped like a bucking horse and landed on its side in the ditch. The rest of us stopped and hit the dirt, waiting for an ambush that never came. When we finally got up and looked in the truck there was nobody there, nothing you could think of as a person. The two Vietnamese soldiers inside had been turned to chowder by the blast coming up through the floor of the cab. After that I always packed sandbags under my seat and on the floorboards of anything I drove. I suspected that even the scant comfort I took from these doleful measures was illusory, but illusions kept me going and I declined to pursue any line of thought that might put them in danger.

We were all living on fantasies. There was some variation among them, but every one of us believed, instinctively if not consciously, that he could help his chances by observing certain rites and protocols. Some of these were obvious. You kept your weapon clean. You paid attention. You didnt take risks unless you had to. But that got you only so far. Despite the promise implicit in our trainingIf you do everything right, youll make it homeyou couldnt help but notice that the good troops were getting killed right along with the slackers and shitbirds. It was clear that survival wasnt only a function of Zero Defects and Combat Readiness. There had to be something else to it, something unreachable by practical means.

Why one man died and another lived was, in the end, a mystery, and we who lived paid court to that mystery in every way we could think of. I carried a heavy gold pocket watch given to me by my fiance. It had belonged to her grandfather, and to her father. Shed had it engraved with a verse from Kahlil Gibrans The Prophet. It went with me everywhere, rain or shine. That it continued to tick I regarded as an affirmation somehow linked to my own continuance, and when it got stolen toward the end of my tour I suffered through several days of stupefying fatalism.

The ordinary human sensation of occupying a safe place in a coherent scheme allowed me to perform, to help myself as much as I could. But at times I was seized and shaken by the certainty that nothing I did meant anything, and all around me I sensed currents of hatred and malign intent. When I felt it coming on I gave a sudden wrenching shudder as if Id bitten into something sour, and forced my thoughts elsewhere. To consider the reality of my situation only made it worse.

Not that my situation was all that bad, compared to what it might have been. I was stationed in the Delta at a time when things were much quieter there than up north. Up north they were fighting big North Vietnamese Army units. Tens of thousands of men had died for places that didnt even have names, just elevation numbers or terms of utilityFirebase Zulu, Landing Zone Oscarand which were usually evacuated a few days after the battle, when the cameras had gone back to Saigon. The NVA were very hard cases. They didnt hit and run like the Vietcong; they hit and kept hitting. I kept hearing things: that they had not only mortars but heavy artillery, lugged down mountain trails piece by piece as in the days of Dienbienphu; that before battle they got stoned on some kind of special communist reefer that made them suicidally brave; that their tunnels were like cities and ran right under our bases; that they had tanks and helicopters; that American deserters were fighting on their side.