Tobias Wolff - In Pharaohs Army: Memories of the Lost War

BACK IN THE WORLD

Here are ten pungent and wonderfully skewed stories of exhilarating grace and lucidity. A gentle, ineffectual priest finds himself stranded in a Vegas hotel room with a hysterical, sunburned stranger. A show-biz hopeful undergoes a dubious audition in a hearse speeding across the California desert. As Tobias Wolff moves among these unfortunates, he observes with a compassionate eye the disparity between their realities and their dreams.

Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-679-76796-1

IN PHARAOHS ARMY

In In Pharaohs Army Tobias Wolff gives us a precisely and sometimes pitilessly remembered account of his young manhooda young manhood that became entangled in the tragic adventure that was Vietnam. Traversing an arc that leads from paratroopers jump school to the carnage of the Tet offensive, Wolff re-creates a war where survival depends less on skill than it does on blind luck and the ability to look inoffensive. The Americans are pitiable in their innocence and terrifying in their capacity for uncomprehending destruction. The allies are malicious practical jokers. And a successful mission is one that nets Wolff a stolen color television setthe better to watch Bonanza on Thanksgiving Day.

Memoir/978-0-679-76023-8

THE NIGHT IN QUESTION

A young reporter writes an obituary only to be fired when its subject walks into his office, very much alive. A soldier in Vietnam goads his lieutenant into sending him on increasingly dangerous missions. An impecunious mother and son go window-shopping for a domesticity that is forever beyond their grasp. Seamless, ironic, dizzying in their emotional aptness, these fifteen stories deliver small, exquisite shocks that leave us feeling invigorated and intensely alive.

Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-679-78155-4

OLD SCHOOL

The protagonist of Tobias Wolffs shrewdlyand at times devastatinglyobserved first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself. The climax of his quest becomes intimately entangled with the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of the competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.

Fiction/978-0-375-70149-8

OUR STORY BEGINS
New and Selected Stories

This collection of storiestwenty-one classics followed by ten potent new storiesdisplays Tobias Wolffs exquisite gifts over a quarter century.

Fiction/Short Stories/978-1-4000-9597-1

ALSO AVAILABLE

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, Edited by Tobias Wolff, 978-0-679-74513-6

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com

TOBIAS WOLFF

Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Books by Tobias Wolff

Our Story Begins

Old School

The Night in Question

In Pharaohs Army

This Boys Life

Back in the World

The Barracks Thief

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

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.