In Pharaoh's Army

...It made me feel benevolent, generous, protective as if I were surrounded by children, as I often was- crowds of them, shy but curious, taking turns stroking my hairy arms, and, as a special treat, my mustache...

...his horsemen confused...

...It was in the slump of their shoulders and the plodding way they moved...

...That essay on Tet, "The Lesson," is as close as In Pharaoh's Army ever comes to a grand, historical assessment of the war, and even here, Wolff refuses to depart from the gritty surface of the particular...

...They hadn't even bothered to plant any grass...

...Experience was the clapper in the bell, the money in the bank, and of all the experiences the most bankable was military service...

...To believe otherwise was self-deception...

...Something was wrong with the latrine system...

...and all his magnificence dismayed...

...as a lesson it succeeded...

...This is an exercise that Catholic school children were once taught to call an examination of conscience, and it's at least arguable that if we could all remember our favorite sins as precisely and our embattled selves as kindly as Wolff does, we might see a revival of the sacrament of reconciliation...

...That was how I became an officer in the United States Army...

...In his earlier book, This Boy's Life, Wolff gave an account of his own adolescence which perfectly balanced pity for his vulnerable teen-age self and ironical examination of that self's outrageous posturing...

...The resolute imperial will was all played out here at the empire's fringe, lost in rancor and mud...

...Faas and other boom-boom aficionados would be disappointed by Tobias Wolff s essays on arms and men...

...It was in My Tho, for instance, that the twenty-year-old Wolff took pleasure in being one of a very few white men among these dark folk, big among the small, rich among the poor...

...In My Tho I had a sense of myself as father, even as lord, the very sensation that, even more than all their holdings here, must have made the thought of losing this place unbearable to the French...

...My special position did not make me feel arrogant, not at first...

...About what principally attracted him to the misadventure, Wolff is characteristically blunt and self-deprecating...

...In an astonishing essay entitled "Duty," he presents Sergeant Fisher, a frightened and inarticulate young man who resists the temptation to desert a doomed position...

...That frail sensation would be tested, obviously, by what has since become familiar history, and shattered beyond recognition during the Tet offensive, of which Wolff s laconic eight-page account is the most honest and useful description I've yet read...

...As a military project," he concludes, Tet failed...

...He didn't see me...

...In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them...

...The VC came into My Tho and all the other towns knowing what would happen...

...Wolff is too good at his craft to neglect the glints of human splendor which flash on the surface of lethal steel...

...that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them, and that we would kill every last one of them to save our own skins...

...the place always stank...

...He was busy making assurances, giving hope with his calm voice and the fact of his abiding presence...

...People here seemed in the grip of an unshakable petulance...

...The school's graduation night traditionally featured a comedy revue for which the post commandant apparently had high expectations...

...After his enlistment and a fantastically incoherent (at least to those of us without military experience) series of training assignments, Wolff found himself just squeaking by in Officer Candidate School on the strength of his talent for writing satire...

...We would kill them all to get at one...

...Among the reasons In Pharaoh's Army is such a fine war story is Tobias Wolffs almost magical capacity for making such an emotion imaginable.emotion imaginable...

...The sole American in a village likely to be overrun at any minute by the Viet Cong, Fisher is last glimpsed by Wolff from the window of a departing helicopter...

...A sourness had settled over the base, spoiling and coarsening the men...

...Even Wolffs most disapproving superiors could ill afford a flop, so, he admits, "they kept me on to produce a farce...

...I almost envied him...

...His path was absolutely clear...

...At least they taught it to me...

...When the morning fog lifted over Fredricksburg, Virginia, and General Robert E. Lee saw the sunlight flashing on the bayonets of the Union soldiers he was preparing to kill, he famously remarked that it is well God made war so terrible lest we might grow too fond of it...

...They knew that once they were among the people, we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing between them...

...They taught that lesson to the people, and also to us...

...Here were pharaoh's chariots engulfed...

...While there is nothing in subsequent pages to suggest that this adolescent insight is untrue, there is ample and heartbreaking proof that, like most adolescent insights, it is tragically incomplete...

...A bright kid who wanted to be a writer, he admired such writers as Norman Mailer, Eric Maria Remarque, and Ernest Hemingway, and he believed that he needed experiences like theirs to write about: "I turned into a predator, and one of the things I became predatory about was experience...

...In his memories of the Vietnam War, something just as crucial and funny and mysterious as that exercise is going on...

...Elsewhere, his description of the personnel of a U.S...

...At Dong Tam I saw something that wasn't allowed for in the national myth-our capacity for collective despair...

...Some readers of In Pharaoh's Army might suspect that Tobias Wolff himself is bemused by the unconventional nature of his memoir and even slightly apologetic that he can't manage to sound a little more like Michael Herr, Philip Caputo, Tim O'Brien, and other shaken veterans of the disaster in Southeast Asia...

...Oh yes," he said...

...But war is often beautiful, too...

...Michael O. Garvey The AP photographer Horst Faas, who took many pictures of the war in Vietnam, replied memorably when an interviewer once suggested that his attraction to the subject of combat might be more than strictly professional: "Vot I like eez boom boom...

...His problem-it seems to me at least-is that he's a far better writer than anyone else who has yet tried to describe what happened in Vietnam...

...Duty had swallowed him whole, loneliness, fear, and all...

...Assigned as an advisor to an ARVN battalion, Wolff took up residence in My Tho, a Mekong Delta town about which some of the book's most luminous and absorbing passages are written...

...base near My Tho eloquently magnifies the local desolation: In their anger at being in this place and their refusal to come to terms with it they had created a profound, intractable bog...