In Pharoah's Army

Caught the essence of a war we fought with a flawed plan for winning.

As others have said, the quality of Wolff's writing is exceptional. His prose is as lucid and tactful as any you'll find today. This memoir - perhaps somewhat fictionalized, but undoubtedly less so than Robert Graves's acknowledged WWI classic "Goodbye to All That" - will still be read decades from now for its emotional honesty in depicting the Vietnam career of an admittedly mediocre, though hardly conscienceless, young officer. And how many officers will admit in their books that they were mediocre? Reviewers who lament the dearth of sensationalism and battlefield horror in this book may need to reevaluate their understanding of what war is like. Novels require plots, real life has none. The picture that Wolff gives of Vietnam service as an SF adviser to the ARVN is every bit as true to life as more "exciting" memoirs (and in some cases maybe truer). Not every American busted jungle in a U.S. combat unit. Wolff came under some rocket attacks in his one-year tour, and that was about par for the course. Another problem some readers may have is that Wolff is a master of subtlety and juxtaposition. Episodes that seem not to "have a point" reveal their point when seen in the perspective of other things that are going on at the margins of, or in some cases outside of, the story itself. As an example, consider the title. Tobias Wolff is a memorable writer, and in its portrayal of a different kind of "'Nam," "In Pharaoh's Army" is a minor classic of American writing.

There are those of us males who were on the leading edge of the baby-boomers - born in the late 1940s - for whom Viet Nam was an experience that forged our futures. After almost 40 years it is good to look back and try to make sense about what happen to ourselves - individually and collectively. Along with Michael Herr's "Dispatches", Tobias Wolff's "In Pharaoh's Army" captures the feeling of those of us who served. on the ground, in Southeast Asia and came home with no physical - and I must admit - very few psychological effects. Wolff captures the phenomenal sangfroid that Americans exhibited during that 95% of the time they were not being attacked - the other 5% was stark terror! Our inability to understand the Vietnamese culture or the war as it was being prosecuted by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong is starkly portrayed. No better scene has been written that the "sighting" of taller than normal, Vietnamese strangers in the village bar drinking beer before January 31, 1968. The Americans recognized these men as not villagers but did nothing about it. They were North Vietnamese regular soldiers in civilian clothes infiltrating the American "secure hamlets" in order to kick off the 1968 Tet offensive. Our technology superiority was only exceeded by our baseless arrogance. This book is a great read! Pick it up for one of your summer books. If your are of the boomer age or just interested in your parents' generation, you'll enjoy "In Pharaoh's Army" and get a feel for how hundreds of thousands of us lived a part of it.

"In Pharaoh's Army" is not your average war memoir, nor even your average Vietnam war memoir. Wolff joined the army because he wanted to be a man of honor and he trusted the government to use its soldiers well. Instead, he finds that while he is a better soldier than some, he is not the "wily, nerveless killer" that the Army wants him to be. He gets through Officer Candidate School (at the bottom of his class) only because he has the talent to produce the satirical revue for graduation night. New assignments repeatedly have little or nothing to do with his immediate prior training. When Wolff finally gets to Vietnam, he is sent to act as the American advisor to a Vietnamese unit, but with very little guidance as to what he is to advise them about. Tet is the only pitched battle Wolff describes, but the day-to-day challenges of mines, snipers, and being a white man in an Asian world make getting to the end of each day a triumph. Each day and every trip are endless until they are over. Survival has more to do with luck than with being a good soldier. Wolff's title is apt: "Here were pharaoh's chariots engulfed; his horsemen confused; and all his magnificence dismayed."Wolff finds his honor in honesty. From the opening epigraph to the final paragraph, Wolff attempts to set it all down honestly, the lost war that is neither glorious nor action-packed. His prose is spare, straight to the point and yet poetic. The irony, when it comes, is devastating (and aimed at himself, as often as at others). Many of the stories would lend themselves to a more comic telling, but while the book is often humorous, Wolff always subtly reminds us that this is a deadly serious matter. The book is superbly structured, the selection and ordering of the stories designed to reinforce Wolff's points. Wolff gives us a real sense of the uncertainty and terror that pervaded every day, that led men to do things they can no longer imagine or explain. "How do you tell such a terrible story? Maybe such a story shouldn't be told at all. Yet finally it will be told." I'm glad Wolff did the telling. Highly recommended.

This picks up where This Boy's Life left off. While there are no characters here as vivid as Toby's Stepfather, Dwight, from the earlier work, there are very touching scenes with his birth father, a man pathologically unable to tell the truth. Only about half of this book takes place in Vietnam, contrary to the impression you may get from the cover and the title. This is very different in tone from most books that deal with Vietnam. The self-pity factor is extremely low. At times it is almost like Huck Finn goes to 'Nam. Readers anxious to know more about the dysfunctional Wolff family may want to seek out Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke Of Deception.

After reading "This Boy's Life", I had to read "In Pharoah's Army", even though I have no interest in the Vietnam War.The nice thing about this book is that even with a subject that I don't care for, it is told from an individual's perspective which can make or break any situation if told in the right way.Wolff comes through with this book too, by being very honest with his readers. He seems to be holding back a little more with this book than he did with his earlier memoir, but that appears to be more of a function of space and time considerations than of concealing information.Although there were things about his character that disappointed me, that made me like the book all the more due to it frankness.I hope that Mr. Wolff is working on a third memoir over the next phase of his life. I can't wait to read it.