Judging the Man He Was

By Paul Gray

Near the end of this terse, mesmerizing memoir, Tobias Wolff describes sitting in a bar sometime in 1968 in Manhattan Beach, California, with a woman he would like to impress. His plans are thwarted by a couple of local drunks, familiar to him from past drop-ins, who interrupt the tete-a-tete and start talking about the war in Vietnam. Wolff, who has just finished a one-year tour of duty there, finds himself launched on an anecdote that he realizes as soon as he begins it will fail to achieve the effect he desires on his date or on anyone else. He plunges hopelessly ahead: "But as soon as you open your mouth you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems. How can you judge the man you were now that you've escaped his circumstances, his fears and desires, now that you hardly remember who he was?"

Such questions are implicit in all autobiographical writing, and it is to Wolff's credit that his In Pharaoh's Army (Knopf; 221 pages; $23) both raises and answers them with such skill. As he demonstrated in the award-winning This Boy's Life (1989), Wolff knows exactly how to find and then walk the line between self-censure and self-pity.

Thus he can look back dispassionately on the prep-school flunkout he once was, the aimless youth who had decided, at age 16, to be a writer. At the time, this choice did not suggest study and hard work but rather the pursuit of subject matter. "Experience," he remembers thinking, "was the clapper in the bell, the money in the bank." The military seemed a good place to find adventure, plus the "honor" and respectability Wolff also craved. What he got was Vietnam.

Wolff's book is only tangentially related to the vast and still expanding library of Vietnam literature. There are few heroics or even many dangers on view. Assigned as a Green Beret adviser to a South Vietnamese battalion, Wolff understands that the Viet Cong guerrillas in the vicinity are leaving him alone: "To kill me would have been easy, a piece of cake, and that they hadn't bothered to do it showed a just appreciation of my importance to the war effort." Nor does Wolff indulge himself or his readers in the retrospective breast beating of so many Vietnam confessions. "When you're afraid," he writes of the counterviolence against the Viet Cong after the Tet Offensive, "you will kill anything that might kill you."

Each of Wolff's 13 chapters reads like a rigorously boiled-down short story, but the effects never seem artificial or contrived. Wolff impulsively promises to give a color TV he and a sidekick have just stolen from a U.S. base to a young Vietnamese boy, but then decides the hell with it. He and his friend keep the set and watch the Bonanza Thanksgiving special just as they had planned. He protects an abandoned white puppy from the Vietnamese troops who want to cook and eat it, only to set himself up for an O. Henryish twist at his going-away party. Vietnam may have given Wolff some bell clappers, but it evidently taught him something too: how to portray life as both desperately serious and perfectly absurd.