In Pharaoh's Army (22 page)
Authors: Tobias Wolff
I was in the Bodleian Library one night, doing a translation from the West Saxon Gospels for my Old English class. The assigned passage was from the Sermon on the Mount. It came hard, every line sending me back to the grammar or the glossary, until the last six verses, which gave themselves up all at once, blooming in my head in the same words I’d heard as a boy, shouted from evangelical pulpits and the stages of revival meetings. They told the story of the wise man who built his house upon a rock and the foolish man who built his house upon the sand. “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”
I’d forgotten I’d ever known these words. When they spoke themselves to me that night I was surprised, and overcome by a feeling of strangeness to myself and everything around me. I looked up from the table. From where I sat I could see the lights of my college, Hertford, where Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh had once been students. I was in a country far from my own, and even farther from the kind of life I’d once seemed destined for. If you’d asked me how I got here I couldn’t have told you. The winds that had blown me here could have blown me anywhere, even from the face of the earth. It was unaccountable. But I
was
here, in this moment, which all the other moments of
my life had conspired to bring me to. And with this moment came these words, served on me like a writ. I copied out my translation in plain English, and thought that, yes, I would do well to build my house upon a rock, whatever that meant.
G
EORGE ORWELL WROTE
an essay called “How the Poor Die” about his experience in the public ward of a Paris hospital during his lean years. I happened to read it not long ago because one of my sons was writing a paper on Orwell, and I wanted to be able to talk with him about it. The essay was new to me. I liked it for its gallows humor and cool watchfulness. Orwell had me in the palm of his hand until I came to this line: “It is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.”
It stopped me cold. Figure of speech or not, he meant it, and anyway the words could not be separated from their martial beat and the rhetoric that promotes dying young as some kind of good deal. They affected me like an insult. I was so angry I had to get up and walk it off. Later I looked up the date of the essay and found that Orwell had written it before Spain and World War II, before he’d had the chance to see what dying in your boots actually means. (The truth is,
many of those who “die in their boots” are literally blown right out of them.)
Several men I knew were killed in Vietnam. Most of them I didn’t know well, and haven’t thought much about since. But my friend Hugh Pierce was a different case. We were very close, and would have gone on being close, as I am with my other good friends from those years. He would have been one of them, another godfather for my children, another bighearted man for them to admire and stay up late listening to. An old friend, someone I couldn’t fool, who would hold me to the best dreams of my youth as I would hold him to his.
Instead of remembering Hugh as I knew him, I too often think of him in terms of what he never had a chance to be. The things the rest of us know, he will not know. He will not know what it is to make a life with someone else. To have a child slip in beside him as he lies reading on a Sunday morning. To work at, and then look back on, a labor of years. Watch the decline of his parents, and attend their dissolution. Lose faith. Pray anyway. Persist. We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That’s how we find out who we are.
I know it’s wrong to think of Hugh as an absence, a thwarted shadow. It’s my awareness of his absence that I’m describing, and maybe something else, some embarrassment, kept hidden even from myself, that I went on without him. To think of Hugh like this is to make selfish use of him. So, of course, is making him a character in a book. Let me at least remember him as he was.
He loved to jump. He was the one who started the
“My Girl” business, singing and doing the Stroll to the door of the plane. I always take the position behind him, hand on his back, according to the drill we’ve been taught. I do not love to jump, to tell the truth, but I feel better about it when I’m connected to Hugh. Men are disappearing out the door ahead of us, the sound of the engine is getting louder. Hugh is singing in falsetto, doing a goofy routine with his hands. Just before he reaches the door he looks back and says something to me. I can’t hear him for the wind. What? I say. He yells,
Are we having fun?
He laughs at the look on my face, then turns and takes his place in the door, and jumps, and is gone.
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 Pharaoh’s Army
This Boy’s Life
Back in the World
The Barracks Thief
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
OOKS BY
T
OBIAS
W
OLFF
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 PHARAOH’S ARMY
In
In Pharaoh’s Army
Tobias Wolff gives us a precisely and sometimes pitilessly remembered account of his young manhood—a 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 set—the 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 Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed 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 stories—twenty-one classics followed by ten potent new stories—displays Tobias Wolff’s 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
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1995
Copyright © 1994 by Tobias Wolff
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1994.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Happiness Music Corporation:
Excerpt from “My Happiness” by Betty Peterson and Borney Bergantine, copyright © 1948 by Happiness Music Corporation. Used by permission.
MCA Music Publishing:
Excerpt from “I’m Sorry” words and music by Ronnie Self and Dub Allbritten, copyright © 1960 by Champion Music Corporation. Champion Music Corporation is an MCA company. All rights reserved. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Wolff, Tobias, [
date
]
In Pharaoh’s army: memories of the lost war/Tobias Wolff,
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76375-4
1. Wolff, Tobias, [
date
] 2. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
DS559.5.W64 1994
959704’38—dc20 94-11574
9B
Some of the names in this narrative have been changed.
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