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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
In Pharaoh’s Army
Tobias Wolff
Bloomsbury Press £12.99
Reading Tobias Wolff’s memoirs In Pharaoh’s Army is like reading a literary equivalent of The Deer Hunter or Platoon. It is his way of getting over the Vietnam Syndrome. Wolff tries to come to terms with this by writing a book in which a strange sense of guilt prevails. He finds himself in the American army as officer material and feels guilty that his friends are being sent to Vietnam while his training continues.
While he can’t wait to get out there, his friends are dying, and when he finally does arrive in Vietnam he feels a sense of guilt for not being in the middle of all the action.
You do get a picture of what it is like to be at war, always on edge, never trusting anyone, having a routine that you keep to simply because it got you through the day before. A good illustration is the way Wolff puts sandbags under his seat in the jeep, so if he drives over a mine his ‘butt’ would stay with the rest of his body, though he knows this to be a waste of time.
This could be any war, it is not portrayed as the war in which America dropped more bombs on Vietnam than the total that were dropped in the Second World War. There’s little mention of the mass napalming of areas causing massive destruction and death. This is written from a purely American perspective. There’s no attempt to explain what the war was about or the general feelings of those involved. When you’re waist deep in a paddy field with machine gun fire all around, you can understand a lack of clarity, but 20 years on we can expect a more considered opinion.
The North Vietnamese play no part in the book at all except as the enemy burrowing like rats all around the American camps or infiltrating the bases as peasants sending out details about the camp to the Vietnamese.
The South Vietnamese army are shown as unhelpful jokers and ignorant. On an exercise one day a Vietnamese soldier finds a dog and keeps it. When Wolff asks him what’s it called the soldier replies, ‘Canh Cho’, or dog stew. This horrifies Wolff who knows a dog is a man’s best friend and buys it off the Vietnamese soldier.
The problem with the book is you’re not sure whether Wolff’s guilt for serving in Vietnam is genuine or not.
I wanted him to survive and work everything out but by the end there was this hollow feeling that he doesn’t feel guilty at all – just that he wants to forget all the bad things that happened and remember his lost friends in some way.
If you want to know more about the Vietnam War then read Vietnam, the 10,000 Day War, or try to find a copy of Dispatches, which is a collection of American soldiers’ letters – or from a Vietnamese perspective the excellent Sorrow Of War. All of these explain the horror of this war much better than Wolff’s hollow account.
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