In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War

by Tobias Wolff

  We found Specialist Four Lyons playing chess with another man in the company mess hall. They were both unshaven and wrecked-looking. Lyons took a pint bottle of Cutty Sark from under the table and offered it to us. Sergeant Benet waved it off and so did I. The argument against drinking and driving carried, on these roads, a persuasive new force.

  “Where is everybody?” Sergeant Benet asked.

  “Big show. Raquel Welch.”

  “Raquel Welch is here?”

  “I think it’s Raquel Welch.” Lyons took a drink and gave the bottle to the other man. “Raquel Welch, right?”

  “I thought it was Jill St. John.”

  “Hey, maybe it’s both of them, I don’t know. Big difference. What with all the officers sitting up front you’re lucky if you can even see the fucking stage. Seriously, man. They could have Liberace up there and you wouldn’t know the difference, plus all the yahoos screaming their heads off.”

  “So,” I said. “We’ve got the Chicom.”

  “Yeah, right. Oh boy. Problem time.”

  “Don’t tell me about problems,” Sergeant Benet said. “I didn’t drive down here for any problems.”

  “I hear you, man. Really. The thing is, I couldn’t swing it. Not for one Chicom.”

  “We agreed on one,” I said. “That was the understanding.”

  “I know, I know. I’m with you, totally. It’s just this guy, you know, my guy over there, he suddenly decides he wants two.”

  “He must be a crazy person,” Sergeant Benet said. “Two Chicoms for a TV? He’s crazy.”

  “I can get you some steaks. Fifty pounds.”

  “I don’t believe this,” I said. “We could’ve gotten killed coming down here.”

  “T-bone. Aged. This is not your average slice of meat,” Lyons said.

  The other man looked up from the chessboard. “I can vouch for that,” he said. He kissed his fingertips.

  “Or two Chicoms and I can get the TV,” Lyons said. “I can have it for you in, like, an hour?”

  “Who is this asshole?” I said. “Get him over here. We’ll settle this right now.”

  “No can do. Sorry.”

  “We shook hands on this,” Sergeant Benet said. “Don’t you be jacking us around with this we-got-problems bullshit. Where’s the TV?”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Get it.”

  “Hey man, lighten up. It’s not my fault, okay?”

  Sergeant Benet turned and left the tent. I followed him.

  “This is fucked,” I said.

  “We had a deal,” Sergeant Benet said. “We shook hands.”

  We got in the truck and just sat there. “I can’t accept this,” I said.

  “What I don’t understand, that sorry-ass pecker-wood wanted two Chicoms, why didn’t he say he wanted two Chicoms?”

  “I refuse to accept this.”

  “Jack us around like that. Shoot.”

  I told Sergeant Benet to drive up the road to an officers’ lounge where I sometimes stopped for a drink. It was empty except for a Vietnamese woman washing glasses behind the bar. The TV was even bigger than I remembered, 25 inches, one of the custom Zeniths the army special-ordered for clubs and rec rooms. I motioned Sergeant Benet inside. The cleaning woman looked up as Sergeant Benet unplugged the TV and began disconnecting the aerial wire. “The picture is bad,” I told her in Vietnamese. “We have to get it fixed.”

  She held the door open for us as we wrestled the TV outside.

  On the way to the gate Sergeant Benet said, “What if Captain Cox is still moping around? What you going to do then?”

  “He won’t be.”

  “You better hope not, sir.”

  “Come on. You think he’d miss out on Raquel Welch?”

  Captain Cox stepped outside the guard shack and waved us down.

  “My God,” I said.

  “What you going to tell him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then you best let me do the talking.”

  I didn’t argue.

  Captain Cox came up to the window and asked where we were headed now.

  “Home, sir,” Sergeant Benet said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Outside My Tho.”

  “Ah yes, you’re with our noble allies.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “So what’ve you got in here?”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, you already looked.”

  “Well, why don’t I just take another look. Just for the heck of it.”

  “It’s getting pretty late, sir. We don’t want to be on the road come dark.” Sergeant Benet nudged the accelerator.

  “Turn off that engine,” Captain Cox said. “Now you just damn well sit there until I say otherwise.” He went around to the back of the truck, then came up to Sergeant Benet’s window. “My,” he said. “My, my, my, my, my.”

  “Listen,” I said. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Sergeant Benet opened the door and got down from the cab. “If I could have a word with you, sir.”

  They walked off somewhere behind the truck. I heard Sergeant Benet talking but couldn’t make out his words. Before long he came back and opened the door and pulled the Chicom from behind the seat. When he returned Captain Cox was with him. Captain Cox held the door as Sergeant Benet climbed inside, then closed it. “You boys have yourselves a good Thanksgiving now, hear?”

  “Yes sir,” Sergeant Benet said. “We’ll do just that.” And he drove out the gate.

  “What a prick,” I said.

  “The captain? He’s not so bad. He’s a reasonable man. There’s plenty that aren’t.”

  Sergeant Benet pushed the truck hard, but he didn’t look worried. He leaned into the corner and drove with one hand, his eyes hooded and vaguely yellow in the weak light slanting across the paddies. He smoked a Pall Mall without taking it from his lips, just letting it smolder and hang. He looked like a jazz pianist.

  He was a hard one to figure out, Sergeant Benet. He thought it was amazing that I could get along in Vietnamese, but he spoke about ten different kinds of English, as occasion demanded—Cornerboy, Step’n-fetchit, Hallelujah Baptist, Professor of Cool, Swamp Runner, Earnest Oreo Professional, Badass Sergeant. The trouble I had understanding him arose from my assumption that his ability to run different numbers on other people meant that he would run numbers on me, but this hadn’t proved out. With me he was always the same, a kind, dignified, forbearing man. He read the Bible every night before he went to bed. For wisdom he quoted his grandmother. Unlike me, he suffered no sense of corruption from his role as scrounge or from the extreme caution he normally practiced. He had survived Korea and a previous tour in Vietnam and he intended to survive this tour as well, without any romantic flourishes. He avoided personal talk, but I knew he was married and had several children, one of them a little girl with cerebral palsy. His wife was a cook in New Orleans.

  He was solitary. His solitude was mostly of his own choosing, but not entirely. The Vietnamese had added our bigotries to their own, and now looked down on blacks along with Chinese, Montagnards, Lao, Cambodians, and other Vietnamese. If they had to have advisers they wanted white advisers, and they generally got what they wanted. Sergeant Benet was the only black adviser in the division. The Vietnamese didn’t know what to make of him, because he gave no sign at all of being anybody’s inferior. Even Major Chau deferred to him. Sergeant Benet sometimes got together in My Tho with a couple of sergeants from one of the other battalions. I had the idea they were out raising hell, until I saw them once in a bar downtown. Sergeant Benet was just sitting there, smoking, sipping his beer, looking into the distance while the other two talked and laughed.

  The ferry had been almost empty on the way over, but when we got to the landing there was a long line for the crossing back. Two buses, two trucks full of vegetables, some scooters and mopeds, a whole bunch of people with bicycles. We were looking at three trips’ worth, maybe more. Se
rgeant Benet went around the line and angled the truck in front of a bus. The driver didn’t say anything. He was used to it. They were all used to it.

  After we boarded the ferry Sergeant Benet settled back for a quick nap. He could do that, fall asleep at will. I got out and leaned against the rail and watched the ferryman wave the two buses into position, shouting, carving the air with his long, bony hands. The deck was packed with people. Old women with red teeth worked the crowd, selling rice balls, bread, fruit wrapped in wet leaves. Ducks paddled along the length of the hull, begging for crumbs. I could see their bills open and close but their calls were lost in the voices around me, the bark of the ferryman, the cries of the vendors, the blare of a tinny radio. The engine throbbed under the weathered planking.

  A woman just down the rail was staring across the river, lost in thought. I recognized her immediately. A little boy, maybe five or six, stood between us, watching the ducks. I said hello to him in Vietnamese. He drew back against her, gave me a sober look, and did not answer. But I got what I wanted; she turned and saw me there. I greeted her in formal terms, and she had no choice but to return my greeting.

  Her name was Anh. When I first got to My Tho she’d been working at division headquarters as a secretary and interpreter. One afternoon I stopped by her desk and tried to spark a conversation with her, but she had hardly lifted her eyes from the papers she was working on. She made me feel like a fool. Finally I gave up and went away without a word, knowing she wouldn’t answer or even look up except to confirm that I really was leaving.

  Then she lost her job, or quit. I hadn’t seen her since, but sometimes her face came to mind—not very accurately, as it turned out.

  Her face was covered with faint pale scars, subtle as the hairline veins under the glaze of old porcelain. They didn’t spoil her looks, not as I saw her, and perhaps this is why I’d forgotten them. Their effect on me was to make me feel, in spite of the deliberate coldness of her gaze, that she was exposed and reachable. She had one small livid scar at the corner of her mouth. It curved slightly upward, giving her a lopsided, disbelieving smile. Her lips were full and vividly painted. I thought she might be Chinese; there were a lot of them in My Tho, traders and restaurateurs. She was paler and taller and heavier than most Vietnamese women, who in their floating ao dais seemed more spirit than flesh. Anh’s neck swelled slightly above the high collar of her tunic. Her hands were white and plump. You could see the roundness of her arms under her taut sleeves.

  Again in Vietnamese I asked the boy if he had been on the bus. He looked at Anh. She told him to answer me. “Yes,” he said, and looked back down at the ducks.

  “Do you like riding the bus?”

  “Answer him,” Anh said.

  He shook his head.

  “You don’t like the bus? Why not?”

  He said something I didn’t understand.

  “He gets carsick,” Anh said in English. “The roads are so bad now.”

  I wanted to keep the conversation in Vietnamese. In English I was accountable for what I said, but in Vietnamese I could be goofy or banal without having it held against me. In fact I had the idea that I was charming in Vietnamese.

  To the boy I said, “Listen—this is true. Four times I took the bus across my own country. That’s five thousand kilometers each way. Twenty thousand kilometers.”

  “Look,” he said to Anh. “We’re going.”

  So we were, slowly. The ducks didn’t have any trouble keeping up.

  “He’s shy,” Anh said in English.

  Speaking English myself now, I said, “Is he shy with everyone? Or just me?”

  “Just Americans.”

  “How come?”

  She pushed out her lips and shrugged. It was something an actress would do in a French movie. She said, “He doesn’t trust them.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged again. “You’re an American. Can he trust you?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything, but the other side of her mouth, the one without the scar, lifted slightly.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Van.”

  “Your son?”

  There was a change in her, and then she was looking at me without any friendliness at all. “My sister’s,” she said. “I take care of him. Sometimes.” She turned away and leaned forward, elbows on the rail. She cocked one knee, then lifted the other foot and rubbed it up and down the back of her leg. I was supposed to think that I was no longer any part of her thoughts, but her movements were so calculated, so falsely spontaneous, that instead of discouraging me they gave me hope.

  A wooden crate floated past with a bird perched on top. From out here on the river I could see how thick the trees grew on the banks, bristling right up to the edge and reaching out, trailing their branches in the water. Far above us a pair of jets flew silently. They were shining bright, brighter than anything down here, where the light was going out of the day.

  “Hey, Van,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “Do you like TV?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you like to watch?”

  He said something I didn’t understand. I asked Anh for a translation. She took her time. Finally she turned and said, “It’s a puppet show.”

  “How about Bonanza? You like Bonanza!”

  “Little Joe,” he said in English.

  But he was already looking away.

  “He doesn’t see those shows,” Anh said. “He hears about them from the other kids.”

  “Doesn’t your sister let him?”

  “No television,” she said, and picked up the wicker bag at her feet. The drivers cranked their engines; people began to board the buses as we approached the landing. The trees cast long shadows out over the water, and when they fell over us the air turned cool, and Anh’s face and hands took on the luminous quality of white things at dusk. I knew I had somehow made a fool of myself again. It vexed me, that and the way she’d smiled when I said I could be trusted. I made up my mind to show her I was a really good guy, not just another American blowhard.

  “We have an extra TV,” I said. “It’s in the truck.”

  “We don’t need television.”

  In Vietnamese, I said, “Van, do you want a television?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She hefted her bag. “What kind?”

  “Zenith.”

  “Color?”

  I nodded.

  “How big?”

  “Big enough.”

  “Nineteen inches?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five inches? How much?”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  “What for, then—Chicom?”

  I couldn’t help laughing.

  “What for, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  She watched me.

  “It’s a gift.”

  “A gift,” she said. She went on watching me. She looked away and then looked at me again. “Okay,” she said unhappily, as if agreeing to some exorbitant price.

  I was going to tell her to forget about it if that was how she felt, but I said, “I can drop it off tonight.”

  She considered this. In a tone of surrender, she said, “Okay. Tonight.” She told me where she lived. I knew the street—a line of cement-block bungalows along the reservoir, just inside town.

  WE LET the buses go well ahead of us, figuring they’d pick up any mines that might have found their way into the road since we drove out. I didn’t say anything to Sergeant Benet about my plans for the television until we approached the crossroads. A short distance to the west lay our battalion; a bit farther and to the east, My Tho. I asked him to make the turn east. “Let’s get a drink,” I said.

  He wasn’t interested. The drive back had done him in, and I knew how he felt because I wasn’t exactly in the pink myself. We’d lost radio contact again after we left the landing. All we could get was static broken occ
asionally by urgent, indistinct voices that vanished when I tried to tune them in. The road was empty and getting dark. Stretches of it were already dark where trees overhung the road, scratching the top of the truck as we went by. Sergeant Benet had continued in his solitude, mute, pensive, not even smoking anymore. I’d been left with nothing for company but the consciousness of my own stupidity in making this trip, which I was now trying to talk Sergeant Benet into prolonging. Finally I had no choice but to tell him the truth, or a version of the truth in which I appeared as benefactor to a deprived child.

  “What’s his mother look like?”

  “I don’t know. I talked to his aunt.”

  “This aunt, she pretty?”

  “I suppose you could say so.”

  “Well, sir, you didn’t give away any TV.”

  “I’m afraid I did.”

  “No sir. It’s still in the back there.”

  “But I promised.” When he didn’t say anything, I added, “I gave my word.”

  He turned west toward the battalion.

  I could have made him drive the other direction, but I didn’t. In this moment on the darkening road, Anh seemed a lot farther away than My Tho—an impossible distance. I was glad to be off the hook, and heading home to a good show.

  We made it with time to spare. Sergeant Benet set up the television while I fried a couple of pork chops. He had trouble getting the color right; all the faces were yellow. I had a try at it and lost the picture completely, then gave him advice while he labored to get the picture back.

  By the time Bonanza came on we were ready. We turned off the lights and settled in front of the screen, which looked like Cinerama after the dinky Magnavox we’d been watching. It was, as always, a story of redemption—man’s innate goodness brought to flower by a strong dose of opportunity, hard work, and majestic landscape. During the scene when the wounded drifter whom Hoss has taken in (over Little Joe’s objections) and nursed back to health nobly refuses, even under threat of death, to help his sociopath brother ambush the good brothers, the Cartwrights, and run off with their cattle, Sergeant Benet rocked in his seat and said, “Amen. Amen.” He said it again during the big turkey-carving scene at the end, when the camera panned the happy faces at the Ponderosa feast table. And I was moved myself, as in some way I had planned to be. Why else would I have put myself on the road that afternoon except for the certain reward of this emotion, unattainable from a 12-inch black-and-white?—this swelling of pride in the beauty of my own land, and the good hearts and high purposes of her people, of whom, after all, I was one.