In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War

by Tobias Wolff

  “Laddy,” he told me, “without war we’d still be swinging in the fucking trees. It’s God’s own university and anyone who says different is a self-deluding fairy.”

  Doc Macleod looked on me as a fool in the making, starved for instruction that I was too far gone in folly to profit by but which it was his thankless duty to provide. In this spirit he sometimes took me along when he paid his calls on militia outposts in the backwaters of the province.

  These were mostly villages, never meant to serve as forts, that had the bad luck to be close to roads and rivers and canals. From these villages, the theory went, a communist-hating peasantry could maul the Vietcong as they moved through the area. It didn’t work out that way. These people weren’t belligerent mountain tribesmen or Nung mercenaries; they were farmers, and after they got home from training camp they took off their boots and tried to stay out of trouble. Their villages were easy prey. The Vietcong regularly attacked them to pick up weapons and show their strength.

  I was under no obligation to go along on these trips, Medcaps as they were called, but they made me feel useful. That was why I kept going out. It was like being a missionary; even a god. A couple of us big white guys would drop out of the sky and spend the day surrounded by astonished rustics who fully expected us to perform miracles. Some of what they lined up to show us—blisters, boils, pyorrhea—Doc Macleod had me treat with first aid. He took care of the rest. The work kept me busy for a few hours, and did no harm. It wasn’t even very dangerous; we descended in broad daylight and left before nightfall.

  In one of these outposts I met an American sergeant named Fisher. He had been stationed there with a lieutenant who’d gotten killed a couple weeks back. Now Fisher was on his own until the lieutenant’s replacement arrived. And what a place to be alone in. Every wall had holes in it. Most of the stucco had been blasted off the cinder-block community hall that Fisher and his lieutenant had helped build when they first arrived. The earthen wall around the perimeter still hadn’t been properly filled in where mortar fire had blown gaps in it.

  Fisher was young, twenty or twenty-one, and with his jungle hat on he looked even younger. His skin was completely smooth. But when he took his hat off he aged fifty years. His hair was white. Not silver, not the lustrous thatch of the hale, deep-sleeping burgher, but dry wispy white. It was the hair of a used-up old man.

  He blinked constantly. His voice was high and he talked a blue streak, stammering often. That was when he spoke to Doc Macleod and me. When he spoke to the Vietnamese he sounded calm and sure of himself. In the village there was a young child, a girl, with a cleft palate. Doc Macleod wanted to take her back with us and send her on to Saigon for corrective surgery. The mother went into hysterics. I tried to explain that she could go along with her daughter and stay with her in the hospital, but she refused to listen. Fisher went over to Doc Macleod and asked how important the operation was.

  “She’ll never get laid without it.”

  “Being beautiful isn’t all that important here.”

  “She’ll look like a fucking crocodile. Is that ugly enough for you?”

  Fisher put his arm around the woman and walked her outside. I could hear how serenely he reasoned with her. She simply couldn’t argue, Fisher was so quiet and certain of her submission. She went away and came back with a bundle and sat with her daughter until it was time to go.

  After we finished up, Fisher invited me back to his quarters to wait for the helicopter. He and his lieutenant had fashioned a room for themselves in the back of the hall by hanging blankets on a rod. Fisher pulled them together to give us some privacy and offered me one of the Cokes we’d brought him, which I tried to refuse because I didn’t want to deplete his store. He insisted. I took it and sat on the lieutenant’s bunk and let Fisher bend my ear. Some kids gathered at the open window and watched us. They didn’t say anything. A few of them had had their heads shaved that morning for parasites and were possibly worried about the consequences of drawing our attention again. Behind them I could see long strings of pig guts hanging between two poles; they were covered with flies whose furious buzzing never left my ears.

  Fisher was telling me about the lieutenant who’d been killed. He was, by coincidence, from the same part of Illinois as Fisher himself, and their fathers were both high school teachers. They had become close friends in their isolation here. Fisher told me that he was in touch with the lieutenant’s parents, that his own parents had driven over to see them and share the letters Fisher had written before the lieutenant got killed, in which he described his friend’s courage and devotion to the villagers.

  “Man, did he love these people,” Fisher said. “You should’ve heard him speak the language. It was unbelievable.”

  “You’re doing pretty well yourself.”

  “Not like him.”

  “How did he get killed?”

  Fisher was sitting on the other bunk. He shook his head and stared at the dirt floor between his feet. “Not like him. He really worked at it. Wherever he went he was always pointing at stuff and saying, What’s that? What’s that? He was a Christian, you know? Everyone was family to him, everyone, that’s just the kind of person he was.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Fisher examined me as if trying to remember what I was doing there. “You a believer, sir?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes. Sometimes not.”

  “I used to be. I’m not so sure, anymore. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, when you really think about it. Like resurrection of the body, what’re they going to do if you get blown up—find every little part of you and stick it all back together? What if part of you is in one country and the rest of you is in some other country?”

  I heard the helicopter coming in. Fisher ignored the sound and kept talking.

  “When you actually see what bodies are made of, you know, inside, it’s kind of hard to think of all that stuff coming back together again ten thousand years later or whenever. I mean, how do they keep track? When you think of all the people that have died … that’s a lot of people. The other thing is, how do they figure out who gets resurrected? If you’re a saint or something, okay, sure, that’s easy, but what if you’re a Christian but you’ve killed people?”

  Hesitantly, unsure of my right to speak on this subject, I said that God must understand how things like that happened. Fisher didn’t seem to hear. He kept talking.

  Doc Macleod called out from the other end of the hall. It was time to leave.

  Fisher walked with me toward the field where the helicopter was waiting. His words came faster and faster, as if to weave a net of sound by which to snare me and hold me there. He was like a safecracker madly spinning the dials as the clock runs out on him. I stopped and said, “Why don’t you come back with us?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Just get on and go,” I said.

  “I can’t,” he said, but I could see that he was thinking about it.

  Doc Macleod was ahead of us, handing up the little girl to the crew chief. Her mother waited beside him, along with an older man who wore a chin beard. He was lean and bony. Ropy veins stood out on his neck and forearms.

  “I’m not sure about this,” Fisher said.

  I didn’t say anything. Now that I’d made the offer there was no taking it back, and who wouldn’t want to see him safely out of this place? But I was also beginning to understand that people were going to be beaucoup unhappy with me if Sergeant Fisher deserted his post at my invitation. I couldn’t begin to imagine where my troubles would end if he got on that helicopter.

  It never came to that. While we were still at the edge of the field, some sort of dispute arose between the little girl’s mother and the bearded man. He’d been holding her bundle and now he would not let go. He didn’t jerk at it or try to wrestle it away from her, nor did he utter a sound, but he would not surrender it. She was weeping, quietly, without display. Fisher went up to them and spoke to the man, who let go and s
tepped back with Fisher and watched as Doc Macleod helped the woman up and then climbed on board himself. I followed him and buckled myself in and waved to Fisher. He didn’t see me. He was busy making assurances, giving hope with his calm voice and the fact of his abiding presence. Duty had swallowed him whole, loneliness, fear, and all. His path was absolutely clear. I almost envied him.

  Fisher looked up with the others but made no sign as the chopper lifted slowly off the field and climbed above the rooftops. The pilot passed over the village with a lumbering restraint that might have been courtesy, until we were clear of the perimeter. Then he hit the gas.

  DOC MACLEOD AND I went into My Tho for some fish soup that evening. As we drove in from the airfield it started to mist up and by the time we finished eating rain was falling in sheets and the sky was black. The hot soup, together with the rain pounding on the roof, made me heavy-limbed and thoughtful. I stared out the window while Doc Macleod worked on a model plane he’d produced from his bag. He always had a model going; he said it kept his hands steady. A column of Vietnamese soldiers walked down the street, rifles slung upside down beneath their glistening ponchos.

  I said, “I wonder what made his hair turn white like that?”

  “What unbearable experience, you mean? What terror too great for mortal man?”

  “Something turned his hair white.”

  “I’ll give you the short answer, laddy. That’s the one you’ll think you understand. Genes.”

  “I know that’s the usual explanation.”

  “The only explanation, boyo.”

  “The only scientific explanation, you mean.”

  “Don’t be a silly cunt.”

  “There are cases.”

  He put down the model. “You can’t be serious.”

  “There are.”

  “Christ!” He threw himself back hard against the chair and looked around at the waiter as if to call him as a witness to my stupidity.

  “I know of one personally.”

  “Oh you do, do you? You didn’t see it happen, did you? No. How curious. Every mother’s son personally knows of a case, and nobody has seen it happen. You know what I fucking hate?” He leaned toward me. “More than anything else, sonny, I hate the condescension of ignorant sissies with all their more things in heaven and earth Horatio bullshit. It’s too much to bear. You want a mystical explanation? Call it fate. Say, ‘It was written.’ That would be the whole bloody truth.”

  “It happened to someone in my ex-fiancée’s family. Not an actual family member—”

  “Don’t!” He put his hands over his ears.

  This conversation passed from my mind until just after Tet, when I was searching through one of the makeshift hospitals in My Tho for some people who had disappeared without trace. I was dull from the smell of carbolic and sepsis and from the sight of all these bereft, mutely suffering people with their terrible wounds and lopped limbs. It was odd to feel the wholeness of my body as I made my way among them. And then I saw Doc Macleod across the room, walking regally between a row of cots. He saw me at the same time and stopped short. “My God, man,” he said. “Your hair! It’s white as snow!” He caught me completely flat-footed, and before I could stop myself I felt my hand fluttering toward my head. He smiled and shook his finger at me and moved off down the aisle, trailed by a fussing retinue of Vietnamese doctors and nurses. He was in his glory.

  A Federal Offense

  JUST BEFORE Tet my father sent me a belated Christmas card in which he said he watched the Vietnam news every day and was “damned proud” of me. I knew he meant well, but I couldn’t help wondering what he had in mind. What did he think I was doing over here? What would he like me to be doing? Something “hush-hush,” maybe, something understatedly brave and important as in the stories he used to tell, or imply, about flying with the RAF and serving with partisans just about everywhere. But maybe not. In fact I didn’t know what he expected from me, or what to expect from him.

  He had gotten out of prison a couple of years back while I was in Officer Candidate School. A friend of his from the old days found him an apartment in Manhattan Beach, and my father wrote me from there to send news of his release and simply to wish me well. There was no humbug in the letter, no talk of impending deals or bum raps. He said Geoffrey was helping him out every month and that was how he’d gotten my address. Years had passed since I’d heard from him or made any effort of my own to get in touch, and I was astounded to see his broad, outsized scrawl, the letters almost like ideograms, on the envelope. I sent back my own good wishes and thereafter we exchanged notes every six months or so.

  When I was in language school my father wrote to propose that he come to Washington for a grand reunion. He could catch up with his boys, meet Priscilla and Vera, and pay his respects to our mother (he had either forgotten, or didn’t care, that she had married again). He saw no reason, if he found Washington to his liking, why something couldn’t be worked out with his parole board that would allow him to move there.

  Geoffrey and I had a talk about it. His sense of humor was not on display. To him, the idea of the old man in Washington was a pit filled with man-eating possibilities. I could see his point. For once in his life he was solvent and in place, even, as book editor of the Washington Post, something of a personage in town, a favored ambassador from the trivial but charming realm of literature. Priscilla was expecting their first child in a few months.

  Enter the old man. It was obvious to both of us how the play would go, we knew the script by heart: exotic cars paid for with rubber checks, stereos and Dunhill lighters charged to “my boy over at the Post.” Landlords, grocers, clothiers, purveyors of wine and spirits, loan sharks, all clamoring for justice—to Geoffrey. The whole thing would fall on him. It was unthinkable. But Geoffrey had thought about it; that was what made it hard for him. He had a lingering dream of somehow bringing the old man back into the family, and would have done just about anything to pull it off except let him destroy his life.

  We declined our father’s offer to join us, and he took it like a sport—nothing ventured, nothing gained—and said no more about it. But I’d gotten interested in seeing him again, and after my orders for Vietnam came in I arranged to take a quick detour to Manhattan Beach.

  It started badly. When I got to LAX I couldn’t find the envelope with his address. He was not allowed to have a phone—Ma Bell couldn’t afford him. I tried calling Geoffrey, and got no answer. Then I remembered that a few months back there’d been a flap over some slippers and a tobacco pouch my father had charged at a Scandinavian imports store and neglected to pay for. He’d almost gone back to prison on account of it, but Geoffrey made good for him and the owner dropped charges. The name of the store had stayed with me. I looked it up in the phone book and found my way there.

  My luck turned. The owner was on the premises and eager to be of help. A tall man with a mild, cultivated air and a faint accent, he immediately produced my father’s address and insisted on driving me there. As soon as we got in his car he began to apologize. He never should have gotten the police involved, and he wouldn’t have if he’d known Arthur was on parole. Never! Not for a moment! He was deeply sorry for the trouble he’d caused. “Such an extraordinary man, your father. Such things he has done. The airplanes, the dam in Turkey.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I told him.

  “Such interesting conversations we had.”

  He went on this way until we reached the apartment, a converted garage on the ground floor of a stucco house. I could see the ocean between two apartment buildings at the end of the street; when the store owner turned the engine off I heard the crash and surge of waves. He came around to open the trunk for me and this was when my father stepped outside. He must have seen us pull up. He looked wary, and no wonder. I had omitted to tell him I was coming, because up to the last minute I wasn’t sure I’d go through with it. He hadn’t seen me for six years, since I was fifteen; I did not look like that boy anymore
, especially in the uniform I’d worn so I could fly military standby. At first glance I was just a stranger with badges and shiny boots, the embodiment of civic compulsion in the company of a man he had defrauded. I wouldn’t have recognized him either. He wore ugly black glasses. His face had thickened, his nose gone puffy as a cauliflower. He needed a shave.

  “Hello, Arthur,” the store owner said. “Here is your son.”

  He looked at me. “Toby?”

  I put my hand out. He stood there, then took it, then bent toward me and kissed me clumsily on the lips.

  The store owner put my duffel bag on the sidewalk. “Let me know if you need anything,” he said to me. Then, sadly, “How are you, Arthur?”

  “Tops, Peter. Hunky-dory.” As we watched the car pull away my father asked me how I happened to arrive with “the melancholy Dane.” I began a narration, but once I came to the matter of the unpaid bill he shook his head to let me know he’d heard enough.

  It was a bad beginning, and we had trouble getting past it. My father went back and forth between cuffing my arm, calling me Buster and Chum and the pet names of my childhood, and standing back with a puzzled, watchful expression. He didn’t know what to do with me. Of course I’d been a jackass to surprise him, but it went beyond that. It had to do with the whole of our history. He must have wondered where we stood in all this, what I’d forgiven, what I held against him, what I held against myself. I had questions of my own. The air between us was heavy with them.

  After I’d changed clothes and had a sandwich we escaped the apartment and followed the walkway above the beach. The afternoon light glared on the water. My father noticed that I was squinting and pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket. “Go on,” he said, when I tried to refuse.