In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War

by Tobias Wolff

  As a military project Tet failed; as a lesson it succeeded. The VC came into My Tho and all the other towns knowing what would happen. They knew that once they were among the people we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing between them. We would kill them all to get at one. In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them; that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them, and that we would kill every last one of them to save our own skins. To believe otherwise was self-deception. They taught that lesson to the people, and also to us. At least they taught it to me.

  Old China

  I MET Pete Landon when I was in language school. Pete was a Foreign Service officer, educated at Groton and Harvard, very talented, very accomplished. He already spoke French, German, and Italian, and while everyone else was still rendering Vietnamese as if it were some absurd mutation of English he’d begun learning its poetry. He was athletic and rakish. Other men, myself among them, courted his notice as if he were a beautiful girl; he had that charge of glamour. When he laughed at something I said, I felt lucky. Singled out.

  Pete was seven or eight years my senior and showed an avuncular interest in me that I was not above encouraging with stories of near-death experiences during survival training and parachute jumps. He seemed amused by my impersonation of a cocky young warrior, and I played it up.

  Pete got to Vietnam before I did and spent some months in the countryside. Then he was posted to Saigon. He sent me his address and offered a bed whenever I needed one, an invitation I put to use several times when I came to town on supply missions. His house was a handsome old villa surrounded by gardens and serviced by a gardener, several cleaning women, and a French-trained cook.

  Pete had four roommates, also civilians. I didn’t know what any of them actually did and I had the idea I shouldn’t press them on the subject. They were smart, casually elegant guys from the same world as Pete, and, like him, princely in their hospitality. They always had friends in the house, journalists, visitors from the States, cryptic young officers from up-country wearing Montagnard bracelets. It was like an ultracool fraternity.

  We assembled before dinner and put on some music and cracked open the scotch. The music got louder, we got louder. Pete and his friends were close about their work but dedicated gossips with a familial range of common acquaintance. They spoke, it seemed to me, not as snobs but as canny observers of their tribe. What else would they talk about? As they drank and matched stories, the world they conjured up became more real and present than the world outside the house, and they became part of it again. I could see it happen. It happened to me too, through an old trick of longing by which I managed to believe myself one of them.

  Dinner was formal. This formality did not extend to dress, but it governed the protocols of speech and conduct. We were young men, after all, flushed with drink, trembling on the edge of riot. It was understood that the night would end orgiastically. The polite forms postponed that conclusion while respecting its inevitability, making every decorum an aspect of the debauchery yet to come.

  We sat at a mahogany table lit by two silver candelabra. Pete presided, carving the meat, explaining the wine, conducting us like a choirmaster. He ruled but did not oppress. He managed to get each of us to put something on exhibit, to recite Shakespeare or sing a song or tell a story he knew we told well. When we finished he’d say “Hear, hear!” As the meal went on he pinged his glass and stood to propose toasts so long-winded and mannered that I assumed he must be parodying someone, maybe even parodying toasts themselves, the very idea of toasts, toasts as the ur-liturgy of that exquisite respectability whose restraints we would soon be trashing. Once we’d eaten our fill he did not suffer us to hurry away. He produced cognac and Cuban cigars and leaned back in his chair, thinking deep, inviting us to consider whether the Novel really was dead, and if Napoleon’s Russian campaign had in fact been such a great failure as conventional minds made it out to be. In the best Socratic fashion—“Good point, well taken, but is there perhaps another way of thinking about Borodino?”—he held us to the subject until there was nothing left of it or of our capacity to spout this guff, and then he’d fold his napkin and push back his chair and suggest that perhaps we might get a drink somewhere.

  How bizarre, to enter the streets of Saigon after a night at Pete’s table. Everything was newly foreign: the buildings, the look of the trees against the evening sky, the sounds and smells, and most of all the people in their absolute otherness, crowds of them on the sidewalks and roads, under awnings, in doorways and restaurants, so many it seemed they must be out for some purpose. We worked our way among them to the street, flagged cabs, and began our descent into the night.

  Given the daunting standards of the time and place, there was nothing remarkable in our dissipation; only, perhaps, in the feeling of superiority that joined us while we pursued it. Back in the house we’d kept the forms of gentility with the understanding that they didn’t really own us. We were renegades; this young gentlemen business was irony. But later, in the dumps where our outlaw trail led us, the irony assumed another form. We were, it seemed, young gentlemen after all, drawn here by anthropological curiosity. This heightened sense of ourselves gave us both license and detachment. We were on the Grand Tour, and this was part of its truth, which we as touristical swells had a duty to eat whole without making faces.

  Pete controlled the itinerary. He drank but didn’t show it. His speech never thickened or slurred, his manner became more old-world as the night ran its course. When the rest of us were at the point of collapse Pete caused taxis to appear and carry us back to the villa. At this moment he was at his brightest and most affable. He was ready to scramble up some eggs, brew a pot of coffee, have a serious talk.

  The others waved him off and went to bed. But I stayed up with Pete. I liked having his attention; it was worth losing some sleep for. He ransacked the kitchen for sweet rolls and cakes and urged them on me with an open hand, along with his thoughts and advice. I knew he had two kid brothers back home; he treated me pretty much as if I were one of them. And if he condescended, if he gave his advice a little too freely, if he sometimes made me feel too smartly the differences in our ages, our histories and prospects, that was all right. I knew he had my best interests at heart.

  NOT LONG AFTER Tet, Pete paid me a visit at my battalion. He had with him in his Land-Rover a man named Shaw. They’d driven down from Saigon, hoping to reach Ben Tre, but the roads were all jammed up and when they found themselves outside My Tho in a hard rain they decided to stop for the night.

  Shaw went inside to take a shower but Pete still wasn’t ready to call it a day. He had Sergeant Benet and me put on our ponchos and show him around the battalion. We inspected the gun emplacements, then walked the perimeter, with Pete stopping at every strongpoint to question the guards. They deferred instantly to him, grinning like children at the miracle of his beautiful Vietnamese while he asked them about their weapons and defensive procedures and then about their home villages and families. Sergeant Benet and I waited dumbly, shoulders hunched against the drenching rain, ropy streams of it running off our hoods and past our faces.

  It was dark when we got back inside. Shaw had the news on TV. Pete played with Canh Cho awhile, then came over to the kitchen area, where Sergeant Benet was making a salad while I grilled some steaks.

  “Quel boeuf!” he said. “Filet mignon … Where in the world did you find those?”

  “Friends,” I said.

  “You’re doing all right here,” Pete said. “The veritable lap of luxury.” He didn’t make this sound like a compliment.

  During dinner it came out that Shaw was also a Foreign Service officer, stationed in Thailand. I liked him. He came quickly to the point and had a brusque, undeceived way of bringing you to yours. He’d traveled to Vietnam for a visit and Pete was taking time off to show him around, put him in the picture. It was a friendly thing to do, but I could see they wer
en’t really friends. There was constraint in Shaw’s manner toward Pete. He didn’t seem to notice how winning Pete was and refused to be conducted in his presentation of himself, to have his gruff persona managed.

  Pete didn’t know how to talk to him. But he wouldn’t give up; he kept bantering on in that gallant mock-courtly way of his. I had never seen Pete at a loss before. I was embarrassed for him and felt somehow disloyal in my embarrassment.

  We stayed up and had a beer after Shaw and Sergeant Benet hit the rack.

  “So,” Pete said. “You’ve got yourself quite the little nest here.”

  “We do what we can.”

  “I had a somewhat different idea of your situation.”

  “We never really talked about it. There’s not much to say.”

  “I mean, good Lord, you’re really set up. Entre nous, where’d you get that TV?”

  “A trade,” I said.

  “Really. Well. You’ve set yourself up in style here. Nothing left to chance.”

  “You’re doing okay yourself,” I said.

  “In Saigon, yes. I didn’t live that way in the bush.”

  I knew this was true. I had seen the photographs of Pete with his villagers, Pete sinking a well, Pete building a bridge, Pete out on patrol with the local reaction force. Pete in native garb, eating cross-legged on a dirt floor, chopsticks poised above his rice bowl. He had a thick album of these pictures, and still more framed on the walls of his bedroom.

  “I would have thought you’d be traveling with a faster crowd,” he said. “Something a little more out on the edge.”

  “You go where they send you.”

  “I mean, this is just like home, isn’t it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Oh, but it is. Exactly. You get tired of the old filet mignon, you pop into town for a little Chinese.”

  I said, “You don’t just pop into My Tho.”

  “Well, of course you do! I thought you’d want to be out …”—he waved vaguely—“doing some damage.”

  “I’ve been out.” Then I said, “I can’t say I did much damage.”

  Pete leaned forward. His expression was kindly. “You know, this isn’t going to last forever. You have to ask yourself: What am I going to have to remember when it’s over? What am I going to have to look back on?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  He reached over and slapped my knee. “You’re a razor-edged weapon, remember? Terror from the sky. Death on cat’s feet. Don’t you want to show your stuff?”

  “I want to get home.” The words came so fast I almost choked on them.

  Pete sat back. He made as if to speak, then shook his head and took a drink. When I said good night he raised the bottle without looking at me.

  THE NEXT MORNING Pete announced a change of plan. Instead of going on to Ben Tre, which wasn’t much to look at since Tet, he proposed to drive to a village west of us to meet someone really interesting. This man had held important posts throughout the Delta, and though he was now living in retirement he kept in touch with his old network and knew things about the country no one else knew. He was famous for his grasp of the situation. If he didn’t know about it, it wasn’t worth knowing.

  Sergeant Benet said, “It’s not a good road out that way.”

  “Nonsense,” Pete said. “It’s a perfectly good road. I’ve driven it many times.”

  “The surface is all right,” I said. “It’s just not very secure right now. Nobody uses it much.”

  “If nobody’s using it,” Pete said, “then they won’t be expecting anybody, will they?”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  Shaw was looking from one to the other of us. “How far is this place?”

  “Around twenty-five clicks,” I said.

  “Twenty at the most.” Pete looked at me. “Please don’t feel obliged to go. I’m sure you have pressing things to do here.”

  Until that moment I’d had no thought of making the trip; it hadn’t even crossed my mind. “I was hoping to go,” I said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  “Don’t do this on my account,” Shaw said. “There’s no need.”

  I shook my head. “Curiosity.”

  “Good man,” Pete said.

  PETE HAD to make some calls to Saigon. While he was over at the communications center I piled sandbags on the floor of the Land-Rover and fixed us up with weapons. Two M-16s, plenty of ammo, a bunch of frags. Pete had brought his Swedish K, a good-looking, much-sought-after rifle, but only one clip. I asked Shaw if he knew how to use any of this hardware. He said he did, but preferred not to. “I’m planning to stay noncombatant on this trip,” he said.

  “You might have to change your plan.”

  “I hope not,” he said.

  “Are you a Quaker?”

  “What a peculiar question. Why do you ask?”

  “Something about the way you said ‘noncombatant.’”

  “What a place. You say the word noncombatant, you get asked if you’re a Quaker.”

  “You’re not, then.”

  “Nope.”

  “No offense meant.”

  “None taken. I can think of worse things to be.”

  “Not me,” I said. “Not over here.”

  Sergeant Benet pulled me aside before we left. He didn’t think I should be going. I had no orders and no mission to perform.

  I said I wanted to go.

  “Begging your pardon, sir, you got no business down there.” He waited for my answer, and when I repeated that I wanted to go, he said “Bullshit” and turned away. It was the only time he ever swore at me.

  After we’d driven a few kilometers beyond My Tho the countryside changed. The paddies were empty. Nobody tried to sell us anything, the kids didn’t beg and chase after us. There were no military vehicles on the road, only a few mopeds and bicycles. The bridges were unguarded. I sat in back and kept track of our position on the map while Pete drove and pointed things out to Shaw.

  Along the way we stopped to look at a brick building that had been all shot up. An acrid smell still clung to the walls. We wandered around inside, looking up at the sky through the holes in the roof. Shaw stood beside a window and began to snap pictures. Still taking pictures, he went into a crouch. I came up behind him and saw what the camera was getting, the pile of spent shells under the window, the blasted window frame, the country outside clear to the horizon, too much of it to hold at bay, though some poor soul had desperately tried. This picture was the story of his desperation.

  We reached the village just before noon. Pete sent a boy with a carton of Marlboros to announce our arrival, and not long afterward we were sitting on the floor of a large, dim room with Ong Loan, the man Pete had spoken of. Ong Loan was small even for a Vietnamese, bald, and very old. He didn’t look that old—his face was smooth and round, babyish—but you could hear it in his voice. He spoke in a papery whisper. Conversation must have been painful for him, but he didn’t spare himself. He asked after our health, commented on the season, answered Pete’s questions as to his own well-being. He spoke in his own tongue and occasionally in French; if he knew English he gave no sign of it. As he talked he held a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger, drew deeply on it, and with his eyes closed blew smoke toward the ceiling.

  A number of people had gathered in the room with us. They stood along the walls, watching, saying nothing. After a time two women came forward with tea and rice cakes. Ong Loan apologized for the plainness of the fare. Pete praised its quality.

  Ong Loan asked Pete about Saigon. It had been so long, he said, since his last visit. Years. Pete described how busy it was, how crowded; how overrun with soldiers. I kept expecting them to exhaust the civilities and get down to business, to discuss those important matters of which Ong Loan had such intimate knowledge. But no. They went on in this pleasant humor, Ong Loan whispering the questions, Pete answering in his liquid, idiomatic Vietnamese. I los
t them for long stretches, then picked them up again at a familiar word or phrase. Shaw swiveled his head from side to side as he listened. Of course he didn’t understand a word.

  And then they began to discuss porcelain—Chinese porcelain. I knew that Pete had some expertise here. The house in Saigon was filled with books on the subject, and he owned a collection of valuable plates and jars he’d picked up cheap from dealers who were out of their depth. Pete described one of his recent acquisitions to Ong Loan, who bent forward and turned his head slightly. He forgot to smoke. It seemed that he too was an enthusiast.

  I couldn’t follow them. There was no point in trying. Like Shaw, I could only watch, and mostly I watched Pete. More than ever I was struck by his fluency, not just in the flow of his words but in the motion of his hands and the set of his mouth; the way he ate and took his tea; his elaborate courtesies. He did it all with such a flourish, such evident pleasure—how happy and assured he was in his possession of these people’s admiration, how stylishly at home in this alien place, on this hard floor, surrounded by wonder-struck villagers. Yet I could see that his greatest pleasure came not from mastery of this situation but from our observation of his mastery.

  I watched him, and understood why he’d brought us here. He wanted us to see how easily he could take his place among these people, to be one of them and at the same time not one of them, yet not quite one of us. Something more than either. And his demonstration of mastery required that we be stripped of it, made helpless, reduced to the role of spectators.

  Not that Pete saw it that way. He probably thought he was exposing Shaw to valuable atmospherics. But whether he knew it or not, that’s what this whole number was about: the perfect Vietnamese, the compulsion to excite native awe, the insouciant gamble of life, the porcelain collection, the Swedish fucking K rifle. It was about cutting a figure.