In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War

by Tobias Wolff

  We drank more tea. My butt was numb, my back hurt, my legs burned with cramp from being crossed so long. I didn’t say anything, though. Shaw had begun to show signs of impatience and I figured he would break first. He kept shifting creakily. When this didn’t get Pete’s attention he simply stood up.

  Pete raised his hand in acknowledgment but went on talking.

  “I’m ready,” Shaw said.

  “We’re almost done,” Pete said.

  “I’m ready now,” Shaw said.

  Pete made sumptuous apologies for the haste in which he was forced to depart, apologies Ong Loan declined even to hear. He spoke to one of the women behind us, who left the room and returned with a blue-and-white bowl on a wooden base. It was about the size of a rice bowl. Ong Loan presented it to Pete, Pete tried to give it back, and when this was not allowed he closed his eyes and made a deep bow over the bowl and began to speak of Ong Loan’s incomparable largesse. It looked like we were in for a profound experience of mandarin gratitude. I gathered up our weapons and ammunition. Shaw followed me outside into the rain.

  “What was all that about?” Shaw said.

  “You’ll have to ask Pete,” I told him. “It was too fast for me.”

  We sat in the Land-Rover and listened to the rain tap against the canvas top. The wind picked up. The rain fell harder. The sky darkened, and a great blinding sheet of water broke against the windshield. Early afternoon, and the sky was black as night.

  Through the blur of rain I saw Pete appear in the doorway. In one hand he held a package. He scanned the sky, then ran for the Land-Rover. Shaw pushed the door open for him and Pete fell inside, laughing, drenched to the skin. He handed the package back to me. “Guard this with your life,” he said. “It’s worth more.”

  “We’ve got ourselves one hell of a storm here,” Shaw said.

  “Not so bad,” Pete said. “It’ll break.”

  He drove fast, bent over the wheel, into the blackness. Our headlights glared back at us from the glassy wall of falling rain. The rain drummed on the rooftop. The air inside the Rover grew rank and steamy; Pete had to keep wiping the glass with his sleeve. I couldn’t see well enough to track us on the map, but it didn’t matter because the radio was useless. Nothing but static.

  Pete looked at me in the rearview. “Why so glum?”

  “Who’s glum? So what did Ong Loan have to say?”

  “Ong Loan,” he said, pensively. “An original. A true original.”

  “So what’s the news? Are we winning?”

  “I’ve got some news for you,” he said. “Are you ready for it?” When I didn’t answer he reached back and shook my boot. “Come on, boy! Let’s see some enthusiasm! Uncle Pete’s been working for you!”

  I waited.

  “I talked to General Reed this morning. He’s going to take care of your problem.”

  “What problem is that?”

  “Missing out on all the fun. Pack your bags, big guy—you’re going to the party.”

  I said, “I’m not sure I understand you.”

  “Sure you do.”

  He was right; I did. I waited a moment, then said, “What, am I getting transferred?”

  “Kid’s got a mind like a steel trap,” Pete said to Shaw.

  Shaw turned in his seat and looked at him as if he’d never seen him before.

  “You should have your orders by the end of the week,” Pete said.

  “Where to?”

  “Up north. Very interesting slot, just came open. A-team.”

  I leaned forward between the seats. “You already set this up? This is definite?”

  “A done deal. We’re checking you out of the Plaza.”

  “I wish you’d said something to me about it.”

  Pete didn’t answer.

  I sat back again.

  For ten months now I’d been telling myself that whatever luck I enjoyed was no fault of mine. I’d volunteered for the whole nine yards, and they’d chosen to put me here. This fact had allowed me to half absolve myself of the suspicion, held so far only by myself, of malingering. But now the bet was called. This was a chance to offer myself up and put all doubt to rest, and I found I had no heart for it. The knowledge was humiliating. It left me with no protection against myself.

  We went through a hamlet. An old man was hunched in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. American voices broke through the fuzz on the radio, then faded again.

  “Pete? I’d like to talk to you about this.”

  “What’s wrong?” Pete said. “Afraid to leave the big guns?”

  Shaw was looking straight ahead. I had the feeling he was trying to efface himself, to grant me privacy, as if I were naked.

  I said, “If we could have a word together.”

  “Sure. All the words you want. But this is going to happen.”

  The rain stopped just after we reached the battalion. I invited them to spend another night, but Pete wanted to press on to Saigon.

  “Pete,” I said. “A word?”

  Shaw headed toward the hooch. “I’ll be inside,” he said.

  Pete watched him go. He had an air of puzzlement and injury, of being insufficiently appreciated. It was clear that he’d expected both of us to admire this trick of being able to yo-yo a man from one end of Vietnam to the other with a single telephone call.

  “I wish you’d talked to me before you went ahead with this,” I said.

  “We talked last night.”

  “I never said I wanted a transfer.”

  “But of course you want a transfer! You’re wasted down here.”

  “This is where they sent me. I took my chances like everyone else. They could’ve sent me anywhere. They could’ve sent me to this interesting slot of yours.”

  “They should have.”

  “But they didn’t. That’s the breaks, just the same as if they’d sent me up north. It’s just the way things fell out.”

  “It was a mistake. Now we’re fixing it. You’ll thank me someday. This is the chance of a lifetime.”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “You don’t have to like it,” he said. “That’s not the point.”

  “I’m lucky I made it this far.”

  “It’s all set,” he said.

  “Fine. It’s all set. I understand that. I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to accomplish up there in two months. It took me longer than that to get things scoped out down here.”

  “Two months? Who said anything about two months?”

  “That’s when my tour’s up.”

  “Come on.”

  “Less than two months”

  He stared at me.

  “Fifty-four and a wake-up,” I said.

  “You’ve been here ten months already?”

  “Ten and change.”

  “Then why didn’t you say something?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake! You can’t go up there for two months, they’ll still be breaking you in and then you’re heading back home. I’ll never hear the end of it. I don’t suppose you’d consider extending.”

  I shook my head.

  “You know, I used up a very big favor with General Reed getting this spot for you. What’s going to happen the next time I have to ask him for something?”

  I had no answer.

  “If you had even four months left I’d ram this thing through anyway,” Pete said. “For your own good.”

  I WAS undressing to take a shower when I found his package in the pocket of my fatigue jacket. I stashed it, figuring I’d have Sergeant Benet drop it off at Pete’s villa the next time we went up to Saigon. But in the morning a message came over the battalion teletype, instructing me to put extra padding on the package and take it to the My Tho airstrip and send it out in the priority mailbag. The message concluded: DO NOT DELAY REPEAT DO NOT DELAY. This Was followed by Pete’s name and the acronym and postal code of his place of work.

  I took the parcel out of my fo
otlocker and weighed it in my hand. When I pinched the puffy wrapping I could feel the outline of the bowl. I didn’t remember exactly what it looked like, its particular marks and patterns, but I still retained an impression of its beauty. Surely it struck everyone with its beauty when it was first brought into the room. No one had spoken; we simply watched as the bowl was handed from the old woman to Ong Loan and then to Pete. That it was ancient I knew at a glance. The blue was soft and watery, the white subtly yellowed like old ivory. To see it cupped in the hand, and then to see it given into another hand, was to understand that it was meant for that purpose; to be passed on. Pete’s bow had been cinematic but I couldn’t blame him for it. That he should bow in his pleasure at so antique and beautiful a thing was only right.

  I put the package on the floor and pressed at it with my stockinged foot, for better control and so as not to leave any bootprints. It was tougher than I’d expected, but then of course it was tough. How else could it have lasted all those years? I gave it more and more of my weight until I was almost standing on it. Though I didn’t hear the break, I felt it travel up my leg—a sudden, sad release. I picked up the package and checked to make sure I hadn’t broken just the wooden base. It was the bowl. It had cracked into several pieces. I wrapped the package in some bunched sheets of Stars and Stripes and covered those with a layer of parcel paper. Then I took it to the airstrip. I followed Pete’s orders to the letter, and I did not delay.

  REALLY, now. Is the part about the bowl true? Did I do that?

  No. Never. I would never deliberately take something precious from a man—the pride of his collection, say, or his own pride—and put it under my foot like that, and twist my foot on it, and break it.

  No. Not even for his own good.

  I Right a Wrong

  SERGEANT BENET’S TOUR ended a month before mine. They kept promising me a replacement but none came, because units up north had greater need. The day before his departure I was told I’d have to wait at least another week, which news I did not take well.

  Sergeant Benet didn’t want to go by helicopter to Saigon, he wanted to go by road. The road was worse, actuarially. His odds were better in the air, but of course he knew that as well as I did. This was just a feeling he had. We attached ourselves to an American convoy from Dong Tam and made the city late afternoon the day before Sergeant Benet’s flight home. We were running behind time, but before dropping him off at out-processing I convinced him to stop on Tu Do Street for one last beer. I had some idea that we might have a personal talk. Instead we watched a Vietnamese girl in a white cowboy hat sing like Patsy Cline. The troops in the bar were actually listening to her. They were all white.

  This was a cracker joint. I took some time figuring that out, being white myself, and by then we were attracting unfriendly attention. Nobody said anything, but they looked us over. I wouldn’t have made much of it except for the way it affected Sergeant Benet. He sat low in his chair and drew into himself in a way that reduced his presence, offering self-diminishment as a peace bond. There was something timeworn and entirely dignified in his attitude, but I felt like a fool, and I wanted to say so. What I said was, “I hope you know how much you’re going to miss me.”

  “Yes sir, I believe I will.”

  “I was joking.”

  “I know.”

  The girl was singing “Crazy.” We went back to watching her.

  For eleven months we had lived together. Each of those mornings Sergeant Benet had appeared in fresh fatigues, with our day already mapped out. He called me sir. He found work for us to do when there didn’t seem to be any and somehow let me know what orders I should give him to preserve the fiction of my authority. I knew that he was my superior in every way that mattered, but he didn’t allow me to acknowledge this and gave no sign of suspecting it himself. If he had, our barely sufficient imitation of purposeful existence would have collapsed. I understood all that. But I’d hoped to say some word of truth to him here at the end, to show some recognition of the facts. I didn’t intend to flatter him, or even thank him. I just wanted him to know I wasn’t stupid. And to accomplish this I had brought him to a redneck gutbucket.

  Sergeant Benet finished his beer. “Time we hatted up,” he said.

  We drove the rest of the way in silence, according to our custom. When we reached out-processing Sergeant Benet let me carry his duffel bag inside the gate.

  I set it down among some others. “I don’t see how I can stay there alone,” I said.

  “You’ll do just fine, sir.”

  “Forget I said that.”

  “They’ll send somebody else down, for sure. You got, what, twenty-eight days?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Thirty days. One at a time, sir, like the man says.”

  A second lieutenant came over and snapped his fingers for Sergeant Benet’s orders. He began to read through them, and without looking up he said, “You’re late.”

  I had rank on him. I could have locked his heels and smoked him good, but I kept quiet. Whatever I said now, Sergeant Benet would pay for later. He wasn’t mine anymore.

  IT WAS too late to head back to My Tho, so I booked into a hotel near Cholon. There was a bar on the roof and a small malarial-looking pool and a bandstand where a knock-kneed girl in go-go boots was dancing to scratchy records and talking to the men watching her. From where I sat I looked across at a line of buildings ruined by the fighting at Tet, collapsed walls exposing furnished rooms like stage sets.

  I drank brandy through what was left of the afternoon. This was not my habit. I began to feel lucid and strong. I thought of things I could have said and done to the men in the bar who had made Sergeant Benet agree to seem smaller than he was. At sunset I went to the railing and puked. I stood there as night came on, watching flares go up across the river. I could see tracers streaking back and forth near a distant bridge but the sound was lost in the clamor of the streets below. It seemed to me I made an interesting figure, staring out into the darkness with my pipe in my mouth. It was a Kaywoodie I’d bought at the PX to help me ease off cigarettes. The pipe, the idea of myself smoking a pipe, alone at the railing, gave me a gallant and philosophical picture of myself. I smoked my pipe and gazed over the city, over the people below, to whom I felt superior because I was feeling deep and dark things of which they were ignorant. This was when the idea came to me to go back to that cracker establishment. The thought of the place produced a sense of obligation, as if it was my duty to return and introduce these backward folk to the notion of consequence.

  I didn’t get there anytime soon. There were other venues in between. I turned up on another hotel rooftop, the Rex, arguing almost to the point of blows with a helicopter pilot about Bonnie and Clyde. He thought the violence was gratuitous. Then I was in a dive on a side street somewhere. Then another dive. Then the cracker joint. At a certain moment I became brightly conscious that I was there, though I had no memory of getting there from the last place I’d been. The night was without transitions.

  An American was up on the stage, singing and pounding an acoustic guitar whose fancy inlays glittered in the lights. He had long stringy hair and a stringy, truly pathetic beard. All the crackers joined in when he got to the last line: “I’ll never get out of this world alive!” They were actually stomping and slapping their knees.

  “Why, you stupid cracker,” I said to the fellow next to me at the bar. He had a long white face and thick glasses in owlish black frames. He cupped a hand at his ear and leaned over. “Beg pardon?”

  “Stupid cracker!”

  “Dusty!” He pointed at the singer and shook his head as if to say, Is this guy great or what?

  I checked up and down the bar to see if anyone was looking at me so I could say, What the fuck are you looking at? Then I lit my pipe and leaned back and almost fell off my stool. My neighbor caught me by the arm. “Whoa,” he said. “You don’t look too hot there, fella.”

  “Can’t breathe.”

  “What?
”

  “Can’t breathe.”

  “You okay?”

  I shook off his hand and made my way outside. I was in the alley out back, leaning against the wall, when fate sent me some customers. They came out of the bar and looked around and started to bicker. There was a tall guy with his arm in a cast up to his elbow, and two buckaroos wearing identical yellow shirts, with yokes and pearl buttons. Except for the shirts they didn’t look anything alike. One had a big plume of red hair and simian arms that poked way out of his sleeves. The other was a trim fellow, small head, very neat-looking, neat in his movements, very pleased to have himself in such good order. He had a toothpick in his mouth. It bothered me that they would dress this way without being twins.

  “Okay, we’re here,” the redheaded buckaroo said, “so where the hell is Henry?”

  “He’s coming,” said the guy in the cast.

  “He’s supposed to be here. That was the deal.”

  “He’ll be here. Just hold your horses.”

  I started singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  The two buckaroos talked about Henry, whether they should wait for him or not.

  I sang louder. “We’ll walk hand in ha-and, We’ll walk hand in ha-and …”

  They looked at me. The one in the cast said, “You got a problem?”

  “I’m a Negro,” I said.

  The trim buckaroo took out his toothpick as if he meant to say something, then put it back in his mouth.

  The guy in the cast said, “I guess you do have a problem at that.”

  “I ain’t got all night,” the redhead said.

  “Me neither,” the trim one said. “If Henry thinks he’s got some kind of monopoly around here, he is sadly mistaken.”

  “That’s it,” the redhead said. “That is the whole truth.”

  “I’m a Negro,” I said. “What’re you stupid rednecks going to do about that?”

  “I could kick your ass,” the guy in the cast said. “Would that satisfy you?” He was sweating profusely. His shiny black shirt was streaked white with salt stains and his eyes bulged like a horse’s.