40 pages • 1 hour read
Tobias WolffPharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Thanksgiving Special”
Wolff’s memoir opens with him and Sergeant Benet bearing down on what appears to be a bicycle accident on the road; despite honking his horn, the villagers remain in the middle of the road. Wolff does not slow down, so the villagers jump out of the way; he runs the bicycles over with his truck. Sergeant Benet tells him what a shame it was, and Wolff notes that while, months earlier, he would have stopped, no one stops anymore—between mines and snipers, soldiers drive fast and keep driving whenever possible.
Wolff has learned that, despite the U.S. Army’s insistence that “If you do everything right, you’ll make it home” (5), being a good soldier seemed to have little to do with whether someone dies. As a result, soldiers rely on luck and superstition, such as the pocket watch Wolff carries—given to him by his fiancée—or the sandbags he places on the truck’s floor before he drives anywhere.
Wolff is stationed in a relatively peaceful part of Vietnam: the Delta in the south. The north is where the heaviest fighting is taking place. Most of the enemies the Army soldiers face in the Delta are local guerillas who aim to terrorize the soldiers and pick off a few here or there rather than score big hits. “We did not die by the hundreds in pitched battles,” Wolff writes. “We died a man at a time, at a pace almost casual” (7).
Wolff finds himself in the Delta outside of Mỹ Tho, rather than in the North, because he has been trained in Vietnamese. The personnel officer had apologized for the assignment, assuming that Wolff was looking to fight. However, he is relieved.
Mỹ Tho is designed to look and feel like a French city, as the French people who designed it wanted to feel at home. Mỹ Tho is quiet compared to the North, with little violence within the city limits. Wolff does not believe luck could explain it. He suspects there could be an unspoken agreement and that the guerillas themselves enjoy relaxing in town as much as the American coalition; however, no one knows for sure.
Mỹ Tho is also unique because American soldiers are generally not allowed inside the city limits, for which Wolff is pleased, as he believes American soldiers would have ruined the town. Instead, the grunts are required to remain up the road at Dong Tam.
Wolff and Sergeant Benet, his ostensible partner, are unclear what their role is, as Vietnamese officers like Major Chau do not appear to need their assistance. As a result, they become “scroungers,” looking for things they can trade and barter to upgrade their own living situation. Chicom rifles are most valuable because they cannot be faked. Grunts desire them as souvenirs because they are distinctly Communist weapons and therefore perfect trophies for soldiers who rarely see any real action.
On the day of the aforementioned Thanksgiving special, Wolff and Benet are attempting to trade a Chicom rifle for a larger television. Unusually, they are stopped at the gate rather than waved through. The MP at the gate finds the weapon and gives them a hard time about it. Benet makes up a story about the rifle being for a General Avery for the holiday, and they manage to get through.
Once inside, their contact tells them the deal is no longer for a single Chicom; instead, he wants two rifles. Wolff and Benet leave angry and stop off in a bar; noticing the 25-inch television, they tell the bartender they need to fix the picture, then simply unplug the television and take it.
On their return, they are stopped again by the same MP. This time, Benet takes him aside to speak with him; when they return, he hands the MP the Chicom, and they are allowed to go on.
On the ferry back, Wolff recognizes a woman, Anh, whom he knows as a secretary in Mỹ Tho. Anh is cold toward him, but Wolff talks to her and her nephew in Vietnamese. Anh tells Wolff that her nephew is shy around Americans because he does not know if he can trust them; thus, he questions whether he can trust Wolff. Wolff responds by promising to gift them the television later that night, to which Anh assents.
When Wolff tells Benet about his promise, Benet replies that he has not given away any television, as it is still sitting in the back. Wolff does not argue when Benet turns toward their battalion rather than Mỹ Tho. That night, they watch Bonanza together, and Wolff feels pride in his country and his people.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Command Presence”
Prior to joining the military, Wolff works on a ship. However, he becomes aware that one of the ship’s mechanics holds a strong hatred for him, for reasons unknown to Wolff. One day, while Wolff is napping on one of the propeller blades below decks, he awakes as the mechanic walks by and lifts his head just before the mechanic turns the propeller on. Wolff realizes the man means to kill him and that, on a ship, there are any number of ways to accomplish that goal with plausible deniability. During his next shore leave, Wolff intentionally misses the ship’s departure.
Because Wolff had dropped out of high school, he has no prospects. He decides to join the military; he had always believed he would eventually, as all his favorite writers served. Furthermore, he is concerned that he is following his father’s path of disrespectability—his father is a conman currently serving a prison term. So, Wolff feels joining the military will bring him honor and respect.
Wolff does his basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. It is the middle of a heat wave, but the instructors are not lenient on the soldiers-in-training, telling them that only weaklings would let the heat bother them. Though Wolff had never been a strong athlete, he finds his hardiness suits the military well.
However, he discovers that some parts of basic training undermine his ideals. He had previously believed every man was his brother, but basic training placed him into a competition with his classmates. He learned to take pride in outperforming them and find joy in their miseries and humiliations.
Because of his “command presence” (49), Wolff is promoted to sergeant, then goes on to jump school in Georgia following boot camp. At jump school, he meets Hugh Pierce, another soldier much like him who had gone to a rival prep school in Philadelphia. The two take joy in others’ miseries, and Wolff quickly realizes that he is now struggling to keep up.
In their last week, Pierce and Wolff sign up for the Special Forces and head to Fort Bragg for training. It is here, among the elite soldiers, that Wolff realizes he is out of place; he can keep up with the physical demands but does not learn as quickly as the others do. When he overhears their instructors expressing fear at going back to Vietnam, Wolff grows anxious—if the best of the best are terrified, what chance does he have?
Wolff agrees, at the behest of one of his commanders, to attend Officer Candidate School. He is sent to artillery Officer Candidate School, barely passes, then returns to the Special Forces. This bewilders him, as nothing he learned in artillery school will be useful.
As his friends are called into battle, Wolff is instead sent to the Defense Language Institute in Washington, D.C., to study Vietnamese for one year. His family still lives in D.C., and he is able to live as a civilian during his time there, so it works out well for him. He also begins a tumultuous relationship with a woman named Vera, a descendent of Russian royalty. He hears news of the war and grows more afraid, yet he justifies the war to his critical family and friends. While relaxing at his mother’s house one night, he comes across Pierce’s name in the list of casualties.
After he completes language school, Wolff is called back to Fort Bragg. He is assigned to lead a training jump mission; however, he has done no military studying or training in the last year, and the jump fails miserably. His troops ignore him for the remainder of his time at Fort Bragg, and two weeks later, he arrives in Vietnam.
Part 1, Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Chapters 1 and 2 predominantly set the tone of the memoir and establish Wolff’s background and reasons for joining the Vietnam War. It is not unusual, though it is notable, that Wolff does not ascribe particularly noble reasons for his choosing to volunteer. His reasons are both personal and inconsequential, thus arguably portraying a more honest view of modern military recruitment (even if the Vietnam War was still in the era of active drafting). Though he doesn’t introduce his brother Geoffrey until Chapter 2, Wolff goes on to compare his path with Geoffrey’s throughout the book. Wolff is unable to work within societal norms and conventions, and despite earning a place at a prestigious prep school, is unable to keep it. This leads him to a ship’s life, then the military once he has no other real options. He is not a particularly good soldier and does not pretend to be—though the act he puts on in training earns him a higher rank than he might have otherwise earned.
Moral inclination and duty nonetheless play an important role in Wolff’s story. For one, although he does not suggest that the Vietnam War was a moral one, his desire to join the military is tied up in a moral view of it being an institution. In particular, he is concerned with the fine line between himself and his father, another man who flouts societal norms and conventions but does so as a criminal. Wolff recognizes his father’s same impulses in himself and believes choosing the military will curb those impulses and garner respect. Thus, at the core of these chapters is a fundamental conflict regarding the nature of institutions: Wolff derides and defies institutions’ social legitimacy while simultaneously looking to those same institutions for personal legitimacy. (It is telling that his father frequently passes himself off as a veteran, suggesting that Wolff finds an important difference in desires and actions.)
Military life suggests another fundamental conflict: that of the societal versus the individual good. Wolff acknowledges that he entered training believing in the power of standing up for one’s fellow man; however, he is quickly disabused of this notion when he encounters fellow men who are apathetic to their own position—and, by extension, his. Herein lies an interesting contradiction of the military as Wolff portrays it; it is simultaneously a singular, cohesive unit and a group of individuals with varying levels of concern for the well-being of the unit. When the issue is life or death, as it is on the battlefield, does Wolff owe his allegiance to his unit or to himself? Should he have to stand, and potentially lose his own life, for soldiers who might not do the same for him? This is important not only for Wolff’s narrative but also as an interesting analogy for the larger war, which was ostensibly about communist versus capitalist principles—communal, Eastern ideals versus individualist, Western ideals. Wolff does not discuss the larger political ramifications of the war, beyond noting that many of his friends and family disagree with it, but he wrestles with these ideas on a personal level through his own involvement.
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