My brother and I are very similar. I am four years older than him, but our birthdays are only three days apart. We both are very skinny and have trouble finding pants that will stay up on their own. We both like to talk. We are practically the same height (for a few weeks, at least). And we also get sporadic obsessions. Let me explain: some people have lifetime hobbies. They might like woodworking and hiking, for example, and do both for decades. Not so with my brother and I. We go all in on one thing for a few years, and then we focus our entire attention on something else. For example, there was a stretch when I loved crocheting, and then all I did was photography. My brother had a soapbox; then he was big into skateboarding; now his hobby is fishing. And from 2017 to 2020, both of us were obsessed with making movies. Well, we called them movies; they were actually ten minute videos in which we used our horrible acting skills to tell tales of funny old ladies and gallant knights and dumb detectives (and one time, Santa Clause).
When making those videos, we felt what every human feels–a longing for honor and adventure. People have a natural desire to make themselves heroes. We want others to admire us. Whenever I formulated a plot, I made myself the main character. I pretended to be a girl who solved a difficult crime, a prisoner who escaped from a high-security prison, or a princess who outsmarted her kidnapper. It was my way of giving my thirteen-year-old self the honor I saw other people attaining in the movies I watched and the books I read. And in his memoir In Pharaoh’s Army, Tobias Wolff admits to having the same longing for honor, glory, and recognition, though he had much more cause than I: Wolff’s father was not the most respectable of men. He lied and cheated and stole without regret, and “his unflinching devolution from an ace airplane mechanic to welsher, grifter, convict—appalled me” (Wolff 45). Wolff was embarrassed and ashamed of his dad, and did not want to end up like him. He didn’t want to tear apart his family. He didn’t want his sons to say he was dead so they would not be associated with him. But instead of making terrible videos to gain honor, he joined the army. For him it “was the way, the indisputable certificate of citizenship and probity” (Wolff 46). He believed that if he was a soldier, he would have glory and a good name for the rest of his days. People would admire him. He would have something to boast about.
But many years later, Wolff doesn’t boast. He does not even portray himself in a positive light. In Pharaoh’s Army is an account of his military days and his experiences in Vietnam, and he could easily have written it in a way that glorified his bravery and the things he went through–and many would say he deserved to do so. Instead, though Wolff originally wanted honor, he portrays himself in an inglorious light, and strangely, that reflects better on him than if he had made himself a hero.
Wolff has a negative tone from the outset. Before he was sent to Vietnam, he belonged to the Special Forces. However, he quickly pointed out, he “was completely incompetent to lead a special forces team.” Lest anyone assume he was modestly exaggerating, he went on to say,
This was adamant fact, not failure of nerve. My failure of nerve took another form. I wanted out, but I lacked the courage to confess my incompetence as the price of getting out. I was ready to be killed, even, perhaps, get others killed, to avoid that humiliation (Wolff 8).
If Wolff was trying to make himself look good, this is not the way. Evil villains in movies hold their pride so tightly that they kill others before admitting they were wrong. Think of Denethor, in The Lord of the Rings, who was willing to let his city be overthrown and all his people die rather than surrender the throne to the rightful king who could rule and lead the people in battle better than he.
Luckily for the men who might have been under Wolff, he was transferred to be an advisor for an artillery battalion before he was deployed, because he could speak Vietnamese “like a seven-year-old child with a freakish military vocabulary” (Wolff 8). The artillery battalion post was much safer, and it was a position Wolff was capable of handling. But he tried to change his orders and be moved back to the Special Forces because, “after all, it was honor itself that I wanted, true honor, not some passable counterfeit but the kind you could live on the rest of your life.” He felt that sitting in a relatively safe area as a translator was not glorious enough. He needed to be in the thick of things, being shot at, killing people. “I would demand to be sent to the special forces, to wherever the latest disaster had created an opening, and hoped that by some miracle I’d prove a better soldier than I knew myself to be” (Wolff 9). Wolff had an idea of what honor was, and knew that he had not yet attained it. He thought that being in a dangerous place was the only way he could find that honor.
But it was too late, the personnel officer told him. A transfer back was impossible. And so Wolff became a sitting duck. Partway through his deployment, his dad sent him a Christmas card saying he was proud of him. Wolff wondered,
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 stories he used to tell, or imply, about flying with the RAF and serving with partisans just about everywhere (Wolff 109).
His family and friends assumed, like Wolff, that he was winning praise for his future self by living on the edge, defeating enemies, and helping people self-sacrificially. But that was not what was going on. If anything, Wolff suggests, he was becoming a worse person than he was before. He writes, “the best thing I had to say for myself was that I was still alive. Not impressively, though. Not brilliantly” (Wolff 86). He loved books and wanted to be a writer, but during his time in Vietnam he was unable to read for long, and had no inspiration to write. He repeatedly made a fool of himself in front of the Vietnamese soldiers, and was almost always scared. He lived in a mud hole with a bunch of people who were almost as cruel to each other as they were to the enemy. He cared only about saving his own skin. And he saw himself as despicable and was filled with longing to be a better man.
But Wolff was a lucky man, if nothing else: he got a second chance to gain himself honor through war. One of his friends in Vietnam was a Foreign Service officer named Pete. Pete was a man of accomplishments, and wanted everyone to know it. He had attended Harvard. He spoke at least five languages (Wolff 141). He had photos of his time in the Bush hanging on his walls (Wolff 147). He hosted dinner parties frequently, showing off his aristocratic skills. He charmed everyone he met (Wolff 142). He was careful to spend time with people who would reflect well on him, and he cared about others’ positions in society. Wolff stayed at Pete’s villa in Saigon the few times he was in the area, and as he looked up to him, he didn’t hesitate to exaggerate a little about his own bravery and daring; as he put it,
Pete . . . 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 impression of a cocky young warrior, and I played it up (Wolff 141).
Near the end of Wolff’s time in Vietnam, Pete came to visit him while he was taking another officer (who was visiting from Thailand) on a sightseeing trip. Pete was surprised at Wolff’s situation–it was much more mundane than Wolff had led him to believe. He expressed his feelings one night, saying, “I thought you’d want to be out . . . doing some damage.” Then he told him,
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? . . . You’re a razor-edged weapon, remember? Terror from the sky. Death on cat’s feet. Don’t you want to show your stuff? (Wolff 147).
This is the big question–don’t you what honor and glory, wonderful stories to tell when you’re home? What’s the point if not to glorify yourself? This was what Wolff had believed, at first. But now he thought differently. He replied that he didn’t care anymore: “I want to get home” (Wolff 147).
Pete didn’t like this attitude, so he asked a general to transfer Wolff up north, to where most of the fighting was. He didn’t ask Wolff first, he just did it, then told him. And Wolff was upset. Pete called Wolff’s current position “your problem” (Wolff 154) and acted like Wolff should be forever indebted to his pulling of strings, but Wolff didn’t want to go, and said as much. Pete replied, “You’ll thank me someday. This is the chance of a lifetime.” When Wolff still disagreed, he said, “you don’t have to like it . . . that’s not the point” (Wolff 157). Pete was doing it “for your own good” (Wolff 158).
This shows that during Wolff’s time in Vietnam, his thinking completely changed direction. If he had been looking to the psychological North before going overseas, now he looked South. When he was first transferred out of Special Forces and denied the opportunity to “show his stuff,” he protested the decision, just like Pete did ten months later. Pete was the embodiment of Wolff’s ideas before his deployment, and Wolff no longer agreed with him. He didn’t want to win himself glory, he just wanted to leave.
Wolff writes that he was so angry with Pete that after Pete went home, he took a valuable bowl Pete had accidentally left behind and stepped on it, so it broke, before returning it to him. But then, he asks, “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 break it. No. Not even for his own good” (Wolff 159). So why does Wolff include that anecdote, if it never happened? Maybe because it shows how he felt. And sometimes feeling is almost as bad as doing. Wolff spares himself nothing in his memoir, even inventing stories to help his readers see just how lowly he was.
In the end, Wolff was not transferred to the more dangerous position because he had less than two months of his tour left. But this story illustrates what I am trying to say: Wolff had wanted honor badly. His whole reason for going to Vietnam was so he would have stories of glory to share afterwards. But while he was there he realized just how awful a person he was and how horrible war is. And so he didn’t care about honor anymore.
Because of this realization, Wolff wasn’t sure how to tell his stories once he got home and had opportunities to. His first instinct was to make his tone “somber and regretful” to show how much better he was now, “how far I had evolved in wisdom since then,” but it sounded fake. So, then he switched to a neutral tone, cynical, deadpan, but that didn’t work either. “How do you tell such a terrible story?” He asked.
Maybe such a story shouldn’t be told at all. Yet finally it will be told. But as soon as you open your mouth you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems. How can you judge the man you were now that you’ve escaped his circumstances, his fears and desires, now that you hardly remember who he was? And how can you honestly avoid judging him? (Wolff 208).
Wolff didn’t know how to think about himself and his time in Vietnam. It took him many years to find the right balance of judgment. Because he does judge himself, greatly. He doesn’t tell a single positive story about himself, though I am sure he did brave or glorious things. There are times where he speaks of himself succeeding in the army, but the reader can hear him shaking his head while he does so. There is always a word, or phrase, or tone that implies he sees fault in himself.
It takes bravery to tell the world where one has failed. And not many people have that bravery. For example, take the movie White Christmas, which came out the year before the Vietnam War started. It is about two American men who fought in Europe during World War II and afterwards created a very successful traveling show. They are perfect heroes, and throughout the movie being in the army is idealized. Toward the end they sing, “Gee, I wish I was back in the army, the army was the perfect place for me” (Curtz). This is not the message Wolff proclaimed. White Christmas is a heartwarming film, and viewers admire all the ex-soldiers and ex-generals, but not in the same way readers admire Wolff. It is much harder to acknowledge one’s faults and tell the truth than to say one is awesome and paint a romanticized picture of the world, because people want to look good.
Wolff’s self-portrait in In Pharaoh’s Army shows that he has grown beyond who he once was. If he had told the story when it happened, he would have tried to make himself look as good as the men in White Christmas. But, he writes, “we are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That’s how we find out who we are” (Wolff 220). He did that–he kept living, carrying on through his life, and he grew in good ways. As an older man he could see his faults and speak of them and he thought that honor was not what he had once believed.
The man who once would rather die than admit his faults has now proclaimed them to the world. And there is a different kind of honor in that, a greater honor. As a reader, I have more respect for people who recognize their failings and imperfections with humility than ones who, like Pete, want everyone to know their glory and the honor they won; ones who, like Pete, see self-sacrifice as a way to make a name for themselves, not to help other people. And I want to be like Wolff. Because Wolff could have written a thrilling tale of his accomplishments and good deeds. He could have told the story that way. But he didn’t.
Works Cited:
White Christmas. Directed by Michael Curtz, Paramount Pictures Studios, 1954.
Wolff, Tobias. In Pharaoh’s Army. Vintage books, 1994.
Featured image from http://pictures.abebooks.com/SAWTOOTH/1358271446.jpg, Fair use, Wikipedia commons
Ellen Sheehy 
