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 3-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “White Man”
Wolff recognizes that he stands out in Vietnam, not only as a white man but as a particularly tall one; when marching in a column, for example, as much as he tries to avoid it, he knows that he is an easy target for snipers. He is “out of proportion” to everything around him: “All was shaped and scaled to the people whose place this was. Time had made it so” (77).
One night, while on a mission, Wolff and his troupe set up camp. He watches some Vietnamese troops catch a stray puppy and tie him to a tree. When Wolff asks what they are going to call the dog, they act confused at first, then reply “Canh Cho,” which means “dog stew.” Wolff tries to convince them not to eat the dog, but the soldiers respond by taunting the dog with the fire. Wolff eventually pays them for the dog and takes it back to his tent. From then on, the troops greet Wolff by miming eating stew.
Shortly after Christmas, Vera breaks up with him by letter, telling him she has been seeing someone else. Wolff is jealous of the other man but otherwise unaffected and unsurprised. Feeling inadequate, he promises to spend his nights working on a novel. However, he soon abandons this, and even reading, instead spending his nights with Sergeant Benet watching television.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Close Calls”
Wolff is aware he can be killed at any moment, so he regards each day he gets through alive as a “close call” (87). He suspects that the Viet Cong track his whereabouts and the only reason he has not been killed yet is because they do not believe he is worth killing.
However, Wolff considers a “close call” to be something even more mysterious and fantastic than the daily brushes with death: “A bullet enters a man’s helmet center-front and exits center-rear without putting a scratch on him. A platoon gets ambushed and overrun, after which the enemy puts a round in every man’s head save one” (87).
Wolff has several close calls up until the Tet Offensive. His first occurs shortly after his arrival, when he accepts an offer to attend Easter mass with Sergeant Benet. Following mass, the pair drives to the market, and Wolff sleeps in the jeep while Benet buys supplies. Wolff awakens to a fearful crowd: a live grenade, which miraculously has not detonated, is under his jeep. A bomb squad safely detonates the grenade, which Wolff notes had nearly a zero percent chance of failing the way it did.
Wolff’s second close call occurs six months in, while he is helping attach howitzers to helicopters to be delivered elsewhere. The operation is a risky one, and on one particular day, after hooking up a howitzer, he walks away and it falls right where he had been standing.
His final close call is not a particularly satisfactory story, he feels, so he rarely discusses it. While on an operation, an infantry company is ambushed. As they determine their next moves, ranking American officer, Colonel Lance absentmindedly lays his hand on a lieutenant named Keith Young. When General Ngoc explains that they need an American adviser to take reinforcements to the area, Lance volunteers Young. It seems to be for no reason other than his arm happened to be on the lieutenant—next to whom Wolff had been standing. Young is then killed that day during the operation.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Duty”
Wolff frequently accompanies a “sour, livid Canadian” doctor, MacLeod, on his calls to local villages that were attacked by the Viet Cong. MacLeod believes that “without war we’d still be swinging in the fucking trees” (99) and looks upon anyone who disagrees, like Wolff, as self-deluding. As a result, he takes Wolff on his village calls as a kind of tutelage, believing Wolff to be “starved for instruction” (99).
Wolff enjoys the village visits—MacLeod has him administer minor first aid. On one visit, Wolff encounters a young American, Fisher, who has been stationed there alone ever since his partner was killed; though in his early 20s, Fisher’s hair has gone completely white. Wolff notes that he is unsure of himself while speaking in English with MacLeod and other Americans, yet completely calm and sure of when conversing with villagers in Vietnamese.
Once finished for the day, Wolff sits with Fisher drinking Cokes and letting him talk through his troubles. Fisher mainly talks about his partner who had been killed; as it turned out, Fisher and the lieutenant had been from the same part of the States and had become close friends.
When the helicopter arrives to pick MacLeod and Wolff up, Wolff is concerned for Fisher’s emotional well-being and tries to get him to return with them. Fisher thinks about it but he declines, which relieves Wolff because he did not have the authority to make that offer. Despite the fact that duty has “swallowed him whole,” Wolff envies Fisher for the fact that “his path was absolutely clear” (104).
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “A Federal Offense”
Shortly before the Tet Offensive, Wolff’s father, who was released from prison while Wolff was in training, sends a Christmas card telling him how proud he is of Wolff. While in Washington, Wolff’s father had written to see about moving out to be with the family—an offer they had politely declined, given the potential it had to ruin their lives. However, Wolff makes arrangements to visit him in California just before he leaves for Vietnam.
The trip starts off poorly; he is initially unable to locate his father’s address, and his father was not aware he would be coming. Things start off rocky but mellow out as the day progresses; Wolff, however, is taken aback by how much his larger-than-life father has aged and weakened. Over dinner, when Wolff begins asking questions about their family history, things quickly sour again. Wolff manages to leave the next day on a good note, after a nightcap and some talk about music.
In Oakland, Wolff meets up with a friend from Fort Bragg named Stu Hoffman. Once finished with their paperwork, they head to San Francisco to spend a night on the town. Over drinks, Hoffman brags about his father, a big-time petroleum engineer. Hoffman invites Wolff out for dinner with him and his father the next night, and Wolff accepts.
At dinner, Wolff discovers that Hoffman’s father is a gruff, hard man who is angry that his son has joined the war effort. After dinner, they head upstairs to the piano bar; when Mr. Hoffman steps out for a cigar, Stu tells Wolff that his dad wants him to desert. Stu and his father head out early while Wolff stays at the bar, hanging out with a foursome of tourists from Arizona. The next morning, when the bus departs, Stu is not present.
Part 1, Chapters 3-6 Analysis
The remaining four chapters of Part 1 serve more as vignettes or meditations on life in Vietnam for a soldier like Wolff, rather than deep explorations or extended narratives like the first two chapters. A core theme is juxtaposition in its various forms between Wolff and others both home and abroad. This is most obvious in “White Man,” in which Wolff describes how much he stands out as a tall white man surrounded by both Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. This creates fear in Wolff, which leads him to act erratically at times—which, of course, makes him stand out even more. This juxtaposition extends to cultural differences—e.g., it does not even occur to Wolff that the Vietnamese battalion might look at the stray dog as a food source rather than as a friend.
The differences between Wolff and his fellow Westerners are more intricately explored through the next few chapters, “Duty” and “A Federal Offense.” In “Duty,” Wolff contrasts himself with MacLeod and Fisher, though both men evoke versions of Wolff as well. MacLeod seems like a supercharged version of Wolff’s newfound individualism: he is a man who believes that war is good and necessary for human evolution, yet he has a disinterested view of his own place in the war (MacLeod signed on not to help people but to gain surgery experience). Readers can also note how MacLeod’s affected Scottish accent mirrors Wolff’s own act as a commander. Fisher, on the other hand, is a man who becomes wholly consumed by his duty. He seems to care deeply for the villagers with whom he lives; however, he is unable to recognize his own place in it all; although Wolff envies this to a degree, Fisher also appears to have entirely lost his free will.
“A Federal Offense” offers a different conception of duty while further juxtaposing Wolff with people he encounters. In this first visit with his father, who was recently released from prison, Wolff faces the man—and, more importantly, the personality—he hoped to eclipse by joining the military. The trip goes poorly, as neither man is wholly sure of his place in the relationship; nevertheless, it is an important step for Wolff to acknowledge his father as a person even as he separates himself from that future.
Likewise, Wolff’s later visit with Stu Hoffman revisits the concept of duty while further exploring the difference between intent and action. One key difference between Wolff and his father is not their desires but their actions; for example, although Wolff’s father frequently claims he is a veteran, Wolff is the one who enlisted. This is mirrored in Stu’s actions. Wolff and Stu are very similar, but ultimately Stu is unable to follow through with his own actions; it seems not to matter much whether it was Stu’s decision or his father’s influence that convinced him not to go. That said, Wolff leaves unanswered the question of which is better, suggesting that, in reality, none of them should have gone.
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