IN PHARAOH’S ARMY: Memories of the Lost...

IN PHARAOH’S ARMY: Memories of the Lost War by Tobias Wolff (Vintage: $12; 221 pp.). Tobias Wolff surprised himself by becoming a good soldier, although he never felt he deserved the lieutenant’s bars he earned. In this exceptionally well-written memoir, he recounts his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. Wolff portrays himself and his comrades as naive, yet capable of terrible destruction: “We were advisors, but we didn’t know exactly what advice we were supposed to be giving, or to whom.” Although he admits that much of their time was devoted to getting around regulations and flummoxing hard-nosed superiors, he mourns the close friends he lost and wonders at his own survival. Like all soldiers, Wolff and his friends were less concerned with ideology than with surviving the service with their bodies and minds intact.