In Pharaoh's Army

by Tobias Wolff

  I had been shot at. More accurately, shots had been fired in my direction from afar, without effect on me or the men I was with. Mortars had fallen in my neighborhood—none of them very close. I’d traveled in convoys where other men got blown up by mines and been in a helicopter that got hit, but not punctured, by machine gun fire (Sergeant Benet and I felt the bullets pounding against the metal under our feet, and gaped at each other in naked horror as our door gunner giggled and blasted away with his own machine gun).

  None of these were close calls. A close call is personal, mysterious, sometimes fantastic. 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. A medic falls unnoticed from a pitching helicopter a thousand yards up and lands feetfirst in a rice paddy, plunging to his neck in the mud, where an American patrol rescues him, entirely by accident, the next morning. Things like this happened every day, and the best stories got written up in Stars and Stripes with a picture of the lucky guy. My own close calls were pretty thin gruel by comparison but good enough for me. Up until Tet I’d had two or three, depending on whether you counted the last.

  MY FIRST CLOSE CALL happened a few days after I joined the battalion. I’d just had time to get unpacked and draw battle gear from the quartermaster when we got orders for the field. The operation took place over Easter weekend. Our guns were set up near a Catholic church, one of the few I ever saw in the Delta. On Sunday morning I woke to the sound of tolling bells, and later, as I sat hunched over my coffee, I was smitten by the sight of laughing girls in white ao dais leaping like lambs across the muddy furrows behind our howitzers. Though I had seldom been to mass since I was a boy, I accepted Sergeant Benet’s invitation to join him.

  The service was in Latin. The sound of the old tongue, the smell of incense, the once-familiar rhythm of the liturgy gave me a sense of continuity with my own past, as if this place were not wholly different from other places I had been. I didn’t take communion, but I was pleased at how unhesitatingly I stood and knelt with the others, how quickly the responses came to my lips. I was glad to have Sergeant Benet there beside me. Up to now I’d been unsure of him, afraid he’d despise me for my fumbling inexperience, my incomprehensible officer status. But seeing him bow his head and pray for leniency gave me hope for some from him. When he said “Pax Christi, sir” and held out his hand, I took it with gratitude. Then I bowed to the Vietnamese around me as they were bowing to one another.

  Without marking the change in myself, I had begun to let go a little, lulled from the state of paranoid watchfulness I’d been in since my first night off the plane. A mistake. Fear won’t always save you, but it will take some of the pressure off your luck.

  After mass Sergeant Benet and I drove to the village market to buy some fresh bread and vegetables. While he did the shopping I leaned back in the passenger seat and closed my eyes. My mood was still churchy, sentimental, liquid. I hadn’t slept much the night before, and now, surrounded by friendly indecipherable voices and warmed by the sun, I began to nod off. Then I became aware that the voices had stopped. The silence disturbed me. I sat up and looked around. The crowd had drawn back in a wide circle. They were staring at me. A woman yammered something I couldn’t follow and pointed under the jeep. I bent down for a look. There, lying directly below my seat, was a hand grenade. The pin had been pulled. I straightened up and sat there for a while, barely breathing. Then I got out of the jeep and walked over to where everyone else was standing. We were still within the grenade’s killing range, especially if it set off the gas tank, but I didn’t think of that any more than the others had. I didn’t have a thought in my head. We just stood there like a bunch of fools.

  Sergeant Benet appeared at the edge of the crowd. “What’s going on?” he said.

  “There’s a grenade under the jeep.”

  He turned and looked. “Oh, man,” he said. He dropped the groceries and started pushing people back, his arms outstretched like a riot cop’s. “Di di mau!” he kept saying. “Beat it! Beat it!” Finally they gave ground, except for a bunch of kids who surrounded him and refused to be driven off. They were laughing. I looked on. None of it seemed to have anything to do with me.

  Once the area was cleared Sergeant Benet told a couple of skittish villagers to stand watch until we could send someone to take care of the grenade; then we started walking back to the battalion. Along the way I found my legs acting funny. My knees wouldn’t lock; I had to lean against a wall. Sergeant Benet put his hand on my arm to steady me. Then something went slack in my belly and I felt a stream of shit pouring hotly out of me, down my legs, even into my boots. I put my head against the wall and wept for very shame.

  “It’s all right, sir,” Sergeant Benet said. “You’ll be all right.” He patted me on the back. Then he said, “Come on, sir. You got yourself a little case of the turistas, that’s all. Here, that’s the way. Just a step at a time, sir, that’s right. Easy does it.”

  The grenade never did go off on its own. Our ordnance disposal boys covered it with sandbags and triggered it with a dose of plastique. It was an American grenade, not some local mad bomber device. The odds of it failing like that were cruelly small—just about nonexistent, in fact.

  That was my first close call.

  MY SECOND CLOSE CALL was of a more civilian character, the kind of thing that happens on road crews and construction sites. Still, it almost nailed me.

  I’d been with the battalion for about six months. One of my jobs was to hook up our howitzers to Chinook helicopters when they were needed elsewhere in a hurry or when we were about to be inserted into an area we couldn’t reach by road. I would rig up the gun in a sling, then stand on top of it as the chopper slowly lowered itself toward me, flattening the grass, raising a storm of dust and dirt and paddy water against which I wore ski goggles I’d asked Vera to send me. When the Chinook was a couple of feet over my head, just hanging there, all lebenty zillion tons of it, I would raise a steel loop and work it onto the hook dangling from the bottom of the helicopter. Then I’d nod at the crew chief and the cables would tighten and creak and I’d jump down and the chopper would lift the howitzer straight up, then cumbersomely bank and turn and beat a slanting path slowly higher and away into the distance. You saw all kinds of things swinging under those monster helicopters: howitzers, trucks, other helicopters; even, after a fight somewhere, nets filled with body bags.

  My big fear was that a Chinook would lurch down and crush me against the gun. This could easily happen. All it took was for one of the engines to miss, or the pilot to sneeze, or a sudden downdraft to hit the rotors. I was always on the scout for any sign of unsteadiness—not that I would have had time to do anything. But once the cables went taut I was free to jump, and jump I did, without decorum. While the helicopter maneuvered overhead I brushed myself off and gathered up the sling they’d tossed down for the next pickup.

  In the early days I used to watch as the Chinook hauled its load into the sky; it was a strange sight, but I got used to it and had other things to attend to. I don’t know what made me look up this one time. Maybe I heard a new sound under the engine clatter and the whapping of the blades, a sound I didn’t even know I was hearing, a different sound than what my self-loving body had recorded as acceptable to its interests. Anyway, I looked up sharply. The Chinook was directly above me, sixty, seventy feet, executing an elephantine turn. The howitzer was swinging back and forth. From this vantage I could see nothing wrong, but even so I started to walk backward off the LZ, my eyes raised, and I saw the howitzer shift oddly in its sling, and shift again, and then the sling flew open and the chopper jumped like a flea. The howitzer seemed to fall very slowly, turning as it fell, and landed upside down with a painful blaring whang—more a sensation than a sound—and bounced once and settled. I felt the shock from my heels to my teeth.

  This would not be a proper close call story
if I didn’t point out that the gun hit right where I’d been standing.

  THE THIRD CLOSE CALL happened just before Christmas. I didn’t mention it to anyone afterward, unlike the other two, which I talked about every chance I got. This one didn’t really sound all that dangerous and it wouldn’t have made a satisfactory story. Still, I brooded on it more than on the others.

  We were on an operation. Sergeant Benet stayed with the battalion while I pulled duty at the fire-direction center. On the second day, one of our infantry companies walked into an ambush. I was hanging around the headquarters tent at the time, idly listening to situation reports come in over the radio, and I heard the battle begin and the Vietnamese commander cry through the static for help.

  General Ngoc took over from the radio operator. His staff officers crowded around to listen. There was plenty to hear. Screams. Gunfire. The voices of men in terror and pain. Colonel Lance, the ranking American adviser, came over to the radio, puffing fiercely on his pipe as he watched General Ngoc bark into the transmitter at the frightened commander in the field. Colonel Lance didn’t speak Vietnamese but he narrowed his eyes and nodded from time to time as if he knew what was passing between the two men. And as he stood there listening he absently laid one hand on the shoulder of the officer standing next to him, a first lieutenant named Keith Young. He didn’t look to see who it was; he just rested his hand on him the way a football coach will rest his hand on the player he happens to be standing next to on the sidelines. It was one of those paternal gestures that excited my scorn except when they fell on me, and then I always felt a flood of puppyish gratitude.

  Anyway, Colonel Lance didn’t look to see who was there when he parked his hand. It could have been anyone. It could have been me. It could very easily have been me, as I was standing beside Keith Young at the time, and if Colonel Lance had taken a place between us instead of to Keith’s right it would have been me who got the manly sign of favor. He stood there with his hand on Keith’s shoulder, and when General Ngoc got up from the radio and explained the situation, which was that the company was pinned down and taking casualties, and needed an American adviser to go in with the reinforcements to call in medevacs and air support, Colonel Lance turned to the man he had his hand on and looked him in the face for the first time. He took his pipe out of his mouth. “Well, Keith,” he said, “what do you think?” His voice was kind, his expression solicitous. If you didn’t know better you’d have thought he was asking an opinion, not giving an order, but Keith did know better. “I’ll get my stuff,” he said. His voice was flat. He looked at me as he walked past.

  Colonel Lance nodded at General Ngoc and reached for the transmitter. While he was calling for helicopters to insert the reserve company into the field I faded back and left the tent. Colonel Lance had taken no notice of me, and it seemed wise to keep it that way.

  Keith got killed later that afternoon. I never heard what the circumstances were, only that he was shot in the stomach. That meant he’d been standing up, maybe to carry one end of a stretcher, or with his arm raised to give the textbook signal for attack—“Follow me!”

  His death affected me strangely. It didn’t cause me pain so much as a kind of wonder at the way it had happened. I couldn’t stop playing it out: Colonel Lance hearing the fuss at the radio and walking over to see what was wrong, intent on the terrible sounds filling the air, heedless of either Keith or me except as big American bodies among the Vietnamese gathered around the table. Then his arbitrary decision to stand to Keith’s right, no nearer the radio than if he’d stood between us. This was the decision from which everything else followed: the hand on Keith’s shoulder, the gaze that followed the hand, the order that followed the gaze, the death that followed the order. Everything marched in lockstep from that one moment. If he had stood between us it would have been my shoulder the hand fell on, the other hand being occupied with his curved, fragrant, fatherly pipe. It would have been me receiving the father’s thoughtless blessing touch, me to whom he turned, me to whom he put the kindly question that had only one answer.

  It could have been me. I knew it even then, and Keith might have had the same thought. We were the same rank, had about the same experience. We both stood about six feet. He was older by two or three years, but not so you’d notice. For the needs of this occasion either of us seemed about as plausible as the other. He had grounds for wondering why the hand had fallen on him. It could have been me, and he may even have thought that it should have been me. Certainly there were times, not immediately afterward but in the months and years to come, that I myself had the suspicion it should have been me—that Keith, and Hugh, and other men had somehow picked up my cards and stood in the place where I was meant to stand.

  I once confessed this dreary notion to someone, who, meaning well, told me it was caveman talk.

  “I know,” I said. “But still.”

  But still. In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don’t look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries. You encourage yourself with charms, omens, rites of propitiation. Without your knowledge or permission the bottom-line caveman belief in blood sacrifice, one life buying another, begins to steal into your bones. How could it not? All around you people are killed: soldiers on both sides, farmers, teachers, mothers, fathers, schoolgirls, nurses, your friends—but not you. They have been killed instead of you. This observation is unavoidable. So, in time, is the corollary, implicit in the word instead: in place of. They have been killed in place of you—in your place. You don’t think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you can’t help but feel it, and go on feeling it. It’s the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own life. It’s the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason, and probe its justice.

  I didn’t really know Keith Young. We saw each other in My Tho now and then, exchanged a few friendly words, but we didn’t take it any farther than that. He was too quiet for me, too careful. He struck me, I have to admit, as a company man, and it was pretty clear that I’d made no better impression on him. We never spent any time together until by chance we ran into each other while boarding the Kowloon ferry in Hong Kong. I’d been on R and R for four or five days already and Keith had just arrived. He was on his way to a tailor he’d heard about, and invited me to join him. This tailor was incredible, he said. For thirty dollars he could copy any suit; all you had to do was show him a picture of it. Keith had several pictures, advertisements he’d cut out of Esquire. You could pick up the suits in twenty-four hours.

  I didn’t have anything better to do so I went along with Keith and watched him being fitted for his wardrobe. At first I found the whole thing comical, especially a sign in the window of the shop: “Guaranteed by the Royal Navy.” I liked the idea of the Royal Navy taking an interest in my duds. And then I began to think it wasn’t that bad a deal, thirty bucks, and that it wouldn’t hurt to have a few good suits and the odd sport coat hanging around. Before leaving the shop that day I placed some orders of my own, for clothes that did not in fact resemble the ones in Esquire—“You look like a Chinaman,” a friend told me when I got home—and which quickly began to fall apart because of inferior thread. One of my suit sleeves actually came off inside my overcoat as I was arriving at a house for a dinner party some years later. I considered sending a letter of complaint to the First Lord of the Admiralty, but never did.

  My haul was modest compared to Keith’s. He ordered six or seven suits, tweed jackets, camel and blue blazers, slacks, button-down shirts of every acceptable color, formal wear, and two overcoats—also in camel and blue. He seemed bent on getting the whole clothes problem out of the way forever, right then and there. We hit a few clubs that night and he couldn’t stop talking about what a great deal he’d gotten. And that was the first thought I had when I heard he’d been killed: What about all those clothes? It was a gasp of a th
ought, completely instinctual, without malice or irony. All those clothes waiting for him—they seemed somehow an irrefutable argument for his survival. Maybe they’d seemed that way to him too, a kind of guarantee, like the wives and fiancées some of us accumulated just before leaving home. They gave us a picture of ourselves in time to come, a promise of future existence to use as a safe-conduct pass through the present.

  I sometimes tried to imagine other men wearing Keith’s suits, but I couldn’t bring the images to life. What I see instead is a dark closet with all his clothes hanging in a row. Someone opens the closet door, looks at them for a time, and closes the door again.

  Duty

  ONE OF THE local medical volunteers was a sour, livid Canadian named Macleod. He was full of absurd Scottish affectations that nobody had the nerve to call him on because his tongue was so sharp. Doc Macleod believed that at all times and in all places he was surrounded by fools. I never saw him laugh. Once in a blue moon, when hilarity got the better of him, he’d point his finger and say, “Funny.” Doc Macleod had joined a church-sponsored medical team bound for Vietnam right after his residency in Toronto, because he planned to be a surgeon and thought that the misery here would give him a great chance to perform operations.