In Pharaoh's Army — Memories of the Lost War

The Advisor

Tobias Wolff was a US Army Special Forces officer assigned as an advisor to South Vietnamese forces in the Mekong Delta town of My Tho. His job was to help train Vietnamese soldiers. He did not speak Vietnamese fluently. The war’s logic was not visible to him. He was trying, mostly, not to be killed.

In Pharaoh’s Army is a memoir structured around episodes from that year — some violent, some absurd, some both. Wolff writes in the same compressed, precise prose as his fiction, without the distancing that memoir can allow. He is honest about fear, about his own inadequacy, about the things he did that he is not proud of.

The Absurdity

The central irony of the advisor role — that Americans were advising armies in a war they understood less well than the armies they were advising — is present in every chapter without being stated as argument. Wolff shows rather than tells. The result is a memoir that makes you understand the Vietnam War’s specific kind of failure without explaining it.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set In Pharaoh’s Army apart: The prose has the compression and precision of Wolff’s best fiction — it is a memoir that reads like a great short story collection; The honesty about fear, incompetence, and moral compromise is not self-flagellating but precise; and The absurdity of the advisor role — training soldiers for a war conducted according to different logic on every side — is rendered without editorialising. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Core Ideas

The central arguments the book develops are worth summarising. The American advisor role in Vietnam was structurally incoherent — advising an army you did not trust, for a cause you could not clearly articulate, in a war whose logic you could not follow. Fear is not the same as cowardice — Wolff distinguishes carefully between the ordinary experience of being frightened and the decision about what to do with it. The Vietnam War produced a generation of writers precisely because it was an experience that resisted reduction to ideology. These ideas are grounded in evidence and example rather than speculation, which distinguishes this book from comparable titles that rely on anecdote alone.

The Reading Experience

In Pharaoh’s Army is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes In Pharaoh’s Army from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

The episodic structure means some chapters are stronger than others. The short length may leave readers who want more scope feeling the book ends before it has fully developed. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of literary memoir and Vietnam literature — This Boy’s Life readers who want to follow Wolff’s story forward.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Vietnam memoir as literary art — Wolff applies fiction’s precision to memory’s difficult material.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Tobias Wolff
• This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff — Full Review
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien — Full Review

Publication Context and Wolff’s War Writing

In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War was published in 1994. Tobias Wolff served as an army lieutenant in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, attached to an advisory team in a provincial town in the Mekong Delta. The memoir focuses on this specific, unheroic posting rather than combat, capturing the stasis, confusion, and moral compromise of American involvement through its texture rather than its events.

Wolff’s memoir is regularly paired with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) as the two most literary accounts of the Vietnam War by veterans who became distinguished writers. Where O’Brien works through formal experiment — his book’s embedded fictions about fact and truth — Wolff’s approach is the close, precise prose of a short story writer (his collection In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, 1981, and Back in the World, 1985, established him as one of the finest American short fiction writers of his generation).

In Pharaoh’s Army was a finalist for the National Book Award. Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life (1989) — about his violent stepfather and his own adolescence in the American West — preceded it and was adapted for film in 1993 with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. The two memoirs together make Wolff one of the few writers to have produced major works in both life-writing genres: childhood memoir and war memoir.

Wolff dedicated the memoir to the men of the advisory team he served with in My Tho, Dinh Tuong Province; it stands alongside Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War as one of the defining personal accounts of American experience in Vietnam — each approaching the same war from a different distance, a different angle of accountability.

Wolff’s Advisory Role

Wolff served as a US Army advisor to the South Vietnamese forces in My Tho during 1967–68, advising on tactics and operations without command authority — a position that placed him in proximity to the war’s consequences while denying him the ability to shape its conduct. The memoir’s tone reflects this position: the war observed from a sideline that is still very close to the killing ground.