In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War.

The AP photographer Horst Faas, who took many pictures of the war in Vietnam, replied memorably when an interviewer once suggested that his attraction to the subject of combat might be more than strictly professional: "Vot I like eez boom boom. Oh yes," he said.

Faas and other boom-boom aficionados would be disappointed by Tobias Wolff's essays on arms and men. Some readers of In Pharaoh's Army might suspect that Tobias Wolff himself is bemused by the unconventional nature of his memoir and even slightly apologetic that he can't manage to sound a little more like Michael Heff, Philip Caputo, Tim O'Brien, and other shaken veterans of the disaster in Southeast Asia. His problem--it seems to me at least--is that he's a far better writer than anyone else who has yet tried to describe what happened in Vietnam.

In his earlier book, This Boy's Life, Wolff gave an account of his own adolescence which perfectly balanced pity for his vulnerable teen-age self and ironical examination of that self's outrageous posturing. This is an exercise that Catholic school children were once taught to call an examination of conscience, and it's at least arguable that if we could all remember our favorite sins as precisely and our embattled selves as kindly as Wolff does, we might see a revival of the sacrament of reconciliation. In his memories of the Vietnam War, something just as crucial and funny and mysterious as that exercise is going on.

About what principally attracted him to the misadventure, Wolff is characteristically blunt and self-deprecating. A bright kid who wanted to be a writer, he admired such writers as Norman Mailer, Eric Maria Remarque, and Ernest Hemingway, and he believed that he needed experiences like theirs to write about: "I turned into a predator, and one of the things I became predatory about was experience .... Experience was the clapper in the bell, the money in the bank, and of all the experiences the most bankable was military service."

While there is nothing in subsequent pages to suggest that this adolescent insight is untrue, there is ample and heartbreaking proof that, like most adolescent insights, it is tragically incomplete. After his enlistment and a fantastically incoherent (at least to those of us without military experience) series of training assignments, Wolff found himself just squeaking by in Officer Candidate School on the strength of his talent for writing satire. The school's graduation night traditionally featured a comedy revue for which the post commandant apparently had high expectations. Even Wolff s most disapproving superiors could ill afford a flop, so, he admits, "they kept me on to produce a farce. That was how I became an officer in the United States Army."

Assigned as an advisor to an ARVN battalion, Wolff took up residence in My Tho, a Mekong Delta town about which some of the book's most luminous and absorbing passages are written. It was in My Tho, for instance, that the twenty-year-old Wolff

took pleasure in being one of a very

few white men among these dark

folk, big among the small, rich

among the poor. My special position

did not make me feel arrogant, not

at first. It made me feel benevolent,

generous, protective as if I were surrounded

by children, as I often was--crowds

of them, shy but curious,

taking turns stroking my hairy arms,

and, as a special treat, my mustache.

In My Tho I had a sense of myself

as father, even as lord, the very sensation

that, even more than all their

holdings here, must have made the

thought of losing this place unbearable

to the French.

That frail sensation would be tested, obviously, by what has since become familiar history, and shattered beyond recognition during the Tet offensive, of which Wolff's laconic eight-page account is the most honest and useful description I've yet read.

"As a military project," he concludes,

Tet failed; as a lesson it succeeded.

The VC came into My Tho and all

the other towns knowing what would

happen. They knew that once they

were among the people, we would

abandon our pretense of distinguishing

between them. We would

kill them all to get at one. In this way

they taught the people that we did

not love them and would not protect

them; that for all our talk of partnership

and brotherhood we disliked

and mistrusted them, and that we

would kill every last one of them to

save our own skins. To believe otherwise

was self-deception. They

taught that lesson to the people, and

also to us. At least they taught it to

me.

That essay on Tet, "The Lesson," is as close as In Pharaoh's Army evercomes to a grand, historical assessment of the war, and even here, Wolff refuses to depart from the gritty surface of the particular. Elsewhere, his description of the personnel of a U.S. base near My Tho eloquently magnifies the local desolation:

In their anger at being in this place

and their refusal to come to terms

with it they had created a profound,

intractable bog. Something was

wrong with the latrine system; the

place always stank. They hadn't

even bothered to plant any grass. At

Dong Tam I saw something that

wasn't allowed for in the national

myth--our capacity for collective

despair. People here seemed in the

grip of an unshakable petulance. It

was in the slump of their shoulders

and the plodding way they moved.

A sourness had settled over the base,

spoiling and coarsening the men.

The resolute imperial will was all

played out here at the empire's

fringe, lost in rancor and mud. Here

were pharaoh's chariots engulfed;

his horsemen confused; and all his

magnificence dismayed.

But war is often beautiful, too. When the morning fog lifted over Fredricksburg, Virginia, and General Robert E. Lee saw the sunlight flashing on the bayonets of the Union soldiers he was preparing to kill, he famously remarked that it is well God made war so terrible lest we might grow too fond of it. Wolff is too good at his craft to neglect the glints of human splendor which flash on the surface of lethal steel. In an astonishing essay entitled Duty," he presents Sergeant Fisher, a frightened and inarticulate young man who resists the temptation to desert a doomed position. The sole American in a village likely to be overrun at any minute by the Viet Cong, Fisher is last glimpsed by Wolff from the window of a departing helicopter. "He didn't see me. He was busy making assurances, giving hope with his calm voice and the fact of his abiding presence. Duty had swallowed him whole, loneliness, fear, and all. His path was absolutely clear. I almost envied him."

Among the reasons In Pharaoh's Army is such a fine war story is Tobias Wolff s almost magical capacity for making such an emotion imaginable.