SOURCE: Hopkinson, Amanda. “Fragging Morality.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 332 (9 December 1994): 39-40.

In the following review, Hopkinson calls In Pharaoh's Army an understated indictment of the Vietnam War.

Tobias Wolff's indictment of the US war in Vietnam is all the more withering for being so gentle. Its tone, which is what keeps you reading even the most horrific accounts, has a subtlety and modesty that belie the apparent detachment. The anecdotes that fuel the overwhelming humiliation of the whole experience are graced with charm, and even humour.

Many vituperative critiques have been made of that mad and disastrous period. The waste of lives—overwhelmingly civilian on the Vietnamese side, merely youthful on the American—is impossible to justify either in the chimerical cause of “defeating Communism” or as an experiment destruction waged by the US arms industry. But what ripples this book is the inner corrosion wrought by...