SOURCE: Hoy II, Pat C. “They Died for Nothing, Did They Not?” Sewanee Review 103, no. 3 (summer 1995): 456-58.

In the following excerpt, Hoy lauds In Pharaoh's Army for being a balanced and unapologetic look at the Vietnam War.

At the end of his memoir, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, Tobias Wolff gives us a glimpse of his own homecoming after a year as an adviser to the Vietnamese army. Joining the American army had been essential to Wolff's “idea of legitimacy” because the men he had respected as he was growing up, and most of the writers he looked up to, had all served. He also wanted to become “respectable” in a way that his father had not been. Serving was the “indisputable certificate of citizenship and probity.”

Yet, when Wolff came back from Vietnam, he spent a week alone in a “seedy” San Francisco hotel...