In Pharaoh's Army by Tobias Wolff Read Free Book Online

was similar to that of the Abarth-Allemagne he was then driving (unpaid for, never to be paid for). As he spoke he took a knife from his pocket and cut the gas line on either side of the filter, which he shook out and wrapped in a handkerchief, talking all the while. It was exactly the kind of thing I would have done, but I hated seeing him do it, as I hated seeing him lie about his past and bilk storekeepers and take advantage of his friends. He hadcrooked ways, the same kind I had, but after that summer I tried to change. I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted to be a man of honor.
    Honor. The very word had a martial ring. My father had never served, though he sometimes claimed he had, and this incompleteness in his history somehow made his fate intelligible and offered a means to escape it myself. This was the way, the indisputable certificate of citizenship and probity.
    But I didn’t join up that morning. Instead I went to Washington to bid my mother farewell, and let her persuade me to have another try at school, with results so dismal that in the end she personally escorted me to the recruiter.
    I never made it to the Azores, and even now the word raises a faint sensation of longing and regret. But I was right not to go back to my ship that morning. So many things can happen at sea. You can go overboard at night. Something heavy can fall on you, or something sharp. You can have your hat size reduced by a propeller. A ship is a dangerous place at any time; but when one of your shipmates wishes you harm, then harm is certain to befall you. In that way a ship is like a trapeze act, or a family, or a company of soldiers.
    I WENT through basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, during a heat wave, “the worst on record,” we kept telling one another, on no authority but our opinion that it was pretty damned hot. And it was. The asphalt streets liquefied, sucking at our boots, burning our eyes and throats with acrid fumes. Sweatgleamed on every face. When they packed us into Quonset huts for lectures on “homoseshality” and “drug addition,” the smell got serious enough to put a man down, and many went down. Passing out came to be so common among us that we awarded points for the drama of the fall. The big winner was a boy from Puerto Rico who keeled over while marching, in full field equipment, along a ledge on a steep hillside. We heard him clanking all the way down.
    The drill sergeants affected not to be aware of the rate at which we dropped. They let us understand that taking notice of the temperature was unsoldierly. When a recruit in another company died of heatstroke, our company commander called a formation and told us to be sure and take our salt pills every day. After he’d given his speech and gone back to the orderly room, our drill sergeant said, “Shitbirds, why did that troop croak?”
    We had the answer ready. “Because he was a pussy, Sergeant.”
    We were mostly volunteers. A lot of men regretted the impulse that had brought them to Fort Jackson, and all of us whined unceasingly, but I never heard of anyone writing to his congressman about the treatment we got, which was pretty much what a boy brought up on war movies would expect, and maybe a little better. The drill sergeants rode us hard, but they didn’t show up drunk at midnight and lead us into swamps to drown. The training seemed more or less purposeful, most of the time. The food was decent. And there were pleasures to be had.
    One of my pleasures was to learn that I was hardy and capable. I’d played team sports in school, andplayed them doggedly, but never very well. Military training agreed with me. My body was right for it—trim and stringy. Guys who would have pulverized me on the football field were still on their third push-up when I’d finished my tenth. The same bruisers had trouble on our runs and suffered operatically on the horizontal bar, where we had to do pull-ups before every meal. Their beefy bodies, all