Memory Tells Its Story -- Wolff Offers Honest If Less Than Flattering Portrait Of Man He Once Was

In a brief foreword to his remarkable 1989 memoir, "This Boy's Life," Tobias Wolff acknowledges that the book may contain certain inaccuracies, certain variations from fact.

"I've allowed some of these points to stand," he explains, "because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell."

In effect, Wolff suggests that memory is an actual creative force - a writer's working partner - not merely a chronologic record to be plundered for today's readers. The truth of an experience is to be found in the way it lives in the memory, not necessarily what actually happened long ago.

The same recognition shapes and guides Wolff's compelling new memoir, "In Pharoah's Army: Memories of the Lost War" (Knopf, $23), which for the most part tells of his experiences as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam in 1967 and '68. It is mesmerizing, hard to put down, as it fluidly evokes a crucial period in Wolff's life.

"I've always seen the past in terms of stories," Wolff, 49, said yesterday in his Seattle hotel. "Now, I know in fact that life doesn't happen in stories (and) I have to acknowledge that this book isn't a documentary - after all, I wasn't going around with a tape recorder and video camera."

Yet he likes the memoir form because it "basically admits its subjectivity up front," allowing it to be "more honest" than regular historical scholarship.

"Memoir can be a very powerful form," said Wolff, citing such classics as Robert Graves' "Goodbye to All That" and "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood" by Mary McCarthy. "I really feel that memoir is as true a way as we have of recovering the past - it can give you the feel and texture of a time and place like no other literary form."

The "stories" Wolff tells in his new book pick up where "This Boy's Life" left off: with his expulsion from the Eastern prep school he had finagled his way into by way of escaping an oppressive teenage life in a North Cascades hamlet with his mother and mean-spirited stepfather. Adrift at 18, he worked briefly aboard a Coast and Geodetic Survey ship before jumping ship and joining the Army.

After paratrooper training, then Officer Candidate School and a pleasant year in language school learning Vietnamese, young Lieutenant Wolff found himself posted as an "adviser" to a Vietnamese army battalion near My Tho, in the Mekong Delta. It was not as hazardous as assignments in northern parts of the country, but the potential for instant, unexpected death bred continual paranoia.

Wolff's tone, familiar to admirers of "This Boy's Life," is one of self-deprecating wonder at the young man he once was - and the soldier he wasn't.

"In those days I was scared stiff," he writes. ". . .I wanted out, but I lacked the courage to confess my incompetence as the price of getting out. I was ready to be killed, even, perhaps, get others killed, to avoid that humiliation."

So, Wolff sweats out his 365 days at My Tho and meets a number of personalities he captures with vivid yet economic precision. One of the best is his officious replacement, Captain Kale, who "had a round glistening face as pink as a boiled ham. It was the face of a soft little man but in fact he was tall and bulging with muscles. . .(He) owned records of people playing accordions, and could tell the difference between them." In just a few lines, you know Captain Kale.

There also is Pete Landon, an American diplomat whose imperial arrogance leads him to betray Wolff, and Sergeant Benet, a self-contained young African American who "somehow let me know what orders I should give him to preserve the fiction of my authority."

Ultimately, one is struck by the honesty of Wolff's self-portrait of the young man who continues to live in his memory - even when the picture is less than flattering.

"I certainly did not rise to the challenge," Wolff said yesterday. "There were some men over there who managed to rise above the situation, to be kind, to not make the Vietnamese into `the other' - and where would we be without them?

"I just can't pretend that I was one of them."