[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 such a war—a far cry from the vaunted camaraderie of the battlefield.

In a series of remarkably candid “memories of a lost war”, Wolff recounts his own progressive abandonment of western morality, based on honesty, trustworthiness, chivalry and charity. Without irony, he explains how his corruption arose from one Sergeant Benet, who had the survivor's ability to fix means to ends. Benet is a paradox: a black survivor in one of the world's most racist societies. While his history teaches him the languages of expedience (flattery or servility; assurance or companionship), his devout Christianity teaches him to make sacrifices in the all-American ballgame. Without surrendering a single cherished belief, the man conforms to western racism in his treatment of Asian allies, whose actual language—unlike Wolff—he cannot understand but whose subservient role he fully comprehends.

The rebellious subterfuges and sabotages of such as Major Chau are the other side of the coin, in a country drastically militarised and yet scornful of the foreigners' capacity to “turn the people into prostitutes, pimps, pedicab drivers and thieves, and the town … into a nest of burger stands and laundries … such was the power of American dollars and American appetites”. Yet Wolff can satirise those same appetites in himself.

So capitalism works: a television set here for a Chicom rifle there, with the clear intention “to live not as a Vietnamese among Vietnamese but as an American among Vietnamese”. What arises is the most ghoulish of last suppers, a literal turning of tables in which nothing is as it would appear, nor as the American guests intended. It is a measure of Wolff's professional adroitness that the sacrifice of a puppy can mean as much as that of his best friends, who—through arbitrary happenstance—met their own loathsome ends.

Sudden deaths breed philosophical ruminations. Wolff's light and immensely readable style masks the seriousness of his questions. Nothing in the formation of this “trapeze act … family … company of soldiers” had prepared them for what they were to encounter. Morality paled before a reality at once externally gory and inwardly corroding.

Sergeant Benet's nightly perusal of the Bible would probably not have led him to apply the fate of pharaoh's army to the US in Vietnam. But Wolff (a Catholic) has a desire to bear witness as fervent as that of the four evangelists, who likewise took decades to deliver their testimony. He contends that “The resolute imperial will was all played out here at the empire's fringe, lost in rancor and mud”. The war may have been lost in American confusion, but in all the ensuing dismay and recrimination, these memories themselves will not be lost. From a war where survival was all, the memories survive.