Vietnam War veteran Tobias Wolff translated his military experiences into an acclaimed memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army. I was sent off to language school to learn Vietnamese. I was gone for over a year, 13 months, and I was in civilian status that whole time. I never went to a base. That was how I spent the 13 months before I left for Vietnam.

And that’s what begins this passage. Here is my orders for Vietnam. And then my year of grace ended at the end of it. Scared, short winded, forgetful of all martial skills and disciplines. I was promoted to first lieutenant and posted back to Fort Bragg to await orders. Just after I got there, I was assigned to a training exercise being played out in the mountains of Pisgah National Forest.

I didn’t know any of the men whose temporary commander I became. I was filling in for their regular team leader, who had other business to attend to. Our job was to parachute in and link up with another team and make a show of our expertise. We gathered on the airstrip well before dawn. I tagged along with the first sergeant while he made the equipment check, looking on and see if I knew what he was doing.

It was still dark when we boarded the plane. I sat with the others until we entered the forest. Then I hooked up my parachute and stood in the open doorway, trying to follow our position on the map. There was light breaking on the tops of the hills, but the land below was still in darkness, and the map kept flapping in my hand.

Our pilot was supposed to flash a green warning light when he saw the smoke marking the drop zone. But I knew better than to rely on him. We were moving fast, if out of distraction or malice. He was even a little slow, giving us the signal we could end up in impossible terrain. Miles from the drop zone. And the men we were supposed to meet.

We were flying up a long valley. The slopes were awash in light. The plane was turning gray. We passed a cluster of houses. I tried to find the village on the map. It was unmarked. Or I was looking in the wrong place. In fact, I had no idea where we were. As the valley began to narrow, the plane descended and slowed.

This was the usual prelude to the jump, but the green light still hadn’t come on. I braced myself in the doorway and looked out. Smoke was rising off the valley floor a mile or so ahead of us. Our smoke was supposed to be yellow and this was black, but it was the only smoke out there. I turned to the first sergeant.

His eyes were closed. I looked back out the door and confirmed what I’d seen. Smoke, but still no green light. A decision was required. It was my duty to make it. I gave the order to hook up. And as the first man came to the door. I smacked him on the rump like a quarterback, breaking the huddle and shouted, go!

And the next man and the next until everyone was out but me. And then I jumped. Sudden silence. Mountains all around. The eerie, lovely sight of the other canopies. The men swinging below my men. I’d gotten them out in good order, and with no help from the pilot and the men closest to the ground, gave a shout, and I looked down and saw him hauling like crazy on his risers, trying to change the path of his fall.

The others started doing the same thing, and a moment later, when I got a good look at what lay below us, so did I. We were not, as I had supposed, drifting down upon a field marked with signal grenades, but over the expanse of a vast garbage dump where random fires smoldered, sending greasy coils of smoke high into the air.

I caught my first with a couple of hundred feet up, and the smell got worse the closer I came. I pulled the hard to the left, making for a patch of ground not yet covered with junk. I was lucky being last out. I was fairly close to the edge. Almost everyone else landed in the soup. I watched them go down as I drifted to port and listened to them bellow and swear, and heard the crunching sounds they made as they slammed into the dump.

We were several miles from the drop zone to get there. Took most of the day. No one spoke to me. It was as if I did not exist. We maintained this arrangement until our part in the exercise was over. Two weeks later, I was in Vietnam.

Tags: Memoir