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My Detachment: A Memoir

door Tracy Kidder

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Biography & Autobiography. History. Military. Nonfiction. HTML:My Detachment is a war story like none you have ever read before, an unromanticized portrait of a young man coming of age in the controversial war that defined a generation. In an astonishingly honest, comic, and moving account of his tour of duty in Vietnam, master storyteller Tracy Kidder writes for the first time about himself. This extraordinary memoir is destined to become a classic.

Kidder was an ROTC intelligence officer, just months out of college and expecting a stateside assignment, when his orders arrived for Vietnam. There, lovesick, anxious, and melancholic, he tried to assume command of his detachment, a ragtag band of eight more-or-less ungovernable men charged with reporting on enemy radio locations.

He eventually learned not only to lead them but to laugh and drink with them as they shared the boredom, pointlessness, and fear of war. Together, they sought a ghostly enemy, homing in on radio transmissions and funneling intelligence gathered by others. Kidder realized that he would spend his time in Vietnam listening in on battle but never actually experiencing it.

With remarkable clarity and with great detachment, Kidder looks back at himself from across three and a half decades, confessing how, as a young lieutenant, he sought to borrow from the tragedy around him and to imagine himself a romantic hero. Unrelentingly honest, rueful, and revealing, My Detachment gives us war without heroism, while preserving those rare moments of redeeming grace in the midst of lunacy and danger. The officers and men of My Detachment are not the sort of people who appear in war moviesâ??they are the ones who appear only in war, and they are unforgettab
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"What are they going to do Lt.? Send you to Vietnam?" This little question defines the relationship among draftees and lifers. Kidder was assigned to an intelligence unit in Vietnam that handled radio traffic. Their job was to monitor and triangulate North Vietnamese radio traffic. The lifers seemed to be interested only in side-burn length (often measured with a ruler) and "hooch" neatness. Kidder's attitude soon became one of just collecting a few chips to cash in later and one of live and let live. Only the lifers cared about haircuts and camp discipline. The draftees did as little as possible in the way of military etiquette.

Sometimes a little extortion helped. His unit once picked up the colonel commanding troops from an orbiting helicopter and in his excitement, the colonel was naming names and units in the clear. Kidder's group made a transcript of the recording. His gadfly, Poncho, wanted to send it up the line to get the colonel reprimanded, but Kidder realized the value of showing what they had to the colonel and letting him know that they would do nothing about it. Just collecting a few chips.

Kidder's relationship with Poncho was based on a constant struggle for power. Poncho using threats ("I could always just drop a bamboo viper in your bunk") and bribery (Kidder wants to have an easy relationship with his men). Incidents elsewhere offragging officers would be casually dropped into the conversation.

Several of the reviews elsewhere have castigated Kidder for being a coward and not putting forth full effort required of a soldier. My feeling was quite the opposite. This book is a vivid (pun in the title intended, I'm sure) and very honest memoir of a year in the life of a non-lifer, someone who just wanted to get it over with and survive without killing anyone else or getting killed. You get the feeling he is going through great mental anguish himself, having no idea how to lead troops (he says at one point how little training in leading men he received and how the army would have been better served had they sent new officers to teach in an inner-city school for a year to learn how to lead and control the unruly.) What's a young Lt. to do when one of his men, a troublemaker, announces there had been a meeting about him behind him back the night before and they decided they didn't like the way he was doing things and by the way they would shoot him if he didn't straighten out? He and Poncho, the troublemaker, finally make an uneasy alliance.

How does a twenty-year old deal with the knowledge that his men were being sent out on details to dig up Vietnamese graves so they could determine who would get credit for the kill: the artillery or the Air Force. How do you put that in your letters home? He writes fictional accounts in his mail of events that never occurred. So the mail becomes a mendacious catharsis often reflecting what he wished had happened, not what had really transpired.

The Kidder portrayed is not the hero we wish to see and he flogs himself repeatedly, if not ostentatiously, for his sell-out. Does he respect Poncho more than himself? Perhaps. A very useful addition to the literature of Vietnam from a perspective other than the front-line grunt. Reportage of the inconsequential. ( )
  ecw0647 | Sep 30, 2013 |
In this memoir of Kidder's stint in Vietnam, he pulls no punches, describing the callow youth he was with unrelenting candor. Fine writing and a fascinating tale. ( )
  satyridae | Apr 5, 2013 |
Well-written and a nice direction for Kidder
- Brief at times, sometimes interpersonally flat

A poignant memoir of the author's service in the Vietnam War. Following Kidder's Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, in which the reader saw much more of Kidder's reactions and vulnerability than in the past, it is personal and poignant. Kidder describes his self-conscious adolescence and rather affected presentation of self as a Harvard undergraduate. Eager to be admired and easily influenced by others, he joins ROTC and completes a 1-year tour in Vietnam. His consciousness of classism and racism emerges over the course of this time but is not well-articulated, which I understand as Kidder's effort to reflect his consciousness at the time. His understanding of sexism is more nascent, though Kidder-as-narrator does note that the novel he wrote after his service was about a man done in by trying to protect a Vietnamese woman from rape.

Kidder depicts himself as an uneasy, sometimes self-loathing, self-absorbed young adult. He quotes from letters in which he lied to familiy and friends, exaggerating the danger he was in, his herosim, and his charity toward imaginary Vietnamese children. His actual war experience appears generally not to have put him at great risk (though certainly the strain of living in a war zone takes its toll).

Though Kidder has a coherent story to tell about his coming of age, he tells a more interesting parallel story about the development of a writer. He quotes excerpts from his novel and letters, showing not only the development of his craft, but also the development of a narrating (and sometimes fantasizing the camera shots) persona, one who is sometimes unreliable. As some reviewers have pointed out, his interest in The Great Gatsby may signal that the reader should take the present narrative with a grain of salt, though I wonder if its possible lack of reliability errs in the opposite direction--Kidder seems awfully hard on his younger self.

The title suggests not only Kidder's unit, but also his lack of attachment at the time, his lack of connection to Vietnam (he seems to have stayed in a fairly small military bubble by choice), and perhaps the act of detaching from the experience from his current vantage. It's a good title. If anything, the narrative is just a little too detached, and I wonder where the immediacy of, for example, fear has gone. Perhaps the narrative replicates what appears to be depression, or reflects the isolation in and out of which he moved. There is more than a whiff of failure about Kidder's command, relationships, and writing, at least in retrospect.

Read with Swofford's Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles and Jenning's Mouthful of Rocks: Modern Adventures in the French Foreign Legion to immerse yourself in the boredom of war. Jenning is said by some to be a boastful and unreliable narrator, so these two accounts nicely bracket Kidder's year as an REMF. For musings on men and how masculinity can be used oppressively by other men, pair it with Vincent's Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man, which I've reviewed and disliked, but which could be a useful foil for Kidder's account. ( )
  OshoOsho | Mar 30, 2013 |
Excellent book. So interesting in his ability to demonstrate his selfish and uncool thoughts etc. The classic line - he wanted to be interesting but Pancho wanted an interesting life. Great
  shazjhb | May 14, 2010 |
My Detachment is a memoir of Tracy Kidder’s service in Viet Nam as a low level Army field intel officer, tracking NVN & VC troop movements. With uncommon humility, he chronicles his service. He never shies away from his failures, embarrassments, fears, and missteps. He has to balance the need for respect from the men under him with “orders” from frequently rotating officers above him. One of his men, Pancho, is right out of Catch 22. He’s a borderline insubordinate, useful, mysterious, loyal but frightening, - a man apart. Years later they meet and clear up a few “mysteries”. At the end, he sums up Pancho and himself in a money quote: “He had wanted to have an interesting life, I wanted to be interesting”. ( )
  mckall08 | Nov 23, 2009 |
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Biography & Autobiography. History. Military. Nonfiction. HTML:My Detachment is a war story like none you have ever read before, an unromanticized portrait of a young man coming of age in the controversial war that defined a generation. In an astonishingly honest, comic, and moving account of his tour of duty in Vietnam, master storyteller Tracy Kidder writes for the first time about himself. This extraordinary memoir is destined to become a classic.

Kidder was an ROTC intelligence officer, just months out of college and expecting a stateside assignment, when his orders arrived for Vietnam. There, lovesick, anxious, and melancholic, he tried to assume command of his detachment, a ragtag band of eight more-or-less ungovernable men charged with reporting on enemy radio locations.

He eventually learned not only to lead them but to laugh and drink with them as they shared the boredom, pointlessness, and fear of war. Together, they sought a ghostly enemy, homing in on radio transmissions and funneling intelligence gathered by others. Kidder realized that he would spend his time in Vietnam listening in on battle but never actually experiencing it.

With remarkable clarity and with great detachment, Kidder looks back at himself from across three and a half decades, confessing how, as a young lieutenant, he sought to borrow from the tragedy around him and to imagine himself a romantic hero. Unrelentingly honest, rueful, and revealing, My Detachment gives us war without heroism, while preserving those rare moments of redeeming grace in the midst of lunacy and danger. The officers and men of My Detachment are not the sort of people who appear in war moviesâ??they are the ones who appear only in war, and they are unforgettab

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