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Overview
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 movies–they are the ones who appear only in war, and they are unforgettable.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
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 movies–they are the ones who appear only in war, and they are unforgettable.
The New York Times - Klingenborg Verlyn
The older Kidder almost never relents toward his younger self. The reader is inclined to be a little more forgiving, if only because the worst of Lieutenant Kidder's reported sins are so youthful and venial, so familiar to any honest reader. But there is something else at work here, too. By being tough on his young self, Kidder knows, I think, that no one will laugh too hard at the man he used to be, who would have been wounded most by laughter. And yet if you refract the irony of this memoir a little differently, the result is high comedy. This absurdly earnest young man is guilty of not much more than being young and absurd.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Tracy Kidder went to Vietnam as a reluctant warrior. In fact, the future Pulitzer Prize winner joined ROTC in his junior year at Harvard as a strategy to avoid the draft's uncertainties and the "unnecessary, futile, racist" war. Once in Nam, he assumed command over an anarchistic group of work-shirking enlisted men. His unit's mission was to interpret enemy troop movements from raw intelligence gathered via electronic eavesdropping. This singular memoir is devoid of battlefield heroics but captures the incongruities and abstractness of everyday wartime experience.Klingenborg Verlyn
The older Kidder almost never relents toward his younger self. The reader is inclined to be a little more forgiving, if only because the worst of Lieutenant Kidder's reported sins are so youthful and venial, so familiar to any honest reader. But there is something else at work here, too. By being tough on his young self, Kidder knows, I think, that no one will laugh too hard at the man he used to be, who would have been wounded most by laughter. And yet if you refract the irony of this memoir a little differently, the result is high comedy. This absurdly earnest young man is guilty of not much more than being young and absurd.— The New York Times