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.
