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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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 6, 2005 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780739346044
- File size: 181748 KB
- Duration: 06:18:38
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Kidder, a young ROTC intelligence officer, expects to serve Stateside when orders come for Vietnam. Responsible for an army unit of eight men reporting enemy radio positions, he finds himself far removed from the mortal danger of battle, hunting a shadowy enemy, tracking radio transmissions and passing on intelligence collected by others. Kidder soon realizes with relief and ambivalence that he will get no closer to the war than the radio. The "detachment" of the title seems to refer to a distance from the experience that his narration makes clear. His delivery is unemotional; he is more narrator than main character, making the story an examination of the nation's detachment from this chapter of our history. N.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine -
June 13, 2005
The author of The Soul of a New Machine
put in a year during the Vietnam War; he was a reluctant warrior. Kidder joined ROTC in his junior year at Harvard as a way of avoiding the draft's uncertainties. Two years later he was taking part in a war that he found "unnecessary, futile, racist," serving as a lieutenant commanding an Army Security Agency detachment of eight enlisted men inside a well-fortified infantry base camp. As a shaved-headed ROTC cadet and later as an army officer, Kidder felt "separated from my social class, from my student generation"; in Vietnam, he detached himself emotionally from the mind-numbing army bureaucracy, from his ticket-punching career officer superiors and from his iconoclastic, work-shirking enlisted men. For Kidder, there are no heroes, and, in fact, few "war stories"; he presents, instead, realistic day-to-day reports on what happened to him at his posting: the mission was to interpret enemy troop movements using raw intelligence data supplied by eavesdropping technology. His account is an introspective, demythologizing dose of reality seen through the eyes of a perceptive, though immature, army intelligence lieutenant at a rear-area base camp. War isn't hell here; it's "an abstraction, dots on a map." Agent, Georges Borchardt.
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