My Detachment

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.

August 15, 2005
Pulitzer Prize winner Kidder ("The Soul of a New Machine") turns his great gift for narrative nonfiction to his own life and tells of his year in Vietnam as a young army officer. Far from a blood-and-guts memoir, Kidder's story is one of painful self-revelation and amusing coming of age. He recounts how he joined the ROTC as a confused Harvard student, even as his opinions were turning against the war, and ended up in a not very dangerous corner of Vietnam monitoring radio patterns. His attempts to command his detachment of bored enlisted men and his letters home, which were full of fictional heroics, could have been the stuff of tragedy, but Kidder's storytelling and humor are able to do much more. His unflinching honesty is tempered by his amusement at his younger self, and the green lieutenant imperceptibly matures until he finds himself leaving Vietnam and the army as the man he had wished he could be. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ "5/1/05.] -Elizabeth Morris, Illinois Fire Service Inst. Lib., Champaign, IL

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2005
Kidder, a master in the art of clarion nonfiction and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, has devoted his writing life to portraying others, most recently the public--health reformer Paul Farmer in the best-selling " Mountains beyond Mountains" (2003). Now, in his most personal and droll book to date, he tells the story of how, while attending Harvard and dreaming of becoming a writer, he joined the ROTC in spite of his ambivalence regarding the Vietnam War and ended up commanding a radio research detachment in the Vietnamese countryside. ?As Kidder describes his band of irreverent enlisted men and his efforts to be both liked and respected, he analyzes military culture with shrewd insight and low-key humor, illuminating the often-lackadaisical bureaucratic machinations behind the horrors of combat. In his candid remembrance of the fumblings of his superiors and his own capitulation to the seduction of power, Kidder achieves a M*A*S*H-like ambience, at once funny and wrenching. War is an appalling mix of the absurd and the catastrophic, the banal and the profound, a confounding and tragic reality Kidder's behind-the-scenes memoir brings forthrightly to light.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)