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.
關於作者:
Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and studied at the
University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National
Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary
prizes. The author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Home Town, Old
Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New
Machine, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.