My Detachment: A Memoir

#30
Title: My Detachment: A Memoir
Author: Tracy Kidder
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2005
Genre: Autobiography/Vietnam War
192 pages
+ Well-written and a nice direction for Kidder
- Brief at times, sometimes interpersonally flat

A poignant memoir of the author's service in the Vietnam War. Following Kidder's Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, in which the reader saw much more of Kidder's reactions and vulnerability than in the past, it is personal and poignant. Kidder describes his self-conscious adolescence and rather affected presentation of self as a Harvard undergraduate. Eager to be admired and easily influenced by others, he joins ROTC and completes a 1-year tour in Vietnam. His consciousness of classism and racism emerges over the course of this time but is not well-articulated, which I understand as Kidder's effort to reflect his consciousness at the time. His understanding of sexism is more nascent, though Kidder-as-narrator does note that the novel he wrote after his service was about a man done in by trying to protect a Vietnamese woman from rape.

Kidder depicts himself as an uneasy, sometimes self-loathing, self-absorbed young adult. He quotes from letters in which he lied to familiy and friends, exaggerating the danger he was in, his herosim, and his charity toward imaginary Vietnamese children. His actual war experience appears generally not to have put him at great risk (though certainly the strain of living in a war zone takes its toll).

Though Kidder has a coherent story to tell about his coming of age, he tells a more interesting parallel story about the development of a writer. He quotes excerpts from his novel and letters, showing not only the development of his craft, but also the development of a narrating (and sometimes fantasizing the camera shots) persona, one who is sometimes unreliable. As some reviewers have pointed out, his interest in The Great Gatsby may signal that the reader should take the present narrative with a grain of salt, though I wonder if its possible lack of reliability errs in the opposite direction--Kidder seems awfully hard on his younger self.

The title suggests not only Kidder's unit, but also his lack of attachment at the time, his lack of connection to Vietnam (he seems to have stayed in a fairly small military bubble by choice), and perhaps the act of detaching from the experience from his current vantage. It's a good title. If anything, the narrative is just a little too detached, and I wonder where the immediacy of, for example, fear has gone. Perhaps the narrative replicates what appears to be depression, or reflects the isolation in and out of which he moved. There is more than a whiff of failure about Kidder's command, relationships, and writing, at least in retrospect.

Read with Swofford's Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles and Jenning's Mouthful of Rocks: Modern Adventures in the French Foreign Legion to immerse yourself in the boredom of war. Jenning is said by some to be a boastful and unreliable narrator, so these two accounts nicely bracket Kidder's year as an REMF. For musings on men and how masculinity can be used oppressively by other men, pair it with Vincent's Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man, which I've reviewed and disliked, but which could be a useful foil for Kidder's account.