Sep 21, 2005

Book Rev

In Country

It's hard to say if memoirs are rigged with more booby traps than any other literary genre, but it sure seems that way. Few seem to break out of the narcissistic coma induced by perpetual pats on the "I" key. Even writers who should know better proffer their life stories when only a few selective years are worth the mention. In My Detachment: A Memoir (Random House, New York, 2005) Tracy Kidder dodges these landmines (and others) by limiting the scope to his tour of duty in Vietnam and the years that led up to it.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of A New Machine, and more recently the author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Kidder also happens to be a masterful storyteller with an intuitive understanding of the line between personal demons and larger social constructs.

While most treatments of the living-room war focus on the combat experience, and, to a lesser degree, "the war at home," Kidder's Nam was boring, confusing and quite safe. A product of such Presidential finishing schools as Andover and Harvard, he did not enlist as a political gesture. In fact, as an undergrad, he transferred out of a political science class taught by the yet-to-be-infamous Henry Kissinger because it didn't seem relevant to an English major. What was relevant, however, was the draft. Aiming to get in early and ride out his tour stateside, it was much to Kidder's dismay when the orders came for overseas.

Despite his proximity to the fighting, Kidder explains that to him the war was forever "an abstraction. Dots on a map." For despite popular filmic depictions, Kidder notes that most who served in Vietnam did not see combat. His radio research unit was indeed free of Vietcong, and intercepting enemy Morse code messages was safe and sedentary work. However, he also had the unenviable task of commanding a detachment that had grown used to slack leadership.

Kidder also found that however much he learned to detest military hierarchy, it was never enough to justify slacking off. "I didn't want to feel that I hated being a soldier only because I couldn't be a good one," he writes. In this vein, he came to respect many of his commanding officers and grew increasingly baffled with the implications of his anti-war stance.

Furthering his confusion was the pervasive misunderstanding of his friends back home, who assumed he was in a state of constant danger. Kidder details the ways in which he took advantage of this, intimating experiences that were never his. "I wanted to portray a rugged guy with smudges on his face from sleeping in a foxhole - one hand holding an M-16, the other resting protectively on the shoulder of a Vietnamese boy named Go or Hanh."

While such fantasies may appear silly, it's understandable in light of the author's yearnings for grandeur. There he was, a young literary aspirant hoping this war he opposed might, if nothing else, lend his life some gravitas. (Think Hemingway.) Yet how much character is built drinking third-rate beer in the hootch to a soundtrack of Simon and Garfunkel records?

What brings the reader back to another time, place and mindset has a lot to do with the author's use of source materials. These include letters to and from friends and family as well as his unpublished novel, Ivory Fields. Kidder excerpts these generously, and they breathe the young Lieutenant Kidder to life in all his restless, self-involved glory.

While a lot of memoirs veer toward shocking confessions, Kidder offers up a gentle indictment of his younger self. He doesn't shirk away from his unflattering moments, as evidenced by excepts like this letter to a former girlfriend:

"I am getting to be a great comfort to myself. Soon integrity will have me in her clutches. And speaking of integrity, I rescued a pathetic little whore from the ocean today. God knows what she was doing there besides drowning…"

"Who is this guy?" Kidder seems to be asking, even as he tries to explain. There's a peaceful distance to these reflections, one attained presumably over time and also, perhaps, through the writing process. My Detachment is a welcome break from the showy emotional fireworks typical of so much first-person writing.

Kidder realizes that however much it may conceal a lie, sometimes "the hint of a terrible war story was the best war story of all." Sometimes, however, the less glamorous tales of solitary confusion are even better. Sometimes the best war stories are true.
John Dicker John Dicker, a Denver-based writer, is the author of The United States of Wal-Mart.

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