Reviewed by Amy Duncan

“I’d like to avoid being judgmental,” says Kidder toward the end of his new book, “and I have reason to try.” In this memoir, the Pulitzer prize-winning author who elevated a schoolteacher to hero status in Among Schoolchildren and a doctor to near sainthood in Mountains beyond Mountains humbles himself. In doing so, he also humbles the US army.

In the book, Kidder, a naïve Harvard graduate with writing talent and terrible dating skills, spends a year, from June 1968 to June 1969, as a second lieutenant in Vietnam.  During his time there, he didn’t see any combat. He didn’t try to save anyone. He didn’t watch anyone die. Rather, he served as a lower-level bureaucrat in Radio Intelligence, superior only to a small detachment of men outside the line of combat.

The only character who dies in My Detachment is Lieutenant Dempsey, the protagonist of a novel Kidder wrote after his year in Vietnam. Kidder threads sections of the novel, an over-romanticized war story that was more about the man he wished he were -- a victim of heroic proportions who fights the good fight and tries to keep his men from raping women -- than about the man he was, an officer who asked his detachment to wash their jeeps when Majors stopped by for inspection.

Initially, Kidder is caught between loyalty to his detachment of men and to his superiors. By the end, he sides with his men. But his decision is not through any brotherhood wrought out of shared trauma. Rather, Kidder’s book reveals a world in which the enlisted men, who play brutal pranks and insult officers in graphic terms, are so much more interesting than their superiors that it is only with his men that Kidder seems to feel alive.

Kidder’s emotional detachment is counteracted by Pancho, a Chicano, enlisted man who openly insults Kidder, scares him by putting a dead viper in his hooch (living quarters), and lights his latrine on fire. Pancho’s refrain, “what’re they gonna do….send you to Vietnam?” begins an annoying excuse for the way he mutters vague threats toward officers under his breath and brushes off his mistakes. In describing both his mistakes and his successes, Kidder’s writing emphasizes the pointlessness of his work in Vietnam.

But there is a more disturbing undertone to the way Kidder doesn’t feel the war. It comes up in little moments, when one good Colonel cuts through the Army-speak to clarify the way numbers of dead civilians are lumped in with numbers of dead Vietcong.  It reveals itself when Kidder admits, “I knew how close you could get to this war—I was never more than a few miles away from a village being bombarded or a platoon caught in an ambush—and yet have it remain an abstraction, dots on a map.”