title: My Detachment: A Memoir
author:  Tracy Kidder 
description: The author of <i>The Soul of a New Machine</i> 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."  <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Copyright © 2011 by Barry Eisler. All rights reserved.
  
  
  
  
  
  The Detachment is a work of fiction. Certain incidents described in the book
  are based on actual recent and historical events, but other than well-known
  public figures referred to by name, all the characters are products of the
  author’s imagination and are not construed as real, and any resemblance to
  actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Neither the publisher
  nor author can be held liable for any third-party material referenced in the
  book.
  
  
  
  
  
  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or
  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
  recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.  
  
  
  Published by Thomas & Mercer  
  
  
  P.O. Box 400818  
  
  
  Las Vegas, NV 89140  
  
  
  ISBN: 978-1-61218-944-4
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  To novelists J