From Tracy Kidder, confessions of a lying REMF

[struggle4progress]

September 4, 2005
BY MARK ATHITAKIS

Before he became a journalist, Tracy Kidder was a consummate liar. "I shot a man through the head," he wrote in a letter to his girlfriend from Vietnam, where he was stationed in 1968. "Little pieces of his brain and a great quantity of blood colored my gun and my clothes and my face." In fact, Kidder experienced nothing of the sort, nor did he experience the colorfully tragic scenes that filled Ivory Fields, an unpublished war novel he wrote after returning to the States. Writing to his family and friends back home, he described Vietnam in coy, cloaked terms that implied all sorts of peril and moral degradation that never existed. "For effect, the hint of a terrible war story was the best war story of all," he writes. <snip>

My Detachment, Kidder's slim, potent memoir about his Vietnam stint, is an unusual piece of 'Nam literature in that it speaks for the majority of U.S. soldiers who didn't see combat. (Infantrymen called them REMFs, "Rear Echelon Mother F-----s.") Because his orders were so relatively humdrum -- a lieutenant in the Army Security Agency, he helped triangulate radio signals to locate troop positions -- it has little to say about military tactics and practically nothing about actual fighting. And though Kidder's politics were shaped by the war, there's no anguished, transformative moment where he comes to feel betrayed by his country, the way so many such books do; he joined the ROTC as a Harvard student filled with romantic, Hemingwayesque notions about war and returned from South Vietnam slightly wiser, a bit more hardened, but not exactly shellshocked. <snip>

The culmination of his stint isn't a firefight but an inspection that reveals Kidder for the callow and anxious 20something he was. But while he's willing to confess to his arrogance and childishness -- as an undergraduate he once drunkenly declared "I'm the best goddamn writer at Harvard" and earned a fistfight for saying so -- unlike most memoirists he's not interested in marinating in self-pity. His tone throughout My Detachment is clean and journalistic without being dispassionate; he telegraphs his emotions without playing events for laughs, false drama, or the reader's sympathy. After all, he wasn't the only one in Vietnam who misrepresented the amount of danger he was in; he vividly recalls a fellow soldier blubbering about his little brother being killed in battle when in fact he had no siblings. And as he learned in talking to other veterans, making up stories was enormously common -- a defense against boredom, or a way to justify one's stint.

"I'm sure that many set out for Vietnam feeling confused or unhappy, as adolescents tend to do," Kidder writes. "And deep down many probably thought they would return with improved reasons for feeling that way." Kidder counts himself in their number; the turgid, overheated prose in the excerpts of Ivory Fields he includes showed that, even after the war, Kidder had much to learn as a person. (Not to mention as a writer -- the novel was rejected by 33 publishers). But with a few decades of distance, he has a firm grasp of the way youthful neediness can make you play movies about yourself in your head. Coming home in San Francisco wearing his uniform, he half hopes for contempt and opprobrium from protesters, but nobody notices him or his fellow soldiers at all. Passing the Berkeley campus, he fantasizes: "Maybe if we'd stopped and walked around that campus in our uniforms, we'd have found someone to spit on us."

http://www.suntimes.com/output/books/cst-books-kidder04.html