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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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My Detachment
by Tracy Kidder |
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Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Diffident Tracy Kidder is an outstanding writer
whose latest book, My
Detachment, provides an introspective, shy, reluctant and honest
recollection of the author’s service in I had already been issued
my .45 and other battle gear. Around noon on a hot day in July, glad that I
would finally have something to do, I strapped on my gun belt, donned my
camouflage steel helmet and my flak jacket, tossed my electric fan, which had
at last arrived from home, and my duffel into a jeep, and was driven away
from Chu Lai. We went out the base camp’s main gate
and turned south on Highway To my disappointment and
relief, the drive was short, only ten or fifteen minutes. Just beyond the
southern edge of the airfield, the jeep turned right and passed through a
gate in barbed wire, a wooden arch with a sign affixed,
a picture of a bayonet surrounded by flames, the emblem of the 198th Light
Infantry Brigade. Spotting an officer, the black MP on guard came smartly to attention
and raised his right fist. It looked like a crisply executed version of the
black power salute. I wondered, Why is that permitted?
I felt a momentary impulse to return it, but I replied in the usual way, my
opened right hand snapping up to my right eyebrow. Inside Landing Zone
Bayonet, the streets were made of oiled dirt. The camp wasn’t huge; it looked
as though I could walk its barbed-wired and bunkered perimeter in about
fifteen minutes. It was a patch of mostly denuded, dusty, ocher-colored ground,
a fortified American shantytown. To the west, on the inland side, those
thickly wooded hills hovered above us, green and forbidding. To the east, the
sandy coastal plain stretched out toward the sea. The enlisted driver left me
standing in the sun in the midst of my detachment. I looked around. I was
going to spend a long time in this place. If I close my eyes, I can see it
now, as clearly as the bedroom of my childhood. To my right was a row of
four one-story hootches, unpainted, walled with
screen and plywood, roofed with corrugated metal anchored down by sandbags.
In front of me was a somewhat larger wooden building, the operations hootch. A tall fence of concertina wire surrounded it,
and above the doorway in the wire a sign read RESTRICTED AREA KEEP OUT. A
latrine and outdoor shower lay over beyond the hootches,
beside a small, steep wooded hill with antennas sprouting from the top. There was nobody in sight.
I stood beside a garbage pail overflowing with beer cans and empty C-ration
containers at the near corner of a hootch. I lit a
cigarette. I bit at a fingernail, that old habit flourishing again. In a
moment, a young man came out of the operations building and turned toward the
enlisted hootches, glancing at me. He wore a
T-shirt and no helmet. It looked as though he hadn’t shaved. I thought I must
look preposterous to him, standing there sweating under my steel pot and flak
jacket. “Excuse me. Where can I
find Lieutenant Pease?” “I don’t know. He’s
probably in his hootch.” The soldier didn’t even
call me sir. He pointed left, downhill,
at another little metal-roofed house, set apart from all the others, in a
patch of weeds, the quarters of the commander of the detachment, soon to be
mine. I found Lieutenant Pease inside taking a nap. He was a burly, handsome
black man in his early twenties. I woke him up, but he didn’t seem to mind.
One was bound to feel glad at the sight of one’s replacement. He told me to
look around the detachment. He said I should meet the detachment’s sergeant,
Sergeant Spikes. But first I should take off that flak jacket. I took off my fatigue shirt
as well. I was wearing just a T-shirt when I went looking for Sergeant
Spikes, so he had no way of knowing my rank. I heard voices from one of the hootches. I knocked. Through the screen door, I saw a
bunch of men playing cards. One of them came to the door, beer can in hand. “Is Sergeant Spikes
around?” I asked. “Yup’ he said. “What the
fuck do you want?” “I’m the new lieutenant” I
said. He stood a little
straighter and smiled—wryly, I thought, and this worried me. “Sorry about
that, sir,” he said. Lieutenant Pease knew how
to look elegant in uniform, an enviable knack to me. At the briefing the next
morning, when Pease stood up, Colonel Mahoney, the brigade commander, the local
eminence, smiled and said, “Good morning, Stan.” Making just the slightest
bow, Lieutenant Pease brought his heels together. He could have been a Pease said he already had a
place in business school. I think he couldn’t wait to leave the Army. Once, I
began to repeat to him some of the company commander’s complaints about him.
His expression didn’t change at all. He said something like “Let’s get some
of that Officers Club’ as if he hadn’t heard. I could imagine our company
commander chewing him out, saying, “Dammit, Pease,
you get those men cleaned up~’ Pease would have said, “Yes, sir. Outstanding’
and then done nothing at all. From him, I felt polite wariness. When I
confided my views about the war, he readily agreed. Oh, yeah, it was wrong.
It was a bad war. But his mind seemed to be elsewhere. He didn’t talk much to
the men either. And as far as I could see, he didn’t do anything except
deliver the colonel’s morning briefing. Afterward he’d go to his hootch and relax. A rumpled, intellectual
specialist fifth class, a spec. 5 named Rosenthal, prepared the briefing for
him. Spikes minded the men, more or less. The day after I arrived, Lieutenant
Pease said sternly, “Sergeant Spikes, let’s get this trash cleaned up~’
Spikes looked startled. I got the feeling that he hadn’t heard an order from
Pease in months. You could say my predecessor was adept at delegating
authority, the only difficulty being that in departments such as group
hygiene and appearance, no one at the detachment felt like accepting it, and
Sergeant Spikes, I imagined, didn’t see much point in enforcing policies
that his lieutenant didn’t care about. I don’t think Pease cared about
anything by now except getting out of there. He showed me around the
base camp, introduced me to my men and to Colonel Mahoney’s staff, took me
out drinking at a nearby fighter pilots’ club—where he stayed unobtrusively
sober—and then, after five days, turned the detachment over to me. However,
he didn’t leave. He still had a week and a half in country, and that company
commander back in Chu Lai, the one who had told me
I needed only to ask for his help, decided to have Pease spend his last days
in country with me. I began to think the commander hated Pease, maybe because
he was black. All the men in the detachment were Caucasian, but they clearly
liked their old lieutenant. He didn’t mind if they went without haircuts or
grew long, drooping Fu Manchu—style extensions to their mustaches. I didn’t
mind either, in theory. Why should I care if some of the men didn’t shave
some mornings or the jeep needed paint? I hadn’t come here to harass troops.
I opposed this war. But I wanted to do a good job. I didn’t want to feel that
I hated being a soldier only because I couldn’t be a good one. Besides, almost from the
moment I took over, my superiors back at Chu Lai
began making demands on me that they’d never managed to make effectively on
Pease. And it didn’t help having Pease languish at my detachment, a constant
reminder to my men of how easygoing a lieutenant could be. I was working in the
operations hootch when I heard commotion outside.
Pease had retired a few days ago—literally retired, to the hootch that we shared (“Gonna
get some of that sleep”) and to the pilots’ bar most evenings. I came
outside. A first lieutenant from company headquarters stood by the porch in
front of the building. One of my men stood at attention before him, with his
heels locked. “Look at your uniform, soldier! You haven’t shined your boots!
You haven’t even shaved! When the hell did you last get a haircut?” Out in
the parking area, the second lieutenant who ran the company’s motor pool was
snarling at Sergeant Spikes. “Look at this garbage! Look at the dirt on these
vehicles! You better get your defecation together!” I couldn’t let them do
this. I pretended to a stronger passion than I felt as I called the first
lieutenant aside and said, holding my hands up and shaking them, as if they
wanted a neck to choke, that I was in charge here, that I would have no
authority over my men if he didn’t leave these problems to me, and that I
couldn’t do anything about those problems until he got Lieutenant Pease out
of there. “You’ve got to get him out of
here!” “All right’ the first
lieutenant said. “Just trying to help you out.” He and the motor pooi lieutenant rode away, back to Chu
Lai. I regretted those remarks
I’d made about Lieutenant Pease. One of my men had been standing nearby and
overheard, and I knew he told the others, and I knew they liked their old
lieutenant’s style of command too much not to tell him. And anyway, what I’d
said didn’t do any good. The company commander just didn’t want Pease around
his headquarters, I guessed, and Pease stayed on, right up until a few days
before his date of estimated return from overseas, his DEROS. I pretended to
be glad he was around, and he pretended to believe me. When at last I watched
him swing his duffel bag into the jeep, then wave goodbye to a couple of
drowsy-looking men who’d gotten up to see him off, my spirits drooped. They
always did thereafter when someone departed for home and left me there. But
this time I also felt nervous. Suddenly, I knew I shouldn’t have been in a
hurry to be alone with my men. Rosenthal was teaching me
my technical job, and I knew he liked me. But some of the others didn’t like
him. Maybe he was as lonely as I was. We had some long bull sessions late at
night after preparing the colonel’s briefing. Large and rather slovenly,
belly folded over his belt, Rosenthal would stroke his mustache and begin,
“But by the same token. . . .“ I pretended to listen attentively when
he told me once again about dropping his Army-issue sunglasses several
stories onto pavement and finding them unbroken. “You can criticize these
Army glasses, Lieutenant, but I’ll tell you a little story.
.
. .“ He seemed older than
I somehow, though he wasn’t. But almost all my men seemed older,
they’d all been in country so much longer. I seemed to be hitting it
off all right with Sergeant Spikes, too, in a more distant way. “We have to
make some changes’ I told him. “I’m not saying anything against Lieutenant
Pease. I know you liked him and all.” “Some did’ Spikes said. I realized I’d suspected
that my sergeant disliked Pease, maybe from little movements in his face when
Pease had spoken to him. I was glad. I told Spikes I wanted him
to draw up duty rosters, for trash and latrines and for vehicle maintenance. “Yessir’
he said. He added, “It’s a good idea.” But, I went on, he should leave Rosenthal off half the rosters. Rosenthal himself may have
suggested this. It seemed like a good idea, to give him more time to work on
our primary mission. Spikes said, “Yessir.” But later on I would realize he had stared at me
a moment too long when I gave this order. That night I decided to
join the rest of my men in the hootch where they
did their drinking. They were laughing when I came in, and they didn’t stop
right away, but laughter gradually petered out. I was surrounded by
bare-chested teenagers, faces reddened with sun and liquor, the sheen of
sweat on everyone gleaming under a few bare lightbulbs.
A couple of them were staggering drunk. I sidled up to Spikes and chatted
with him for a time. I could feel the others eyeing me. I left their hootch smiling and went down the hill to my own private hootch, in order to think. Eventually, we’d get to know
one another. Tomorrow would be better. But I was having a hard time acting
naturally. Everywhere I went around the detachment, I felt as if I was being
studied. There was a man the others
called Pancho, and he stared at me openly, with his
head cocked to one side, as if I were a curious variation of the species
lieutenant. He was short and smooth-skinned and slightly round in the middle,
not fat at all but round in the belly like a baby. He had jet-black hair,
always longer than anyone else’s. I noticed that right away, but something
had kept me from mentioning haircuts to him during those first days of my
command. I couldn’t see his eyes because he wore sunglasses, day and night, it
seemed. He’d look me over, then amble away, dragging
his heels, a compact, graceful package, brushing his sleek hair off his
forehead. Sometimes I’d hear him laughing softly to himself. On a day during that first
week after Pease had left, I woke up feeling tired and ornery, and then, on
the way back from briefing the colonel, I noticed that the jeep was almost
out of gas. The men seemed to use the thing whenever they wanted, heading off
to a place they called “the ville’ and it seemed to
me they ought to be grateful that I let them use it, or at least considerate
enough to fill up the tank. The time had come to draw some lines. When I got
back to the detachment, some of them still hadn’t gotten up, and a couple were wandering back from the shitter
in their underwear and Ho Chi Minh sandals. “I want some men to come
with me and fuel up this jeep, goddammit’ I said
through the screen door of one of their hootches.
Eventually, a couple of them came out and climbed aboard. They seemed sullen
to me, though they may have just been sleepy. I hadn’t been to the fuel depot
before, but when we got there, I assumed command. The brigade’s fuel was
stored in huge black plastic bladders, as big around as backyard swimming
pools. I saw a hose connected to one, and I grabbed it and stuck the nozzle
in the jeep’s fuel tank, turning back to glare at the men. They both looked startled. I
thought, That’s good.
I’ve made my point. “Lieutenant’ one of them
said. “I think you got the wrong hose. That’s diesel fuel.” He got out and found the
proper hose. I stood aside. “God, I hope I didn’t wreck it.” The jeep sputtered a little
on the way back to the detachment. A week in command and already I had
wrecked the jeep. “What do you guys think? Think it’ll be all right?” “Yeah, no biggie,
Lieutenant.” “Jesus’ I said, when we’d
dismounted. “You really think it’ll be all right?” “Don’t worry about it,
Lieutenant,” one of them said. As he turned away I saw the flash of his
teeth, a piece of a grin he hadn’t meant me to see. When I passed by their hootch that night, I heard what seemed like more laughter
than usual from inside. Kidder uses
the many meanings of detachment throughout this book to describe his
experience and his psychological state. I recommend My
Detachment to any reader who appreciates fine writing. Steve Hopkins,
November 21, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/My
Detachment.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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