SOUTH BRISTOL, Maine (AP) -- It took decades for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder to come to terms with the painful and embarrassing memories of his year in Vietnam during the war.A 22-year-old Army lieutenant fresh out of ROTC, Kidder was placed in charge of an eight-man, rear-echelon radio research detachment that monitored the communications of enemy units to try to pinpoint their locations.The war became an abstraction for Kidder, who never saw combat and knew the enemy only as "dots on a map." Amid the tedium and boredom, he created an alternate reality, a romanticized vision that he revealed in letters to loved ones and in an unpublished novel about a young infantry lieutenant whose experience fit Kidder's Hemingway-inspired preconception of what war must be like.Kidder, now 59, is unsparing of himself in "My Detachment," a new, often humorous memoir that offers insights into the lives of the support troops who made up most of the 500,000-plus U.S. soldiers who were in Vietnam at the height of the buildup when the author served there in 1968-69.By far the shortest of Kidder's books, "My Detachment" took the longest to complete. He began writing it in 1985, only to set it aside for other projects because he was unable to deal with its "self-flagellating tone." Kidder said he needed to get more distance from the events he describes and prove to himself that he could live up to the psychological implications of the title."I was obviously not detached from it then," he said in an interview at his shingled summer home overlooking a tidal cove along the Maine coast. "Things about the book still made me wince, but once they're out in the open, those kinds of memories can no longer ambush you."The memories include fabricated stories about being covered with blood after he shot a man in the head or about how he befriended two Vietnamese boys who were figments of his imagination. Kidder included those accounts in letters to his parents and girlfriend that he wrote but never mailed.They also include an episode when he was on live in Singapore. The author recounts how the Asian woman he selected from a line of prostitutes awaiting GIs in a motel lobby rejected him, telling her madam, "he isn't good-looking.""My Detachment" contains brief excerpts from Kidder's unpublished novel, "Ivory Fields," whose principal character is Lt. Dempsey, Kidder's alter ego. Dempsey meets a glorious end when he is shot while protecting a Vietnamese woman who was gang-raped by his troops. Kidder now jokes about the overwrought prose in "Ivory Fields," a manuscript that was rejected by 33 publishers. Kidder destroyed all his copies and was "just horrified" when a friend stumbled upon one years later and returned it to him.In his current memoir about his year with the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, Kidder wanted to let it all hang out. "Everything that made me wince -- those are the stories I should make sure I told," he said.'Between fiction and nonfiction' Having no contact with the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong, Kidder's enemy came to be the career officers who tried to impose garrison-style inspections and discipline on his slacker unit at a time when he was struggling to win the respect, or at least the grudging tolerance, of his men.They, in turn, would ignore his orders, preferring to spend their time in their hootch, watching TV reruns of the World-War II drama "Combat" and drinking beer.Kidder changed the names of some of the book's key characters, with one of the "lifers" who gave him the hardest time appearing as Major Great. In retelling the events and conversations, he relied on a "very good memory" as well as on his novel and various letters that had been saved."I was much too callow to keep a journal," he said. "I tried to make this book absolutely true to my memories and I tried to make it as immediate an experience for the reader as I could. But it is a memoir."Suggesting that "memoir occupies an interesting place between fiction and nonfiction," Kidder said he didn't subject "My Detachment" to the same rigorous standards he applied to his other books.Among the better known are "Mountains Beyond Mountains," about a doctor's effort to bring health care to Haiti; "Among Schoolchildren," an account of a dedicated inner-city teacher; and his first and perhaps most famous, "The Soul of A New Machine," which traces the design of a computer, and won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1982. His subsequent books include "House," 1985; "Among Schoolchildren," 1989; "Old Friends," 1993; "Home Town,: 1999; and "Mountains Beyond Mountains," 2003. All were best sellers.Having also explored such topics as aging, home construction and life in his year-round hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts, he is now thinking about writing a book about politics and has been spending time in Washington, D.C.No one from Kidder's detachment has stayed in touch with him, but he crossed paths at a recent book signing with two former lieutenants whom he knew at division-level radio research.By and large, the book was an accurate portrayal of life in a rear-echelon unit, said Jerry Everett of Annapolis, Marylandd, although "I don't think I was as disaffected as Tracy was." John Shay of South Salem, New York, agreed that Kidder "captured a lot of the nonsense" surrounding life at brigade headquarters but said the author was a better soldier than he made himself out to be. "He was good at what he did, and that didn't come across in the book," Shay said.Kidder, who signed up for ROTC at Harvard University to avoid the uncertainties of the draft, quickly came to hate the Army. When he left the Army to start his writing career, he decided that he never again wanted to have a boss.Like most of his Boston-area friends, Kidder opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He attended the occasional peace demonstration after he returned home but was never actively involved in antiwar activities.He said he sees "unfortunate parallels" between Vietnam and the war in Iraq but finds no easy answers. He lambastes the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that paved the way for the Vietnam buildup as "a put-up job," but is even more cynical about flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq invasion.Like Vietnam, he said, there appears to be no obvious end in sight. "Vietnam was awfully complicated, I guess, but this one looks even more complicated."Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. 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