The Forever War

“The suit was fairly comfortable, but it gave you the odd feeling of simultaneously being a marionette and puppeteer.” 

Mandella and his platoon practice maneuvering in their armored suits for the first time on Charon. The suits both manipulate the wearer and give them control, an apt metaphor for a military life. Soldiers of a certain rank—sergeant, captain, major—have a degree of autonomy, particularly in the far reaches of outer space, including the to kill as they see fit. On Mandella’s first mission, his platoon slaughters a herd of creatures they call “teddy bears” for no other reason than they look strange. At the same time, the bureaucracy controls nearly every aspect of the soldiers’ life: their assignment, the duration of their enlistment, even their recovery time after an injury. The soldiers’ personal agency and their lack thereof is an odd dichotomy indeed. 

“I am glad you’re taking good care of yourselves, because each of you represents an investment of over a million dollars and one-fourth of a human life.” 

Mandella’s commanding officer, Captain Stott, perfectly sums up the military’s attitude toward its foot soldiers: worth a lot in terms of financial investment and not so much in terms of intrinsic life value. Stott’s comment speaks volumes about the military’s priorities. With a seemingly endless supply of cash, it can buy all the lasers, armored suits, and spaceships it wants, but those resources are simply flung into battle with little regard for the soldiers’ lives. It also seems an odd and unwise calculus to invest such huge sums of money with so little potential for return except for “little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars” (9). 

“Most of the deaders were people I didn’t know all that well. But they all hurt. And they seemed to make us more scared rather than more cautious.” 

As training continues and casualties mount, Mandella begins to take stock of the situation. Each dead soldier narrows the odds of his own death. This realization is sobering, but Cortez and Stott seem resigned to the death of their charges. Their admonishments to use death as an incentive to be careful ring empty. Fear is the logical result of such an environment, a result more likely, not less, to beget more death. 

“The only area big enough to sleep all of us was the dining hall; they draped a few bedsheets here and there for privacy, then unleashed Stargate’s eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground.” 

The night before their first combat mission, an officially sanctioned orgy takes place aboard the Earth’s Hope. Haldeman’s future army is a potential minefield of sexual assault, something not unfamiliar to integrated military forces today. His casual tone when describing the scene, however, reflects outdated and chauvinistic attitudes toward sex and women: “sex-starved” men are “unleashed” on “compliant” women, and this is all by military decree. Ironically, despite the sexism inherent in scenes like this, Haldeman’s army is also a fully integrated force in which women are just as likely as men to hold command positions. 

“I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality…that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat.” 

Mandella’s first kill profoundly unsettles him. Not only does the sight of a dead Tauran sicken him, but also, unlike in basic training, he must own this kill. Taking the moral responsibility for terminating another life is something no training can prepare him for. In time, however, killing becomes just a part of the job. The human capacity for adaptation inures him to the most obscene and violent part of his duty, and this hardening of Mandella’s soul illustrates how otherwise good men and women can be corrupted by the horrors of war. 

“We stopped for the ‘night’—actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours—atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I had to remind myself—we were.” 

In their search for the Tauran base, Mandella has a realization, one that eludes many contemporary politicians and military leaders: Countries—or planets—are not untamed spaces to be conquered or exploited, and colonizers are more likely to be intruders than legal claimants to the territory. Many believe the United States saw Vietnam as a puppet to be controlled for its own purposes rather than an independent country on whose soil American soldiers were the “aliens.”

“I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day.” 

Mandella’s dream exemplifies the feeling of manipulation as a soldier deployed in combat. As a draftee, he is ever at the mercy of a capricious military that values objectives and victories over human life. While the United States currently has an all-volunteer military, the draft was still the law during the Vietnam War, and so Haldeman, drafted into service with no choice, may have felt very much like Mandella’s clumsy machine controlled by a small but insidious madman.

“First thing we’ll hit is this row of huts, probably billets or bunkers, but who the hell knows…” 

The lack of logistical information doesn’t stop Cortez from ordering a full-scale assault on the Tauran base regardless of the importance of the targets. His capricious, destroy-everything-in-sight attitude sums up Haldeman’s estimation of military strategy, one witnessed during the carpet bombing and deforestation of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The US aerial campaign destroyed large swaths of the countryside—jungles, farms, villages—with such overwhelming force that it’s worth speculating whether the generals in charge had any clearer objective in mind other than random destruction. 

“But in spite of myself, I felt happy, euphoric, finally getting the chance to kill some of those villainous baby-eaters. Knowing it was soyashit.”

Despite the dangers of a live firefight—and even though he knows he’s being consciously manipulated—Mandella feels exhilarated, the adrenaline of combat and the post-hypnotic suggestion overcoming any potential fear. The bloodlust is so powerful and primal, even a highly educated physicist cannot resist it. A similar feeling must have overwhelmed the US Army’s Charlie Company as it killed more than 500 Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of My Lai, none of whom were “males of fighting age. They only found villagers eating breakfast” (Mintz, S. & McNeil, S. “Explorations, The Vietnam War as History.” Digital History, 2018, www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/vietnam/vietnam_menu.cfm. Accessed 27 Aug. 2021). The massacre was so brutal that Americans were forced to confront a terrible reality—the “good guys,” under the pressures of an ill-defined and immoral war, were just as susceptible to committing atrocities as any Nazi or Imperial Japanese soldier. 

“Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren’t all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow men, without any hypnotic conditioning.”

Mandella’s ruminations about humanity’s basic nature tend toward the wicked and corrupt. After slaughtering defenseless Taurans in a frenzy of rage, he assuages his own guilt by realizing that he was not in control of his own mind and that humans have been doing much the same on their own for millennia. His reflections suggest that Cortez’s post-hypnotic suggestion may not have been necessary and that humanity’s natural tendency to violence may have been enough to trigger the slaughter.

“In the company as a whole (excuse me, the ‘strike force’), we had twenty replacements for the nineteen people we lost from the Aleph raid: one amputation, four deaders, fourteen psychotics.”

Interestingly, the biggest cause of casualty among Mandella’s company is not physical injury or death but psychological trauma. While Haldeman never uses the terms post-traumatic stress disorder or “battle fatigue,” he alludes to the severe toll the stress of battle can take on the average soldier. The most striking case is Private Graubard, whose aggression, intensified by the pressures of war, escalates into an assassination attempt against Major Mandella.

“Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century.”

After a Tauran projectile hits the Anniversary and destroys one of the acceleration bays, Mandella’s commanding officer lectures the troops about the complexities and subtleties of warfare. Not only must leaders consider victories and defeats, but they must also consider political pressures, economic factors, and access to enemy information. While the commander never mentions technological advancements, the ability to kill greater numbers with greater efficiency also poses one of the most difficult challenges to any military leader, especially when considering the morality involved. The days of generals leading troops headlong into the fray without consequences are long gone, at least in Mandella’s time. 

“Some of the new people we’d picked up after Aleph used ‘tha, ther, thim’ instead of ‘he, his, him’ for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal.” 

One of the recurring themes of The Forever War is the challenge of navigating changing social norms. In addition to the many changes on Earth—overpopulation, food shortages, marauding gangs terrorizing the population—Mandella notes a curious linguistic adaptation, one that might be a mere footnote in the novel were it not so prescient. In the current environment of gender fluidity and the use of “they, their, them” for those who identify as gender non-binary, Haldeman’s observation touches on the future social zeitgeist in a way unique to the best science fiction.

“Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity.”

Although The Forever War is about war’s effect on one man in particular, Haldeman occasionally steps outside the narrative and, from the perspective of his main character, muses on the more general nature of war and humanity. In this case, he notes some of the positive aspects of war. Indeed, the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s arose alongside protests for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, and the 2013 Supreme Court ruling acknowledging the right to gay marriage are all testaments that such movements require a catalyst—an unpopular war, for example—to spark mainstream acceptance. 

“But this war…the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares.” 

A frequent criticism of America’s all-volunteer military is that the responsibility and grief of war are borne by only a few, leaving the rest emotionally and psychologically disconnected. In the past, Haldeman observes, common cause—augmented by political propaganda—created a united home front. The Taurans, however, are so removed from the average human’s awareness that they do not even make a convenient propaganda target. The war, fought thousands of light years away, barely registers on Earth’s radar.

“They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.” 

Haldeman points out an insidious paradox of modern warfare: As destructive as it is, it is intricately tied to economic interests. Many have argued that World War II was crucial in pulling the United States out of the Great Depression. With so many jobs and budget resources connected to military spending, the interdependence of war and economy is difficult to avoid. 

“That bothered me, to be confronted with a pile of human hamburger and mainly notice the flies and ants and smell. Death is 

so much neater in space.” 

Mandella has become so numb to death that when he sees the bodies of the “jumpers,” he is more disturbed by the swarming insects than by the loss of life. Granted, Mandella and the Potters acted in self-defense, but the tragedy of a society that necessitates killing for food should give anyone pause. Mandella is self-aware enough to recognize his own nonchalance in the face of death. 

“‘The guarantee. Well, were given our assignment of choice. Nobody guaranteed we’d have the assignment for more than an hour.’

‘It’s so dirty.’

I shrugged. ‘It’s so army.’” 

Haldeman’s fictional army—presumably based on his actual military experience—is a manipulative bureaucracy that seeks only bodies for sacrifice. After Mandella and Margay re-enlist, assuming they will be assigned non-combat duties (as promised), their orders are soon changed, sending them back to the front. While Margay is angry at the deception, Mandella seems more resigned, long ago having accepted that the army is duplicitous and will lie to get what it needs.

“Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing.” 

As the army doctors perform surgery on the soldiers injured in a crash, Mandella is struck by the similarity between repairing a body and repairing a machine. This emotional disconnection, imagining human beings as simply networks of tubes, armature, and liquids, helps ease the pain of what he’s really seeing. Moments later, however, he sees through his own self-deception, noting that “the machines would cry out in their sleep” (167). 

“Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.” 

The threat of living on borrowed time creates in Mandella and Margay an almost wild abandon to live life to its fullest. On a six-month leave on the resort planet Heaven, they explore hostile terrain, hunt a massive marine predator, and spend lavishly on the floating resort of Skye. Assuming their deaths are imminent, they decide that sharing love and adventure may deter death, at least for a short time.

“Earth was much more racially homogenous than it had been in my century. Most of them looked vaguely Polynesian. Only two of them, Kayibanda and Lin, seemed pure representatives of racial types. I wondered whether the others gave them a hard time.” 

Haldeman’s future Earth imagines a blending of the races—whether intentionally or by happenstance—both as a genetic inevitability and as a mechanism for creating a better soldier. The author suggests that, even after centuries of strife, humanity is still unable to tolerate racial differences and the only way to ensure harmony is to eradicate all differences.

“So much of my ‘normal’ behavior was based on a complex unspoken code of sexual etiquette. Was I supposed to treat the men like women, and vice versa? Or treat everybody like brothers and sisters? It was all very confusing.” 

The changing sexual norms are particularly difficult for Mandella to decipher. In trying to make sense of it all, he falls back on outdated stereotypes: Gay men wear makeup and are effeminate. He associates sexual preference with gender in a highly reductive, binary way. He is, however, a bit of a dinosaur in this new world. Most of the population, including his mother, is perfectly at ease with the new norms, but Mandella, whose sensibilities are trapped in the past from frequent collapsar jumps, struggles to accept them. 

“One kind of gentleman would have helped her get undressed and then made a quiet exit. Another kind of gentleman might have bolted for the door. Being neither kind, I closed in for the kill.” 

When Dr. Alsever gets drunk on Private Rudkoski’s homemade alcohol, Mandella takes advantage of her impaired condition. It’s unclear whether Mandella sees his sexual assault as a transgression or as just an act of normal male behavior (and therefore forgivable). His use of the word “kill,” however, suggests a predatory quality to his actions and an argument for changing not only male behavior but the language used to describe it.