Apple pie, cold lemonade, people walking their dogs… I’m back. Once I couldn't wait to get home. Now I can't wait to leave. Too loud, too soft, too much. I can’t think. I have no patience. I won’t go back to flipping burgers. I hate the fat, little kids with their grubby hands. There are no other jobs. I can’t sleep. I shouldn’t. It's too quiet. This is not the place I left. I’ve never been here before. There is something I’m good at. One job for which I am uniquely trained …a soldier. The war continues. I'm going home.
You can’t go back. It’s never the same. Each war is different. Every war is the same. No honor. No glory. No heroism. Time does not heal all wounds, and no one knows it better than the reluctant conscript William Mandella, in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Mandella’s been in the war against the Taurans for over a thousand years. It’s the war that never ends.
Mankind has discovered the “collapsar.” Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and it pops out in some other part of the galaxy. Travel time between the two collapsars…exactly zero. Humanity spreads to the stars, but we aren’t alone. A fierce enemy opposes us. An enemy that is mysterious, inscrutable, unconquerable and very far away.
An army of foot soldiers must guard these portal planets and protect the human race. The novel follows Mandella, a physicist drafted by United Nations Exploratory Force (UNEF) through the Elite Conscription Act. While in space, and jumping from portal to portal, he ages only months while decades pass on Earth. In the centuries that follow, sweeping changes occur—the population explodes, language and technology evolve, society changes. It’s not the Earth he knew. It’s not the Earth he left. Is it even worth fighting for? Is the war meaningless?
First published in 1974, this novel was thought to be too controversial and almost was not printed. It was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin’s Press decided to take a chance on it. It went on to win both the Nebula for best science fiction novel in 1975 and the Hugo Award for best novel in 1976. The Forever War, however, is not just a science fiction novel about Vietnam, but a novel about war, and soldiers, and why we think we need them.
Joe Haldeman is a veteran of the Vietnam War, and The Forever War is as much about the war as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It’s a novel about the tedium and futility of war, the brutality of combat. It’s a realistic look at the military from the perspective of the fighting man, and about the isolation a soldier feels when returning home…
Forever war? Or Forever Peace? Drop me an email at from_my_shelf@yahoo.com and let me know. Miss a past column? Visit the archives at http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com This Memorial Day weekend enjoy your time off, but remember those veterans who died in service to their country.
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