A Time for War

By Rob Kunzig

Google the phrase “The Forever War.” Your results will be one of two things—either Joe Haldeman’s 1974 science-fiction novel The Forever War, or an article on the “War on Terror.” While “The Forever War” is a fittingly hyperbolic headline for an anti-Bush rant, the majority of the readership won’t have a clue about the novel, or its newfound relevance.

I found The Forever War seven years ago and devoured it. It hasn’t left my bedside since. For an author, to be read and enjoyed at 23 the same way you were at 16 is the rarest of accomplishments—your book has grown along with your reader without becoming ridiculous. Frank Herbert’s Dune, another seminal sci-fi classic, fails this test miserably. Sorry, Mua’dib.

The Forever War begins in the late 20^th century, shortly after a deep-space probe contacts and is destroyed by an alien vessel. William Mandella, a PhD candidate in physics, is drafted into an elite military outfit trained to combat the threat in powered suits. He and his fellow conscripts smoke dope, train on Pluto, and wonder what the hell they’re getting into. Within a few chapters they’re standing on an alien world, fighting its inhabitants with handheld lasers—who, having no knowledge of mankind or its military, are cut to ribbons.

The next time, humanity isn’t so lucky—the aliens have hundreds of years under their belt, thanks to relativity and time dilation, and they all but destroy Mandella’s transport with a pair of guided missiles the size of pebbles. When adressing the surviving crew, the ship’s captain mentions the term “Future Shock”—the theory that technology outpaces its users. Humanity becomes incompatibility.

Hence the name Forever—due to dumb luck, Mandella survives battle after battle. Every time he returns to Earth, the spinning clock has obliterated another part of his life—loved ones die, world governments rise and fall; currencies, languages, everything changes. Eventually, the only place Mandella can call home is the steel hull of a starship. Thus the unwitting soldier becomes a Major. The final irony is rendered in the book’s climactic battle, in which a technology-zapping force field renders the handheld lasers and nuclear grenades useless, forcing Major Mandella’s soldiers to resort to swords and arrows.

Can you think of another war in which a technocratic nation finds its multi-million dollar war machines rendered useless? I can.

The parallels are obvious and easy. Though William Mandella was conscripted, you find him in many infantry officers who enlisted after college in a fit of idealism or duty: The same sense of disorientation, the same feeling of never knowing your enemy, the same alienation upon homecoming. For them, Iraq is alien terrain. For all the good done by 2,000 pound smart bombs, accurate to within a few meters, they might as well be using slingshots and pointy sticks.

The lesson isn’t in the parallels so much as in Mandella himself. By the end of the novel, he’s spent most of his natural life—and a few millennia of human history—fighting a war which, as he finds out, was initiated in error. Nothing is gained, and he’s lost everything, returning to a world in which nothing is familiar, not even his own species; humanity has evolved into an asexual, hive-mind organism called “Man.” Mandella isn’t a soldier, but now, stranded in an alien future without a war, he’s even less. He’s nothing.

John McCain said that US troops could spend up to “100 years” in Iraq. The hyperbole was rhetorical—he was referring to an American presence more like the Korean DMZ—but the shock and horror were real. Now, more than ever, is a time to read The Forever War and get to know William Mandella; and, by extension, understand the human consequences of war.