The Forever War

by Joe Haldeman

‘Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.’ The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.

‘Most governments encourage homosexuality — the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual countries — they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.’

I once filled out a medical history form and put "homosexuality" in the blank for Birth Control.

I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I’d never had to cope with such an abundance of them.

The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

To buy something you punched in the vendor’s credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.

I use my iPhone coded to my thumbprint to buy everything.

‘And as far as being a leader, you do have a certain potential. But it would be along the lines of a teacher or a minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you’re right, you’ll make one hell of a bad officer unless you shape up.’

‘Wait. You mean nobody … everybody in my company is homosexual? But me?’ ‘William, everybody on Earth is homosexual. Except for a thousand or so; veterans and incurables.’

Pardise!

But not one of the boys appealed to me. How they’d look after another year, I wasn’t sure.

A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

For obvious reasons, no weapons were allowed in the living quarters. The way these people were trained, even a fistfight could be a duel to the death, and tempers were short.

A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive, but it wouldn’t do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.

For several hours nothing happened. We got about as bored as anyone could, waiting to die.

Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.