The Forever War

by Joe Haldeman

Twenty-five years later, most young readers don’t even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that’s OK. It’s about Vietnam because that’s the war the author was in. But it’s mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.

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.

But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavering bloodthirsty warrior.

‘Life,’ she said plaintively, ‘life is …’ ‘Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose.

The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.