The Forever War

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the MWI Book Club, a podcast from the Modern War Institute at West Point. I'm John Amble. [00:00:11] Speaker B: And I'm Theo Lipsky. [00:00:13] Speaker A: And the MWI Book Club is where we talk about books and the profession of arms. [00:00:17] Speaker B: Each episode features one book, fiction or nonfiction, new or old bestseller or cult classic. And we give it a close read to find lessons about war, about leadership, and about character. [00:00:31] Speaker A: On this episode, the Forever War by Joe Haldeman. [00:00:36] Speaker B: Welcome back to the MWI Book Club, a podcast from the Modern War Institute at West Point. This podcast is predicated on the idea that the army that reads is the army better prepared to fight and to win wars. My name is Theo Lipski and my co host is John Amble. You each month we read one book that bears on soldiering and we invite you to join us as we talk about that book. So John, what book are we talking about today? [00:01:03] Speaker A: Theo, Today we are talking about the Forever War, a 1974 science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman. [00:01:09] Speaker B: What can you tell us about Joe Haldeman? [00:01:11] Speaker A: So Haldeman was a Vietnam veteran. He had a scientific, educational background, I believe in physics and astronomy. He, he, I believe, said he wanted to originally be an astronaut. He attempted to register as a conscientious objector, was drafted into the army and fought as a combat engineer in Vietnam. This book was his second novel, but it was his first major successful one. It was actually written for, written as his thesis for a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Iowa Writers Workshop, which is the graduate level fine arts program at the University of Iowa. [00:01:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a legendary workshop, I think, responsible for a lot of, a lot of great writers. [00:01:52] Speaker A: It is legendary. I mentioned that he was a Vietnam vet and I think knowing that is important because, you know, the book is clearly a commentary on that war. It's wrapped up in this imagined plot of interstellar war against an alien race. But it is a commentary on, on that war. I also think it's a, it's an effort to kind of reconcile his thoughts and feelings about his own service in that war. So he's an interesting figure, an interesting author, and wrote a phenomenal novel that [00:02:18] Speaker B: we're going to talk about and an award winning novel that I recall from the reading I was doing around it for this episode. It's the Nebula Award winner. It's a Hugo Award winner. [00:02:28] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:02:30] Speaker B: Why did you pick it specifically? I mean, I have respect for science fiction. I definitely consume it sort of ambiently in television and streaming services and in movie theaters. But I'm not a science fiction reader, are you? [00:02:42] Speaker A: I am. I was not always. And I was a. Pretty much. I was a late convert to the idea that there's, you know, professional value in reading science fiction, that it is a useful source of sort of professional development reading. Once I was convinced of that, this was not the first sci fi book that, that I read. I believe the first one was Ender's Game. There are other famous ones in the sort of canon of military science fiction that, that sometimes pop up on. On professional reading. This Ender's Game. Starship Troopers. [00:03:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:14] Speaker A: This one, however, the Forever War. I think it just lends itself to such a rich discussion that, that ultimately the decision on which science fiction novel we were going to tackle first was a pretty easy one. [00:03:25] Speaker B: And frankly, I don't think I'd touched a science fiction book since I read Ender's Game, which I recall being absolutely engrossing. But for whatever reason, I didn't continue to read it. I'm really glad that we picked this because I think I was due for a return to the genre and the Forever War is a hell of a way to do it. So I thought perhaps it'd be useful before we dive into the book itself and we'll talk about how we're going to split up the episode here in a second. John, for you, just to give us a top line summary. [00:03:53] Speaker A: Yeah, this is sort of the executive summary of the book. So Haldman published the forever war in 1974, and the plot centers on a character named William Mandela. Mandela is fresh off of completing a degree in physics. He is drafted into something called the United Nations Exploratory Force, which is this worldwide military that is engaged in a space war against an alien species that they call the Torrens. He's drafted under something called the Elite Conscription act, which is interesting. This essentially aimed to fill the force with the best and the brightest, smart, educated. I believe that it was a minimum IQ of. Of 150. The book tells the story of that war through the eyes of Mandela. First as a private, later as a sergeant. And then there's this important interlude where his service is complete and he returns to Earth, but he rejoins the military for various reasons that we will. That we will discuss. And. And the story continues as he's commissioned as an officer, first as a lieutenant, and finally it comes to a close with him as a major in command of a strike force. Now, importantly, there's an element of time dilation in this novel because of the way that human forces travel through Space. So his experience of the war is something like, I don't know, 20 or 30 years or more. It actually lasts over a thousand years in Earth time. [00:05:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that time dilation wherein because of the space travel, the protagonist, this guy William Mandela, experiences a thousand earth years in about 20 years from his perspective, allows Joe Haldeman, the author of the book, to do some cool things. He's able to tell what is at once this thousand year space epic and a regular Joe's war story at the same time in the same decently thin volume. This is not a long book, but let's start at the, the beginning. Before we get into the overarching themes of the time dilation on this episode, just for those listening along, we'll, we'll split the book into three parts so that we'll first talk about when William goes to war. Then we'll talk about as the second part, his break in service. And then we'll talk the third and final part about his return to service and his experience in command. So John, why don't you tell us about part one. William's entry into the war and his first exposure to both training and to and to combat. [00:06:13] Speaker A: So part one is really the story of the transition from civilian to soldier to war fighting soldier. The book opens with a training scene. I don't know if you remember. They're sitting in a classroom listening to a lesson called eight ways to kill a Human Right men. Mandela and other privates are, are learning to be these United nations exploratory force soldiers. As they train. We're sort of given details about the war against the Torrens, which evidently began four years prior when a human ship in space was attacked. We're also given some context about, you know, what humans are doing in space. In short, it's about colonization. Space space colonization. And we learn about how the, how the collapse are jump, which is this thing that enable or that allows them to, you know, travel at a very high speed toward what are called collapse hours and emerge from a different collapse are, you know, light years away. Effectively we learned how that enables long distance space travel to sort of make the plot of this interstellar war work. Now the rest of this first part really sees Mandela complete his training on Earth first and then continue it on another planet. And then we see the soldiers first exposure to non human species. They call them teddy bears, another an alien species. And ultimately their first combat engagement against the Torrens. Now I mentioned that this part one is, is really, it tells a story of a transition from civilian to Soldier. And I think it's one that anybody, any reader, any uniformed military reader, somebody who spent time in the military, they'll recognize this. Granted, it's a sci fi novel. They're preparing for war against an alien race. That's something none of us have ever experienced, but we have all experienced that transition. The opening chapters offer this glimpse of Mandela, who I think, I don't know if you agree with this, but I read it as Mandela. You're, you're seeing it through his eyes. He is on the inside still a civilian. His mentality is that of a civilian, even while on the outside he's wearing the uniform and he looks the part of a soldier and this carries him through where his mentality really changes to that of a soldier as well. It's not just learning the, you know, the equipment and tactics and how to do the things of a soldier, but it's reframing his mindset a little bit. It's not unlike, you know, the experience that I had. I commissioned through Officer Canada School, which meant I went to basic training. And it's not unlike the 10 weeks that I spent in a basic training platoon, kind of becoming a different version of me, becoming the soldier version of me. I don't know if you had a similar experience when you, when you joined the army. [00:09:00] Speaker B: Certainly, you know, I commission into the army through West Point. So my initial entry training was a little bit different. It was the cadet variant. But there are certain universal themes. Like you said, that notion that the individual is broken down and then built back up. It's clever the way the author, Joe Haldeman, can take us into a totally exotic context like a science fiction United nations space exploratory force, and still make clear to us that certain experiences are eternal. At the very outset, Mandela doesn't consider himself a soldier. He wants to be a physicist. He studied physics and he regards the military with a bemused, skeptical, intelligent contrarian's eye. But very soon, especially, I think once they end up on a foreign planet during their final trading exercises, and that he experiences real danger alongside his team and they have to overcome that danger, which we can talk about here. In a second, you see the conversion [00:09:58] Speaker A: completed and again on its surface, there should be little that connects the experience of this fictional individual preparing for interstellar war and that of, you know, any U.S. army member. But you know, they talk about collapse stars and portal planets and Torrens, but they also talk about, you know, there's this battle scarred first sergeant, there's difficult terrain, there's, you Know, in the training sessions, the use of fear to sort of force compliance. There are things that just really resonated with me and again, brought me back to years ago in basic training. And you and I were talking about it recently when we were kind of scoping out this episode. And I think I told you that, you know, I remember those first days sleeping in an open barracks bay in basic training, questioning my decision. I had come into the army fully committed. I knew it's what I wanted to do. But it's so different that it forces you to kind of reconcile. This environment is so different from my sort of civilian mentality. And by the end of it, everything shifted. Um, I stopped thinking in terms of, hey, today's, you know, you know, Friday, August 28th. And I thought in terms of, hey, today's day four of, of week eight. It was all about this 10 week cycle. And, you know, you come in. I left basic training looking at my platoon mates as fellow soldiers. We all wore the same uniform, we all had the same haircut. And it's not until kind of later when you start see those people in civilian clothes again that you realize how much diversity there is and what the sort of. What the purpose of initial entry training is to bring this diverse body of people who have unique experiences, unique backgrounds, unique views, unique ideas, and make them malleable into what the army needs, which is a platoon of infantry soldiers or platoon of army soldier armor soldiers, what have you. So I really enjoyed this first part because. Because of, you know, the story of transition was one that resonated with me. [00:12:04] Speaker B: Right. You also can, if you're ever curious, just run the experiment in reverse. This is a science fiction book, so it looks forward to some imagined future and then draws parallels or replicates experiences that are very familiar to us to suggest that certain things don't change. But if you're skeptical of science fiction and you think, well, the author's just making all that stuff up, you can run the experiment in reverse by either reading really old fiction from a different time or talking to people who live through a different time. And what you discover is that there are things that are familiar to you in those experiences and those fictional depictions from centuries before as well. And in that way, you're reading from the future backwards and seeing that certain constants do in fact hold, which makes these sorts of science fiction parallels a lot more credible. But even, like small stuff like the feeling of shuffling into a room as an initiate to be briefed by some curmudgeonly crusty old officer, as happens at the very start of the Forever War, when the his, that's to say Mandela's unit shows up for its final training exercise like that is a feeling that entry into the auditorium or the classroom as an initiate among initiates. [00:13:25] Speaker A: It's a really good point about the timelessness of this sort of translate, of this transition period of initial entry training. I still remember one of the most sort of rewarding or fulfilling discussions that I had after I joined the army was with my grandfather who fought in the Korean War. And it was amazing just how similar the experiences were of coming into the Army. What your first experiences were, the feelings that you felt once you completed that initial entry training and felt like you were a member of, of this, you know, kind of warrior community, so to speak. I think the other thing that you see in this training, and this is sort of the second theme that I want to touch on in, in part one, is the purpose of training is to familiarize these new soldiers with war. And that's a really challenging thing to do in a garrison environment. It's really difficult to simulate the conditions of a real war in a field training environment. This is particularly extreme in their case because at this point I don't think any human has ever actually seen a Tauren and they're being trained to fight them. So of course there's going to be this gap between the training that they experience and the reality that they will eventually face. But we see the same thing now. It, you know, training in simulated environments. There's always a gap between that and the actual realistic experience of combat that a soldier may eventually encounter. And so there's this lots of, kind of almost sense of eye rolling during some of the training because it seems unrealistic or maybe they question why they're learning how to do this. In fact, in the that I, I said that the opening lecture in the scene is, is called 8 Ways to Kill a Human. And I think one of the privates says, yeah, but we're not going to fight humans, we're going to fight Tor. And one of the eight ways was something like hit him on the top of the head. And they said, well, we don't even know if Torrens have heads. It struck me as sort of comical, but also, again, science fiction allows this opportunity to sort of take a case to the extreme, to make the point much more clear. And that's a fundamental reality of the difference between training and war fighting that we still face in the Army. It's a challenge to produce that realistic training that's not to say that the training isn't dangerous, even if it's not entirely realistic. [00:15:54] Speaker B: I think that this is a. This is a point worth dwelling on because in a way is a comment about the purpose of training. In fact, realistic training is, we say in the army, extremely important. Hard realistic training or tough realistic training is practically a cliche. But the question quickly becomes what about the training must be realistic? [00:16:15] Speaker A: Does it. [00:16:16] Speaker B: Do you need to perfectly replicate the form of the enemy that you're going to fight? Or do you need to replicate the sense of mortal threat or the intensity of the environment? And what Haldeman suggests is that the intensity is what mattered more, at least for his characters. And perhaps what does matter. So the task that the platoon is it that William Mandela's in is given, or maybe the company is they have to go on the far side of this minor planet and build a base which is a task of course that they'll have to do if that they're going to serve in a colonial force. At some point during the base's construction they are tested, their defenses are tested by their own trainers. And like we actually do in our army, they train with live munitions. So the base's defenses are tested by a missile attack from the trainers that is considered the final graduation exercise. The missile attack is defeated in the sense that the trainees air defense systems function and they shoot down both the missiles. But the debris of the missiles kills I believe, two of the trainees. And so the first casualties that the readers and the soldiers encounter in this epic story about a semi apocalyptic space war are training casualties, not combat casualties. What I see in the book is an acknowledgment that that is an enduring fact. It doesn't seem to be an accident. The first casualty one encounters is the. The casualty that they encounter in training. [00:17:59] Speaker A: You also start to get a sense of, I don't know if this is the right term, but desensitization, they refer to people who are have either been killed or the prognosis doesn't look good. They call them debtors, which is just sort of a very casual term. But there is this process of desensitization that I think is also sort of inherent to military training. It also that sort of connects us to this first combat event, their first experience of actual combat. Right. [00:18:33] Speaker B: I was about to say you want to talk about desensitization? That first battle is pretty dramatic. [00:18:38] Speaker A: And when we talked about how to separate this book into three parts, I was on the fence about whether the first part should just cover the training. I think it's really important that we included this first combat engagement in part one, because there are through lines that connect the training to this first combat engagement. There are, there are elements of the training period that foreshadows the experiences that we're going to see take place during this first combat engagement. So we, we followed Mandela and his training platoon. And my understanding is that this is effectively sort of a, you know, the. When we talk about historically, whether or not, you know, World War II, for instance, we relied on, largely on individual replacements for soldiers that were killed. There is an argument for unit based replacements. So you take a group of soldiers, you train them all up, and then you send them as fighting units so that they've got this time together. That's effectively what, what I believe they've done with this training platoon. So they have, they're sent to this foreign planet. They have their first engagement with the Torrens. The very first engagement is actually from a distance where their ship is fired on by a Tauren ship. But they have their first ground combat experience against the Taurens and it effectively becomes a bloodbath. They absolutely annihilate these, these torrents, including the torrents who are not putting up much of a fight, who are no longer really a threat. When we were talking about this, you know, before we started recording, you made the very good analogy to the Berserkers, right? These, these Norse warriors who were going to battle in sort of a trance. And there was this bloodlust. And we see that play out with the, the members of this United nations exploratory force fighting unit when they encounter the Taurens. And the reason that we see this effectively, this trans, like bloodlust, is because the, the human soldiers are for all intents and purposes hypnotized. [00:20:38] Speaker B: There is some sort of either audio track or combination of audio track and brainwave manipulation that occurs through their spacesuit, directed by their higher headquarters that programs them, that is to say the human fighters into this semi conscious, extremely violent, like you said, bloodlusting force. And the thing that's transmitted, you get in clips over the course of the scene, but it's this strange amalgam. You get the sense of different motivational calls to battle throughout human history. It's like an anthropological panorama or mixtape, so to speak, that the soldiers get played. And either way the effect is that they are not their normal selves. They do enter this kind of berserk mode. They are put another way to use the language we were using earlier. They are desensitized and listeners may recall. And John, like you've probably heard at least a couple times before, the, you know, the body literature out there in war studies and combat studies about the disinclination that humans have to kill other beings, particularly other humans. There, there are certainly folks out there who have read Grossman's On Killing. Some of you have encountered SLA marshals, Men Against Fire, and some of this science is disputed. The point here is not to wade into that. The, the net conclusion of these books is that in order to get soldiers to be comfortable taking other soldiers lives, you have to basically intervene into their psychology. That can be done in all sorts of ways, from the most crude to the most sophisticated. I think that, John, you and I were talking earlier about bayonet training. [00:22:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that was, I mean, I distinctly remember in basic training going out and they'd open up this crate of bayonets and thinking to myself, you know, what, what century is this? And you fix bayonets on the end of your M4, or for us, I guess we had M16s, and you go to the bayonet range and you know, the drill sergeants yell out, what is the spirit of the bayonet? And all of the basic trainees respond in unison to kill. To kill with cold blue steel. I mean, right? I was never going to kill an enemy combatant with, with a bayonet that is effectively trying to sort of create this desensitization to get over this mental block that you might have about killing another human. [00:23:06] Speaker B: And at most US army installations now, there still is a bayonet assault course. You can book it, you go to range operations, and sometimes you have to blow some dust off the key to the conex where you can draw, you know, the ancillary equipment. But I recall in Germany with my squadron running in kit over to the bayonet assault course and entering into this bizarre obstacle course tucked into some woods, it felt like almost going through a time portal because, you know, here we were with technology much more sophisticated than the bayonet, developed long since the bayonet assault course was conceived. But we were returning to this like, eternal, sort of sacred, strange place to imbibe in the exact same sort of training that you were talking about. The point was clearly not like it's very important that you learn how to stab somebody with a bayonet, though maybe that's true. The point was you need to shove this blade into this human shaped dummy for the purpose of acquainting yourself with that sensation such that you don't hesitate in any form when the time comes, be it for the metaphorical or the literal bayonet plunge. [00:24:17] Speaker A: So effectively, what. What the way they describe it is. As soon as. I believe it was Cortez, right, this, the leader of the formation flips a switch, effectively. And all of the soldiers, their minds are filled with these visions of Torrens ruthlessly murdering humans, defenseless humans. And they're filled with this. This sort of giddiness to kill. To kill the Torrens. And it's effective because they do that, this bloodbath ensues. And importantly, as soon as Cortez, this character, flips that switch back, we have this scene in which Mandela is surrounded by the carnage that he has just participated in inflicting. And he is horrified by it, frankly. And this is where I think you start to see some of the clearest connections with perhaps his own experiences in the Vietnam War. And certainly the conduct of the Vietnam War generally. So part one concludes with. We are concluding our part one with this particular combat engagement, the very first one that they experienced. The. The narrative continues with. With further combat engagements. There's more to follow. He gets promoted to sergeant. Mandela gets promoted to sergeant. We're going to fast forward for part two. And that's where you're going to pick up with the story of when he returns to Earth. [00:25:44] Speaker B: So let's consider the second part of this novel, the Forever War. William Mandela, the protagonist, has gone to war. He has participated in the first ever battle against this alien race in space, what comes to be known as Aleph0. They use a Hebrew naming convention for the different planets where they use Hebrew letters and then a number once they discover enough of them. But Aleph0 or Aleph Null, becomes a famous battle, and he's a veteran of it. By the time he gets back to the institutional military, so to speak, a lot of time has passed owing to that time dilation we mentioned earlier. So he's experienced only probably a couple months or a year, but that the world has experienced something like a half century. That is to say, Earth has experienced a half century. And he is at the end of his enlistment. The question, another eternal question that arises is, are you going to reenlist? And he elects not to reenlist, as do nearly all of the soldiers in the cohort with which he underwent initial entry training. And so instead they go back down to Earth again. This is a terrific depiction of, you know, what it might look like to experience the relativity of time. This is probably familiar to our listeners now. You know, and certainly to me, from movies like Interstellar, maybe you even watched 2001 A Space Odyssey. But recall that this is a pretty early depiction, I think, of the relativity of time and science fiction. This book was written in the 70s, and from my understanding, this is a pretty influential depiction of it. So a lot of subsequent science fiction writers are thinking about Joe Haldeman's work when they write the relativity of time into their own stories. He comes back down to Earth, it's 2007, which, you know, at the time of this novel's writing was pretty far in the future. And he discovers a lot's changed, certainly in the sense closest to him. His. His father is gone and his mother is much aged. She lives in a strange apartment complex that he's never seen before in a suburb of, I think, Washington, D.C. right, John? [00:27:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Columbia, Maryland. [00:27:59] Speaker B: Columbia, Maryland. Right. But a whole lot else has changed besides his family. Let's just set aside the fact that everybody's grown older. So he's very strange that he was born in the 70s, but looks young. There is mass unemployment. I think the unemployment rate is floated at 40%. [00:28:15] Speaker A: There's also a black market for labor. [00:28:18] Speaker B: Right. And that's the second thing. The work is often done extra legally, in a subcontracted fashion. So jobs are scarce. They're then split up on, at times, unfavorable terms whereby the people with the jobs can kind of exploit the people without the jobs, of which, again, there are many, because virtually all economic activity is in some way related to the war. The war has snuffed out all other economic activity. There's also wartime rationing. You get this sort of brief history of a food war that occurred in William's absence, in the main character's absence. But that food war is over. The rationing has remained. So the food war, wartime rationing has outlived the food war and the food scarcity itself, which is a comment about how just how sticky certain policy measures can be even once the circumstances that warranted them have elapsed. And there's also, you get the sense, not unrelated to the black market for labor, a general breakdown in the rule of law. The cities are dangerous places. Everybody who has the means moves about with private security. [00:29:29] Speaker A: And his mother lives on the 92nd floor of this. Of this high rise apartment building, but still has bars on her windows and four locks on the door. I mean, there is a deeply fundamental breakdown in, in security. Yeah. [00:29:42] Speaker B: And you need security in the elevator. Right. Because there are. There are folks who ride elevators waiting for the unsuspecting, the first thing that William does is he goes out and he buys a firearm in this sort of sky lobby mall in his mother's super high rise. Yeah. And that's to say nothing of what happens outside of the cities. In some ways the rural environment's preferable because you get away with some of the vices of the city. But in other ways it's a lot less preferable because there's just no monopoly on violence. There are all sorts of rage bands that rove from rural settlement to rural settlement. For that reason you begin to wonder, he might have ets, so to speak, from the military, but did William really leave the war? Yeah, certainly. Did he leave Mortal Danger? It's also worth noting and we can get into this. Sexual mores have changed, right? There is just a radically different relationship between the sexes in the future. There's a lot more homosexuality. And also there seems to be a lot more transactional or casual dimension to sex to you sort of are exposed to the sex economy in the book. And you can see Joe Haldeman's just trying to consider what the world might look like 50 years on out when he's writing in the early 70s. There are also some amusing things about the new world that suggest that Joe Haldeman's pretty precious education has become very virtual and very, one might say, one directional. The children are in education for 18 years, but more years doesn't seem to equal more learning because they learn primarily via these digital modules that are streamed to them via devices. So they sit passively and are basically subject to videos that are in theory educational or pedagogical innovation, but don't really seem to make them smarter. In fact, the older you are, the more intelligent you are. Not because you've gained wisdom with age, but because you were subject to the pre modern educational system that the protagonist was. Haldeman also anticipates the gig economy. Almost all transportation seems to occur via basically a digital application wherein you call up a car and then you need to confirm that that car is for you via your thumbprint before you get in. And it already has programmed in your destination, AKA Uber or Lyft. And the healthcare system has grown incredibly bureaucratic. There is a warren of different certifications of your identity you need to perform and you are prioritized or deprioritized based on a bunch of effectively comorbidities and other demographic data, which sounds very familiar. So Haldeman gets some credit, I think for prescience. But of course in Other ways not that prescient. Thankfully, you know, the Anarchy of the world isn't immediately recognizable. But we should probably pause here. John and I was wondering if you want to talk about William's relationship with Mary Gay Potter, because this becomes extremely important in the book. [00:32:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I, I think it's very important that we, we get to, we introduce this character, Mary Gay Potter, because when the book starts and he's in training, you don't really get to know many of the characters and the ones that are named Mandela has this sort of very casual relationship with, for the most part, they seem like fleeting relationships. The first character that you really get to know deeply is because it's the first character that he develops this, you know, a deeper relationship with. And that's Mary Gay. Mary Gay Potter. She also leaves the military at the same time as him. They effectively make this decision together because they say, you know, our time is up. Do we want to reenlist? No, let's go back to Earth. They go back to Earth, not together, but they go back to Earth at the same time. And William's first experience in Columbia, Maryland, back with his now elderly mother in her 92nd floor apartment in this very odd kind of futuristic high rise, super high rise, as you, as you described it, is that the Earth is fundamentally an unhappy place. And he gets to a point where he realizes, you know, this life in Colombia, at least for the time being, isn't for him, and he decides to make plans to reconnect with Mary Gay Potter. Now his relationship with Mary Gay Potter, again, you, you mentioned that there are two parallel timelines happening here. There are the Earth years and the interstellar years. The closeness that he has with Mary, Mary Gay Potter is very much a function of the fact that they have experienced the same timeline together, while others are experiencing the other people that would normally have been very close in his life, like his mother, have been experiencing a very different timeline. [00:34:23] Speaker B: And we get the sense that he has feelings for Mary Gay Potter even before they get back to Earth because there's this kind of harrowing injury that she suffers during a collapse r jump or some evasive maneuvers their spaceship has to take and then a collapse jump. And his concern for her during those injuries mark her as a love interest, but it's not clear where that's going. Then when they get back to Earth and Mary Gay and William realize that they are not like the people back home anymore before having this shared experience, they see their relationship mature really quickly. And I think that whether it's Romantic or not, this is highly relatable for anybody who's been in the military or gone overseas. When you get back home, you suddenly find yourself closer to the people with whom you serve than the people back home that you had spent the preceding 18 or 22 years of your life with. And that's despite the fact that the people with whom you served, you'd only spent two years your life with. You know, as the cliche goes, you discover quickly that it's more about the life and the years than the years in the life. And of course, what's clever about this book is that owing to the time dilation, he's in fact spent something like 40 years with Mary Gay on Earth. But to him, it's only a couple. Either way, they want to spend time with each other because they feel like they are the only people who understand each other anymore. And so what they elect to do is go on a trip together. They have a ton of money because they've accrued 40 years of pay. And they're also celebrities because they're the first ever combat veterans to return to Earth from space. So travel is relatively straightforward for them. They go on this kind of futuristic, steampunky air cruise vessel. But they quickly realize they don't want to see what's out there for them on Earth, like I said earlier, just because it's kind of dystopian. So what they instead do is they go back home to Mary Gay's family in South Dakota. I don't think they're originally from South Dakota, but they're forced to go there because Mary Gay's father is found to have committed food ration fraud. Yeah, accidentally, I think. And so he's penalized by being sent with his family to this agricultural commune. The irony is that the life on the agricultural commune is better than life elsewhere. So they kind of like it and choose to say. And what happens is they're very happy. William gets the sense he could be there forever. But then a raiding party comes, attacks the commune, and he and Mary Gay lose Mary Gay's parents to that violence. And at that point, they elect to return to the military because life is not better on Earth. It is also not safer on Earth. And the people and the place on Earth that they find when they return to Earth is nothing like the home that they were hoping to find. But before we move on to part three, it's worth noting the other obvious intervention or illustration that Haldeman is making in this middle part where Mary Gay and William go back home. And he uses the relativity of time whereby Earth has moved on in the measure of decades, whereas Mary Gay and William have moved on only a couple years through life. He uses that to illustrate how civil military divides, divide, develop. The amazing thing is that the world that they return to, that is their home, feels as alien almost as the worlds that they had just been exploring in space. And that I think is a eternal idea in military relations. This divide that emerges between the military and the society it serves, the relativity of time is also not just used to illustrate the divide between the, the civil society and the military, but also the divide that opens up between the individual soldier and other people, especially after going through a difficult experience, especially if the people around you weren't there with you. [00:38:21] Speaker A: When we talk about the civil military divide, we usually talk about it on kind of like an institutional societal level, right, the distinction between this class of warfighters and the people back home. But it manifests also on kind of individual levels. And it's what you're. The point that you were making about having, you know, the world feeling more alien than the worlds that they had had been fighting on these, you know, light years away planets. But also this sense of closeness that he has with Mary Gay Potter is a stand in for that sense of closeness that you have with people who have shared the same experiences. And those experiences, you know, they transcend time. I mentioned that one of the most fulfilling conversations I had after joining the military was with my grandfather who had joined the military 50 some odd years before and, and fought in the Korean War. I used to live in, in, in, on Capitol hill in, in D.C. and right around the corner from my place was an American Legion post. For, you know, any listener that's been to an American Legion post, the post that you're picturing is exactly what this was like. It was effectively a bar. There were two little windows. It wasn't, you know, super well lit. You couldn't really see inside except for these two little windows. And I remember distinctly walking by there one time and seeing two guys sitting at the bar engaged in this sort of animated, in a friendly sense, discussion. One of them wearing a Vietnam veteran hat, the other one looking like he couldn't have been more than 21 years old and was clearly a veteran of our, you know, at the time, current post 9, 11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it, you know, that that image has stuck with me of the unifying force of military service and how it binds people together, even if they've served in different times, in different wars and how difficult it is to form that same type of relationship with people who maybe didn't share that experience. And again, Haldeman brilliantly uses this time dilation trope to take that to its extreme, to make that visible to readers. And I think the Mary Gay Potter relationship is, is the most important to that. This sort of illustrates that dynamic. [00:40:35] Speaker B: I think that that's very well put. Which brings us to the third part of the book. [00:40:41] Speaker A: The third part of the book, as we've divided it, begins with Mandela and Potter's decision to rejoin the military. When they do so, they are promised training jobs, safe, secure sort of rear echelon jobs on, on some foreign planet. They are in fact sent back to combat units. This part also sees the two separated seemingly permanently because of the effects of time dilation. Mandela is a lieutenant in charge of a 10 soldier. I guess it's sort of a detachment. He is then later promoted to major and given command of a strike force. The the strike force is ordered to build an outpost, not dissimilarly to what they were expected to do at the beginning of the book. They're ordered to build an outpost on a planet outside this one, outside the galaxy, outside the Milky Way. This is the farthest outpost that has yet been established by humans from Earth. And incidentally, the force finds itself fighting what would become one of the, if not the last battle of, of the war. In this part, I think there were sort of three elements that are worth examining. The first, and kind of the most obvious one, and frankly one of the most interesting ones in the book to me, was about the nature of leadership. We witness Mandela first as a lieutenant, and then really this dynamic kind of comes into its own and comes to the forefront when he's promoted to major and given command of the strike force. We find Mandela's perspective fundamentally different than what we saw when he was a private or even a sergeant. In the opening sections of the book, he's grappling with challenges of command that, that are never discussed or mentioned in the earlier parts of the book. He's trying to kind of understand his own command philosophy, what's instinctive to him, what comes naturally, but also whether or not what comes naturally to him is the best option. When he is given command of this strike force, we find a tension between, between Mandela and his second in command. Mandela likes to have what he calls an open door policy. He wants any soldier in the unit to be able to come to him with problems, to be able to talk to. This is a command climate that anybody who served time in the military is probably familiar with his second in command is I think, the best way. The, the, maybe the most generous way of describing it is a rigid disciplinarian has a very different approach to leadership and to command. This is also probably a command climate that, you know, many of us who have spent time in, in uniform are familiar with, maybe not to this extreme degree what this book does, right. It takes things that we have all experienced that are maybe subtle dynamics, and it takes them to these extreme degrees and we see this tension between, between the two. Now, importantly, Mandela doesn't, doesn't just assume his methods of leadership are correct. He weighs the balance between the sort of gentle approach to command, which he thinks is good for morale, and a much harsher approach to command, which he thinks is probably necessary to instill discipline. And he grapples throughout his command with whether or not he should position himself in the front lines with his troops or not, how that, what that will signal to, to the, to his soldiers. He thinks it will signal, hey, I'm with you. I don't want to. I, I wouldn't ask you to do anything that I'm not willing to do myself. I believe it's the second in command that tells him, look, if you do that, you know, you might actually be in danger from our own troops. I mean, these are really complicated dynamics that are taking place between the sort of command echelon and the, and the rank and file of this unit. And I don't think Haldeman, I don't think Haldeman has a, has a, he's not making an argument that one or the other of these approaches is better, which I find really interesting. You're not led to a conclusion that, hey, the, the way of military leadership, there's a right way of, of leading in the military, of commanding a unit. You're led to conclude solely that there are different ways to lead to command and each has its virtues, and that perhaps the, the best approach is to adopt the one that comes most naturally to you. I don't know if you, if you read that similarly to, to the way that I did. Did. [00:45:24] Speaker B: I think so. And I think it's important to remember that at the start of the book, Mandela is not a particularly military personality. He considers himself a physicist who is doing a required tour of duty. He's been drafted. And he's skeptical, in an intelligent way of the trainers that he encounters during initial entry training. He's skeptical of the officers, which to him either seems incompetent or unfeeling. And so the fact that he now finds himself in command and sorting through how to manage people is already an important evolution. And anybody who listened to the first episode might remember that we consider the evolution of the protagonist of this novel, the Cane Mutiny, in much the same light. Willie Keith was the name of that protagonist at first. He and the members of his crew aboard the USS Kane, this minesweeper during the Pacific War, are all kind of irreverent and skeptical of military authority. But by the end of the novel, he finds himself in command of the cane for various reasons on the other end of a literal mutiny, and realizes that once you are in the position where, whether you like it or not, you have responsibility both for the lives and the happiness of your service members below you, you, but also for the mission, you find yourself in a constant, unending train of quandaries and dilemmas about when to prioritize morale, when to prioritize the mission. And yeah, I agree, John, very much the case for William Mandela. There's even this highly relatable moment where he is confronted with a cat that one of his soldiers has somehow smuggled onto the vessel, vessel that they're in, traveling through space. And he doesn't like the cat, it seems to him vaguely out of regs, or at least in this gray area. And he has to make a call about whether or not to permit this potential nuisance and distraction. But the soldier says, hey, it's a mascot. A lot of us have mascots and it's harmless. And he elects to that sort of let the cat live, so to speak. And I don't know anybody who's been in a leadership position has been confronted with some desire of some subordinate, you know, either a fun mascot or a irregularity, to put it simply, that you have to pick whether or not it's worth taking a stand on. And those decisions are ones that you make on a case by case basis because there is no hard and fast rule and there's no line of the regulation for how to handle it. So here they are on the absolute outer edge of our galaxy in some made up future year, making the exact same sorts of decisions that a graduate from West Point or OCS or ROTC would have to make as platoon leader or a new platoon sergeant would have to make as a platoon sergeant in the U.S. military today. I think it's. I think it's very affecting and. But also it gets less funny. Right, right. That you alluded to it earlier. But when the chips are down and they're, and they're fighting. He is at risk of being fragged. And you, you get the sense that Haldeman here is exploring a real issue. During the Vietnam War when junior leaders were killed by their own soldiers owing to disputes in far away places removed from the flag pole under the duress of an intense counterinsurgency fight, that too is present. It's not all making decisions about whether or not the cat can stay on [00:48:58] Speaker A: the boat or whether or not the soldiers that are making essentially homemade bootleg liquor can continue to do so because the same dynamic lays out there, right? Mandela knows that this is against the regulations, but he ultimately decides, okay, I'm going to allow this, but nobody's, nobody can be, you know, inebriated when they're on duty. He's found himself between, you know, weighing between disciplinarian enforcement of regulations and, hey, what's actually good for morale. That actually brought me back also to the last episode that we talked about, William Slim's defeat into Victory, where I think I made the comment that I've met a lot of people who believe that morale matters. I don't think I've ever encountered somebody who believes it matters as much as William Slim did. And Mandela sort of has a little bit of that where he understands the importance of, look, we're asking soldiers to do some really hard and dangerous things. We need to ensure that, you know, their life is at least enjoyable enough that they, they're fighting for something. They're fighting sort of for a reason. So again, I, I think that ultimately you come away from this section with not an understanding that there is one right way of leading, but it's important to be true to your own nature and that you have an authentic sense of leadership, particularly when you are in, in, in command of a formation. [00:50:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I think that's very well put. [00:50:31] Speaker A: Now, we talked about this leadership dynamic, the, the sort of, you know, examination of the nature of, of military leadership. The other thing that comes out in this, in this section is there's a lot of emphasis on technology and it really encourages readers to grapple with the intersection of technology and war. War. This is a war that was characterized by advanced technology. However, I mentioned in describing kind of the plot overview of this Part 3 Mandela Strike Force participates in or fights what is one of the last battles of this more than 1000 year war. [00:51:12] Speaker B: John, I think it's worth pausing here just to give a plug for science fiction. Again, I'm not a science fiction reader, but this is a reading to read Science fiction, because in any other story which is bound by the normal constraints of time as we experience it on Earth, you would at best get a snapshot of technology, maybe a couple years of technology progression, right? Because that book is taking place over the course of a year or a couple years, be it a novel or a work of history. But because this is science fiction, Haldeman gets to play with the idea of observing technological development over a thousand years. And the same character experiences that development. And that allows for this longitudinal comparative look at the way technology develops and the way humans develop alongside their technology and which makes what I think you're getting to the final battle super interesting. Sorry to interrupt. [00:52:06] Speaker A: No, I think that's a really important point because there's also, you know, they make these series of, of jumps between the collapsers, right, in order, like a complex series of them to get to this planet where they're going to establish this outpost, where it turns out this last engagement will be fought. There are a series, a number of times in the book where effectively Mandela comes out of one of these and human technology has advanced so much in the. On the, on the Earth timeline that he has to do basically a weapons familiarization or an equipment familiarization tutorial in order to get up to speed on the latest technologies that they're, that they're fighting with. So they're fighting with all sorts of different highly sophisticated advanced weaponry. They also have something called a stasis field, which effectively is a protected, protected bubble that they've established at this outpost. And during the, this final engagement with the Torrens, there's this, you know, constant temptation, okay, should I order everybody back to the stasis field because they're going to be more protected. There's. Or should we stay out in this open ground, in the trenches and fight? He ultimately does order them back to the stasis field. The important thing about this stasis field is that it renders all electronic weapons inert. Basically all of their weaponry turns into useless paperweights. And so they arm themselves with spears and shields and swords to fight this final engagement. The Torrens are able to enter the stasis field and you get this bloody kind of hand to hand combat. And I find the juxtaposition of these things, this advanced technology, you know, the stasis field with these very primitive technologies of, you know, heavy metal blade weapons. I find that juxtaposition really interesting. And it also got me thinking about my own experience and the experience of a generation of, of members of the military during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where for instance, when I was in Iraq, we rolled around in MRAPs that were equipped with, with Duke systems, right, These sophisticated electronic warfare systems. What were they meant to protect against? They were meant to protect against IEDs, homemade bombs. You know, here you have this juxtaposition of high technology and low technology. We had, you know, the unblinking eye in the sky, constant drone surveillance. What were they often doing? They were finding caches of AK47s with these drones. AK47s, you know, at the time, 60, 70 year olds rifle, very simple rifle. That turned out to be one of the defining weapons of those wars. We had, you know, on the US and coalition side we had space based GPS position navigation and timing devices and encrypted com or communications. And we were fighting in Afghanistan Taliban who were communicating effectively with the same sort of walkie talkies that many of us had used as toys when we were kids. Kids. What strikes me is that we often get caught up in these discussions of the technological character of future warfare. We're doing it now with artificial intelligence and unmanned systems and that often the battlefield decides that you're also going to fight with these sort of more enduring kind of timeless lower technology tools. We're seeing it in, in Ukraine right now, right, with. This is very much a drone war. We know that. And yet as soon as one side managed to disrupt the communications between a ground station and the drone and you could no longer fly them, what was the next innovation that came out? It was a fiber optic guided drone, right? Drones equipped with this spool of fiber optic wire that is hundreds of meters or even in some cases kilometers long. And so that's a hard tether that can't be jammed through electronic means. [00:55:59] Speaker B: One, by the way, that feels like a, it feels like a regression, right? I think in the popular imagination the technological progression is from wired to wireless. But we are finding that we have to regress in order to obviate or circumvent the innovations of the enemy. And that is I think in part what Joe Haldeman or what the book, at least I don't want to figure the author too prominently is doing with. With. In the final battle, they fight with spears and darts. The point is that sometimes it's not a matter of constant forward progression, but it's cyclical. You return back to where you were. You return at the end of the forever war to the first form of war, presumably, right? Or you know, hand to hand combat with crude weaponry. [00:56:51] Speaker A: I think the point is Is, as you said, just like in this book, there are two parallel timelines. There's the Earth timeline and the interstellar wars timeline. Technology progresses in a broad general sense in a linear, one directional fashion. The integration of technology on the battlefield does not. It may take those steps forward in parallel with the bra broad advance of technology, but battlefield conditions may also force those regressive steps that you, that you very articulately described. [00:57:30] Speaker B: Right? Or put another way, the windows of advantage close quickly. And I think that this is an important qualifier to all of the at times defensible buzz around innovation and war. Innovation is only productive if you're fighting war, as long as it delivers a tactical or operational or strategic advantage. So the question is not in a vacuum how advanced the technology is, but the question is how sizable and how enduring is the advantage that technology develops. And people lose sight of that and instead they orient on the in a vacuum sophistication of the technology and they end up hyping stuff that isn't worthy of the hype because they don't anticipate or they don't imagine the development of a countermeasure. For every measure that develops, there's a countermeasure that ends up closing the temporary advantage that the original measure. Granted, the fiber optic drone is an example of that. First you have the wireless drone that's thought to be a major advance. Then you have jamming, which is a countermeasure. Then you develop the fiber optic cable operated fpv and then you develop something as crude as a netting that goes over a road that eliminates the advantage of the FPV drone. That development just returns you to the fundamentals of conflict that seem to persist across these countermeasure measure cycles. What Haldeman is able to do through the time dilation aspect of the narrative is make this very clear. Every time the soldiers do a collapse Arduino jump in the Forever war, the first question that they have to ask on the far end of the collapse our jump is where are we in the measure countermeasure cycle? Right. We have these technologies. Now the Torons on the far side of this collapse are jump are they ahead of us? Are they with us? Or are they behind us in the measure countermeasure development? And of course, what they discover in the final battle is that they're at the stage age where the Taurons are fighting with darts and the humans are fighting with spears and they both have shields and what ultimately saves the day. Not this. Well, this does spoil the novel. But who cares? You wouldn't be listening if you did care. What ends up saving the day is the individual ingenuity of William, the protagonist. He doesn't invent a new technology. He creatively and unexpectedly deviates from a pattern of behavior in a way that's productive to wipe out the numerical advantage to the enemy. [01:00:09] Speaker A: Importantly, I think you know that this final scene, this final battle scene also illustrates a really important dynamic within the context of technology, right? Advanced technology has a tendency to distance humans from effectively the dirty work of war. That can be drone warfare, that can be long range precision fires. There is a, A, an important conceptual distinction between launching a missile that at a target that is just a grid coordinate to you, or you know, flying a drone from in some cases thousands of miles away, halfway around the world and firing on a target in a place that is completely foreign to you. It may be a country that you've never even stepped foot on. These were the things that, you know, we, they were defining features of our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And on the one hand that, that, that relieves service members from the moral burden of watching others die at their own hands. And I think that's really, really important. And by this point of the war, many of the engagements are fought with those sorts of weapons. They don't see the Torrens that they're, that they're fighting against. They're fighting this war from a standoff distance where they're not clearly engaged with them. The final engagement is they are forced to condemn conduct this, this, this final battle at close quarters distances, which is fundamentally, you know, different. And as I said, on one hand, advanced technology does free service members from that moral burden. On the other hand, there is still an internal reckoning with doing that violence. That reckoning looks different than it does for soldiers who have experienced, say, close combat. We published in a review several years ago by an Air Force drone pilot named Joe Ritter, he reviewed, you mentioned Grossman's On Killing. Dave Grossman wrote this very influential book, sometimes considered divisive, but this influential book called On Killing. He also authored a book that came out, I believe in 2021 called on killing Remotely, which was specifically looking at this dynamic and, and our reviewer, this Air Force officer reviewed it in a review he titled When War Is Shift Work. And it's this idea that we had drone P in Nevada that were, you know, driving from their home with their morning cup of coffee, maybe stopping at the gas station, filling up, getting to work, clocking in for their eight hour shift of fighting a War, that's a fundamentally different experience than say the infantry units, all of the units that were deployed forward in Afghanistan. But that doesn't mean that there isn't this sort of same reckoning with your place in, in, in intense violence. I think that that's, that's also an important dynamic that is illustrated by this, this final scene. [01:03:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think that's very well said. The, the, the final point about technology that I thought was worth making before we start talking about the sort of strategic critiques written into the end of the book is about artificial intelligence. There is a moment in this book where the protagonist, once he returns to become an instructor and then a commander after deciding that civilian life is not for him on Earth, he goes into what they call the can and he basically downloads into his brain from this software everything there is to know about war. It's not unlike the scene in the Matrix where Neo sits in the chair and gets Kung Fu downloaded. And in fact, I learned that the Matrix Tricks is heavily influenced by the book Neuromancer by William Gibson. William Gibson, another science fiction author, read the Forever War and called it the single greatest science fiction war novel ever written. So you get the sense that maybe the Forever War in fact influenced the scene from the Matrix. But either way, William, the protagonist of the Forever War, emerges from the can and he knows everything there is to know academically about war. He can name your every single author, he can explain every single thesis. He starts randomly quoting Clausewitz and it's as if he suddenly became the perfect war. College cgsc King's College, London. War studies student. And it's useful, but only to a degree. He still is able to lead his strike force to victory. Not because he suddenly recalls a passage or a diagram from some account of the Battle of Vicksburg or, you know, Koeniggratz, but because he is a creative thinker. That's not to say that knowledge is useless, but omniscience in, in the sense that we sometimes fantasize about it, you know, this perfect recall. Put another way, super intelligence doesn't alone get he and his troops to victory. It's specifically the complement of studied knowledge with sort of human creativity that makes the difference. And I think it frankly serves as a useful corrective to some of the buzz around the integration of artificial intelligence into command and control. I don't think there are a lot of people suggesting that AI on its own will become the perfect commander, but this is a good fictionalized illustration of why it might on its own, not get the army where it needs to be be. [01:05:30] Speaker A: I think, I think that's such a good insight, but also a good illustration of how a book that was published in 1974 can still be relevant. What now, 52 years later? If you, you know, think creatively on how to apply the themes of the book to the current context, there are some really interesting insights like the one that you just made. So the final thing that sticks out in this, in this part three of the book is that. But I think this book was fundamentally not. It's not an anti war book, although sometimes it's treated it's. It's simplistically considered to be one. It is more anti Vietnam war or anti the type of war that, that Vietnam was. If part one was sort of a critique of the way the war was fought, if part two was a critique of, of the societal effects of a war like Vietnam, I think part three is a strategic level critique of the war and the decision to, to launch it. I think one of the lessons that you know is most obvious and sticks out is that despite being better resourced, despite tactical innovations, despite enhanced advanced technologies, all of those things do not automatically produce strategic victory. And that becomes clear in this part three. The other thing, and kind of the more the deeper critique that I read from this is that Haldeman is essentially saying that a war that is launched without a nuanced and accurate understanding of the strategic and geopolitical context, without an understanding of the enemy, of the human dimension, and with unclear, ill defined or reactive and dynamic strategic objectives, is never going to end in strategic success. I think it's a pretty, pretty astute observation. It's. You read this and you understand Vietnam a little bit better. [01:07:34] Speaker B: Oh, certainly to your point, the way the book ends is the enemy, the Torons, the aliens and the humans discover a way to communicate with each other which they didn't have. [01:07:47] Speaker A: Have. [01:07:47] Speaker B: And once they start communicating, the first question one side asks the other is why did you attack us? And the other side says, what are you talking about? You attacked us. And in that conversation both sides realize they don't actually have any underlying dispute. And so they just decide to end the war and they stop fighting and they don't conflict because space is quite large any further. And the, the tragedy of it all is that in the process many, many, many humans and Taurons die. And also the home planet that in theory the humans were trying to protect is basically destroyed. It rebounds from its dystopian state in which William finds it. But certainly the thing that they originally sought to defend is gone. The question of ends and means is very salient in the mind of the reader at the end of the book. The other one thing I'd say is I think you're exactly right to point out that tactics alone doesn't get you there. There's a ton of tactical innovation in the book. It's basically a fever dream of technological innovation. And all of that is just levered to show that on its own, tactical excellence is not effective. It is important, and one ought attend to it very closely, and one ought cultivate a warrior mindset. But the book also makes this comment that absent some unifying strategy, even if it's a pragmatic muddling through strategy, absent some dedicated thought to it, the war that you fight will not end as you want it to. The only other sort of closing comment I had on the book, before we get to back matter, is about this cyclical aspect of the book. I think that at first, when you see William and Mary Gay go back to Earth and you see how dystopian is you. You're. You are tempted to conclude, okay, I get this book. It's a dystopian story about a war gone wrong in the future. But it's actually not a dystopian book. It. It doesn't make a comment about human decline. It makes a comment that these affairs are cyclical, which is not necessarily a hopeful comment, but it's not a cynical comment either. And, and this point is made very viscerally because at the very end of the book, book, what happens is Mary Gay and William are reunited. [01:10:07] Speaker A: I think she ends up on this, on. On sort of an. An outpost, a human colony somewhere. And she basically goes out on this ship and travels at high speeds, like for five years at a time to. To slow down her aging so that she'll basically be at the same age no matter what time he comes back. And she says he eventually reunites with her because he's. He's given a letter that she has written to him. And she basically says, you know, I don't know how much you've aged, but here's where you'll find me. You know, I'm happy to be your lover, your wife, but if you're too old, I'm also happy to be your nurse. [01:10:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it's quite affecting. And of course, they're at about the same age, so they reunite. And the epilogue of the book is the birth of their first child. So rebirth is the closing, and in that sense, it's very cyclical. I thought it was, it was a good way to end it. The end to the war is a little bit forced, I thought. But I get why he ended it the way he did. [01:11:04] Speaker A: So that we've basically told the story of the book. We've. We finished the story of, of part three. As you said, the war ends. You said it was a bit forced. I actually think the end of the Vietnam War was similarly forced by very different dynamics. But I think it, maybe even if it, if it is forced to it, it kind of serves the purpose of being this, you know, overarchingly a critique of the Vietnam War. [01:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah. The artificial plot device of the Vietnam War was the United States Congress, I guess. [01:11:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So. So that brings us to the end of part three. We're then going to move into our final segment. So margin notes. These are the sort of the things that we underlined in the book. Made some notes in the margins of the book while we were reading that didn't necessarily fit into the discussion we wanted to have, but were nonetheless interesting. The first one that stuck out to me was do you remember the name of the ship that they first embark on? [01:11:56] Speaker B: I don't know. There are a lot of ships. [01:11:58] Speaker A: There's. [01:11:58] Speaker B: There's Masary too, a random Czech reference in there. But what is it? [01:12:01] Speaker A: It was Earth's Hope. There is later another ship called Earth's Hope 2. There were a number of these and you know, they just strike me, the righteousness of those naming conventions strike me as, you know, on one hand you look at it and it seems a bit silly. It's also very reflective of the way that we go about naming some of our military operations. And you know, when I was in, in Iraq, our main supply routes and alternate supply routes, our bases, you know, we had Camp Victory, Camp Liberty. I was on Fob Loyalty there. There was a resonance. When I read Earth's Hope was the name of their ship. There was a resonance with my own experience. The second margin note that, that I wanted to make was about. We kind of touched on it in the discussion in Part three where we talked about technology and the moral burden of doing violence. We published a piece recently by MWI's director, actually Colonel Pat Sullivan. The Odyssey blockbuster film, this new treatment of the millennia old epic by Homer came out this summer. And Colonel Sullivan wrote about how this particular treatment implicitly focused on this idea of moral injury, the Vietnam War. Again, this book was, you know, is the best way to read it is in the context of the Vietnam War, the Vietnam War was kind of the forcing function that got both us as a society and the military to understand post traumatic stress disorder, ptsd better to understand it as this discrete thing. And we started treating it differently than. Than we had after previous wars that we had fought. Colonel Sullivan's argument in this piece was that for the current generation of military personnel, particularly those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, ideally we will come out of that period with a similarly better understanding of a. Of a. A related but distinct thing called moral injury. Right. When we do something that may not be outside of regulations, it may not be a violation of the law of war, but still forces attention between the action and this inherent internal moral code that every, every human has. There's definitely an element of that when he is grappling with, with, you know, throughout the book, there are they. The characters openly discuss, you know, do you think you can take a life? Do you think it will affect you to take a life? Mandela does take lives of Torrens, of the human raiders when they're back on Earth. The raiders that attack the. The commune in South Dakota where Mary Gay Potter's parents are, are. Are killed. [01:14:58] Speaker B: End of random street assailants when they're traveling in life. [01:15:02] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So I think that there is a moral injury component to this that is a theme throughout that he doesn't address because when he wrote it, we. That term wouldn't be coined for another 20 some years. So I think that that is also an element worth exploring for readers as they're reading this. And then finally there's. There's a point at which we never meet Mandela's father. He. He's died by the time they return to Earth. But there are sort of callbacks to his views about what's happening on Earth, about the war. And he blames the sort of deterioration of Earth into a fundamentally unhappy place, economically, socially, politically, in every sense. He blames that on the Elite Conscription act, which removed these highly talented, highly intelligent individuals to have them go fight a war. That had me thinking about the experience of a place like Afghanistan when. And I remember having conversations about this with Ryan Evans, a good friend of mine, who, who runs war on the rocks, about our obligation to the Afghans who had worked for us over 20 years of war, as the withdrawal was approaching, were our obligations to take them with us to evacuate them from the country. There was a heroic effort to do so. It was clearly not, you know, on a wholesale scale effective, but he. He made a pretty compelling argument that the people that worked for us tended to be More educated. They were some of the, some of the elites of the country and that that would effectively amount to a brain drain and that Afghanistan, if it was going to survive a post war period was going to need many of those bright brains of people. So you know, this is, this, clearly this is probably the biggest stretch talking about the Elite Conscription act and its effects on Earth and, and the effects of the US withdrawal and the evacuation of many of the, of the Afghans that had, had served with, alongside the US military. But that was the other note that I made in the, in the book that, that I thought worth highlighting here. What about you? Did you have any, any margin notes? [01:17:25] Speaker B: Oh yeah, and by the way, I think that the point about the brain drain is well made. It's especially relevant given that Haldeman served in Vietnam at a time when the draft targeted folks who were disproportionately undereducated. That that was the case not because of some nefarious plot necessarily, but because there are a lot of exceptions. Exceptions, available waivers for the draft. If you were undergoing various forms of education and you almost get the sense of Haldeman is wondering, well, what if the reverse were true? What if we could disproportionately take the Harvard graduates or whatever, you know, whatever it may be. [01:18:00] Speaker A: And ultimately I think the point is that any, any conscription that does not produce a military that is broadly reflective of the society in whose name it fights is going to have sort of unintended second and third order consequences, whether that's drafting the elites or drafting those who don't have, you know, those, those same privileges. [01:18:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I think my only margin note that I'll make here is about the planet Heaven. So they basically get some R and R on a planet that the humans have successfully colonized that is delightful and perfect. Perfect. And they have a insane amount of money to spend because of how much time they've been away, given, as you said earlier, time dilation. And the upshot of their time on Heaven is that it is a lot of fun and they do a lot. They travel to all sorts of amazing places, they experience all sorts of different cultures that have developed there. And they are constantly in the lap of luxury because they're spending like they never have before a basically infinite sum of money. Money. But also that it on its own isn't satisfying somehow. Life on Heaven is a lot of fun and not where they want to spend eternity. And so it's not with completely broken hearts that they move on. And that brings us to our closing Two sections. One on our saved rounds, some fun facts about the book, and then another section on what we're reading right now. And with that, we'll. We'll end. My fun fact is I have to. And they're quick. The first is that given the influence of this science fiction novel, you wonder, where's the movie? Like, this is normally where we'd be like, you should go watch the movie. But there is no movie. Apparently, people have been aspiring to make a movie of the Forever War, one of the most successful science fiction novels ever. For a long time. There was a special effects director or innovator who picked up the rights, who had worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Empire Strikes Back, but never went anywhere with that. Ridley Scott had the rights in 2008, aspired to make it, but never got around to it. And as recently as 2015, I guess Channing Tatum was going to star in an adaption that Warner Brothers was going to produce. Never happened. And one article I saw described the project as being stuck in development hell, which I think is, like, oddly fitting. Like, I'd like to imagine that the movie's being developed in some other galaxy or on the other end of some collapse jump, and it's only taking them a couple months. Months. But for us, it feels like forever because we're on Earth time. But the. The other fun fact I thought I'd share is I read a Vice interview with Haldeman when the. I think this authoritative edition came out a while back. And in it the interviewer asked Haldeman about his influences. And he doesn't name science fiction novels. He names the Red Badge of Courage, he names Tolstoy, and he names John Dos Passis, who is the great realist of the early 20th century. He also names catch 22. And we know that Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage was also heavily influenced by Tolstoy. Tolstoy was an artilleryman who fought in the Crimean War. So to the point about the timelessness of certain observations, this book, which is credited with so much prescience for its technological anticipations and for its imagination about the future, is derived from works that either are Tolstoyan or were influenced by Tolstoy. [01:21:23] Speaker A: Tolstoy. [01:21:23] Speaker B: And I don't know, I find that reassuring, for, among other reasons, we're going to be reading Tolstoy next. We're going to go read Haji Murat, his great short novel of the war in the Caucasus. [01:21:35] Speaker A: So my saved round, I really have just one. This book, the Forever War, is widely seen as a response to or a rebuttal of the themes of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which is generally seen as pro military. Haldeman in the, in his introduction to this authoritative edition that came out and I believe in the 2000s, addresses that, but sort of obliquely and it doesn't take a firm position and say yes, this was a direct rebuttal to it, or no, that it was not. He acknowledges that it was influenced by other books, including Heinlein Starship Troopers. But if you know the, as I said, as I mentioned at the outset, I was kind of a late convert to the idea of reading military science fiction for anything other than enjoyment or even for enjoyment, frankly. Once you do, you start seeing connective tissues towards some of these. And whether or not it is a direct rebuttal, and I don't think it is because I don't read the Forever War as anti military or anti war, like I said in part three, I, I think it's a critique of the type of war that the Vietnam War was. And so I don't think it's a direct rebuttal. But as you, you know, for if there are listeners who are also kind of new converts or maybe just dipping their toes into this genre, once you start reading some of these, read Starship Troopers, read the Forever War. You'll see this kind of, of vibrant ongoing discussion that is, is, is really illuminating, is really interesting and you realize that, you know, as with anything, you start to draw connections between one book that you read and, and another book that you read. [01:23:23] Speaker B: So yeah, I, I, I didn't know that. I, I didn't realize that the Starship Troopers novel was written in the late 50s. It's almost as if the Forever War is like the Starship Troopers goes to Vietnam and comes back changed, you know, very much. [01:23:36] Speaker A: Both books are very much products of their times. If you read them and you know, when they were written, you understand their contexts. [01:23:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:23:43] Speaker A: Better. Great. That gets us to our final section. Bonus reads. I'll go first, if you don't mind. I could very easily say for my bonus read, you should read Tolstoy. Not uncoincidentally, we will be discussing Tolstoy's Haji Marat, as you mentioned in the, in the next, in the next episode, I've got two bonus reads. One related to that you read, wrote a piece that we published at NWI last summer called Tolstoy's Complaint Mission Command in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. If anybody thinks that Tolstoy, the Passage of time since he was alive and since he wrote renders what he wrote meaningless. This is an excellent sort of primer on how to read old things and find enduring or very current relevance to them. So again, the article is called Tolstoy's Complaint. That's one of my bonus reads. The other one again, for for readers who have not explored the canon of military science fiction deeply. If you've read the Forever War, now read Starship Troopers. But the one that I would, I would highly recommend is actually the very first military science fiction book or very first science fiction book that I read, which is Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I think that if you, if you're just getting into the genre and you dip your toes in that end of the pool, I think you'll you'll likely be hooked. [01:25:02] Speaker B: And the book that I just read is angel down, which is a novel that recently came out. It won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and it's about a angel that is discovered on the battlefield having fallen from heaven during World War I during the Meuse Argonne campaign. It's not a science fiction novel, but it is magical realism, so to speak. And, and it attempts to, in the same way, use a inexplicable event to raise questions about the way we perceive war. And angel down is very different than the Forever War. I'm not prepared to compare them, but that was on my bedside table these past couple weeks. [01:25:44] Speaker A: Well, that brings us to the end of episode three. At this point, I think I would issue what will probably become a standard request. If you're enjoying this podcast, if you're enjoying the MWI Book Club, if you've listened to now all three episodes, tell others about it. We we hope that this becomes a resource for others who agree with us that reading is fundamentally linked to the military profession. We also hope we change the minds and convert some people to that idea. So if you're enjoying it, please please share it. We are going to try to start doing a better job than we've done with the first couple episodes about previewing what books we have coming up and letting listeners know so that they can read ahead of time and then listen to this discussion from that perspective. Having read the book, Theo, can you give us a preview of what we've got coming up over the next few months? You mentioned Haji Marat by Tolstoy is our October 1 episode. What comes after that? [01:26:43] Speaker B: We are reading Haji Marat by Tolstoy, this story of the counterinsurgency, so to speak, in the Caucasus fought by the Russians in the middle of the 19th century. We're going to move on to Project Maven, a non fiction book about the integration of artificial intelligence into war fighting Today by Katrina Manson. And we are going to wrap up with a A December Read, A Christmas Read almost by John Steinbeck. We usually know him for his writing about Great Depression America, but he also wrote a novella about World War II 1942 called the Moon is Down, set in Scandinavia. That will be our December read and we we hope you join us for all three. If there's a book that you think we should be reading, reach out to us. We're both available over email and there's a presence on social media as well. Either way, thank you so much for listening to this discussion and we hope you join us next time for a read of Haji Murat by Leo Tolstoy in October. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks for listening to the MWI Book Club. [01:27:58] Speaker A: If you enjoyed the this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss future episodes. [01:28:04] Speaker B: And please take just a second and leave a rating or review, which really helps new listeners to find us. [01:28:10] Speaker A: And one last thing, what you heard in this episode are our own views and don't reflect those of West Point, the Army, or any other agency of the US Government. [01:28:18] Speaker B: Thanks again.