The Chilling Reality of the Forever War | Is This Humanity's Future?

When I came back from Afghanistan, at 3am I flew into Boston and was greeted by a group of Vietnam vets saluting and shaking our hands. These vets told us they wanted to make sure no soldier came home ungreeted like they were. It made me cry then and it makes me cry now.

Actually, we in the industrial complex prefer the term "Sustainable War" as it is more accurate to our long-term goals.

There was a serious brain drain too. Soldiers needed to be smarter due to the conditions of a war in space. Our smartest sent off to die.

Little tidbit is Heinlein loved reading the Forever War and personally congratulated Haldeman receiving his Nebula award.

I am a native Vietnamese with family and relatives from both sides of the civil war, and have experienced life both in Vietnam where I grew up and in the US. I read The Forever War during a period of great but also traumatic emotional development. I can relate in an odd way to the main character of this book, and by extension Haldeman himself. Great read, i always revisit the book once a year. P.s. I did not grow up during wartime, my parents were children in the waning years of the war. However the impact of the war was still felt in someway by children of that generation. Some families, from both sides, came out of it worse than others. And some children have inherited more inter-generational trauma than others.

Haldeman's character became a "regular" due to a total lack of ability to reintegrate. Most of my generation who served (I just turned 75) pulled one tour of duty and then took the dive back into society...with mixed results. I turned 21 a month after my enlistment in the Corps up. I looked 14... Entering college was an adjustment in the Fall of 1970... Not a "hostile" campus environment...but alien for all that... The people who graduated from high school in the Spring of 1970 and moved directly to college very different from so many who graduated in 1967. . In 1965 a Marine infantry squad leader (Sgt.) might have been 24 or 25... In 1969 he might be 19 or even 18. War not only inflates the currency...but also the leadership. The Corps went from 170,000 in 1965 to 300,000 in 1968. "War is boyish...and is fought by boys..." Herman Melville YP

I think it can be hard for some of us to really understand how radical some of these ideas were, because of how obvious they are to us. Yes, TFW's handling off sexuality is crude, awkward, and ultimately selfdefeating. But the simple fact that it wasn't "gay=bad" was radical for its time. We should also try to keep in mind that the audience he was writing for wasn't used to this message, and may have needed to have it repeated, just to be able to hear it.

Multiple time GWOT veteran. I related to this after so many deployments. The war had no end in sight and we kept being sent right back. The GWOT was the Forever War.

The Forever War has always been my favorite SF novel. I'm also fortunate enough to have had Joe Haldeman as a professor during the years he taught writing at MIT. A great book, and a great man. Haldeman fun fact: after having been wounded twice in Viet Nam, he was shot again in Florida while riding a bike along the highway.

I first read this in the early 80's. My brother was a big scifi/fantasy reader and first handed me Starship Trooper. I thought it was great and then he handed me Forever War afterwards. Forever War blew me away. I enjoyed Starship Trooper, but saw how shallow it was compared to Forever War. It was my first encounter with time dilation. I loved this concept in science fiction.

Sexuality themes aside, Forever War suddenly reminded me of one of my favorite (and first) sci-fi universes: Battletech. The setting itself is designed to perpetuate war and alienation as a theme which crops us like weeds in every aspect from the novels to the games. Humans merge with machines to become gods, nation states form, split and cannibalize each other like a forest of bacteria under a microscope. In at least one story arc, the descendants of a great war hero self-isolate to avoid being caught in a pending series of civil wars, only to then return to the setting hundreds of years later as a techno-eugenics cult with bizarre customs hell-bent on reconquering the Earth. Who needs aliens when humanity does a splendid job of making aliens of itself?

Always interesting to find a video which hasn't been out long enough for someone to have watched the entire thing yet

"In the grim Darkness of the far future, there is only war."

Glad to see Joe Haldeman getting coverage on this channel. One of the first sci-fi writers I read, and still one of my favorites. A gritty, brutal, cynical take on war.

I served in Bosnia . Alienation affects most soldiers to some degree. I am forever stuck in 1997.

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope." -Smedley Butler

Once you have Starship Troopers and The Forever war covered, the next steps are The Eternity Brigade and John Steakley’s Armor.

Excellent review as always Quinn. I read this book, of all ironic places, when I was deployed in Iraq in 2016. I found this in a drawer of a desk at our company headquarters and read it over the course of two days and loved it. I had no idea that Haldermann was a veteran himself but I can certainly see it now in his writings. i also didn't know the inspiration for the book was the Vietnam war, but it is clear as day to me now. Thank you for reviewing this. Keep up the good work man!

As a vet with 32yrs of service, thank you. This was an excellent analogy.

Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" from 1999 also follows a society of spider people. His novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" 1992 (same series) explores a medieval society of distributed intellects for whom one 'person' is distributed across several creatures in a pack. I highly recommend Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought series for its exploration of both time dilation at sub-FTL travel and his exploration of how non-human intelligences might think and act.