Conscript-to-brutal bootcamp-to-faraway-alien-war. Countless novels have followed this story structure, aping Heinlein’s Starship Troopers with mixed results.

Like me, you might be getting tired of encountering this storyline. Tired of reading what too often turns out to be Full Metal Jacket In Space - Minus The Social Criticism.

If that’s the case, borrow twenty bucks, get to a bookstore and order a copy of The Forever War. This is military-flavoured bootcamp-to-war Science Fiction in its finest form, as refreshing and thought provoking as it no doubt was when it was released in 1974. Like Starship Troopers, this book is a template for the lesser works that have followed it.

The story is a simple one. William Mandella is conscripted and sent to fight in a brutal, bloody war with an alien species. The battles he must fight are so far from Earth that the time-dilation effect of high-speed space travel turns his subjective months at war into years on Earth, his years into decades. Each time he returns to Earth human society has changed further, and Mandella’s is less and less able to fit in, to feel welcome, to feel at home.

From this simple premise Haldeman spins a story of real insight and empathy, an extended allegory for Haldeman’s own war - Vietnam - and the tragedy of soldiers who return from conflicts to find both society and themselves changed so much that the only place they really belong is back on the front lines.
This isn’t a typical blazing-beam-cannons military SF novel. Haldeman doesn’t obsess over laser wattages or projectile calibres, instead focusing his keen writer’s eye on the impact war has upon its participants. Haldeman has explored this territory a number of times, most successfully in All My Sins Remembered and some of his short stories (there’s a real pearler – ‘A Mind of His Own’ in a collection of his work called Infinite Dreams), and he brings an authentic and sensitive voice to his SF. When I found out after reading this book that Haldeman was badly wounded in Vietnam I wasn’t surprised – he writes war in a way I have very rarely seen in SF, less pew-pew!/Kaboom!, and more understanding of the pain and suffering, both physical and otherwise, that soldiers go through.

Haldeman’s novel equals Heinlein’s classic in its social observations and intellectual heft, but in my opinion The Forever War is a more empathetic work, engendering genuine pathos for Mandella and his comrades. It really is a landmark classic of Science Fiction.