One (admittedly facile) way of taking the easy shorthand way of analyzing Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is to draw an analogy. The Forever War is to Starship Troopers what Apocalypse Now is to any John Wayne war movie. Yes, that is an especially simplistic comparison, but strip away enough of the tangential material and it is a fairly accurate portrait of what is left. One novel glorifies the military, patriotic devotion and war as a means of settling a clear and distinct dispute while the other sees it as a never-ending meaningless nightmare.
The novel has often been analyzed through the prism of being a direct counter to the themes and ideas expressed in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but in reality that is the superficial analysis. The comparison to Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war epic holds much more water not in the sense that both the novel and the film are reactions to the politics and psychology (and in Haldeman’s case, the experience) of a seemingly simple engagement into a never-ending war that defied all attempts at explanation and justification.
The title of Haldeman’s science fiction exploration of a Vietnam War allegory says it all. What if a war lingered on so long for soldiers that the world in which they were fighting was disconnected from the world they left by not just space but time. Upon returning home after battle involving the effects of time travel, for the soldiers it is still simply a two-year hitch, while back home on earth things have progressed by decades or centuries. Of course, this is exactly the situation many Vietnam soldiers returning home seemed to experience. America in 1968 was not the same country it had been in 1966 and it goes without saying that those who re-enlisted and served multiple tours came home to a country significantly different from the one they left behind. The story Haldeman tells in his space opera takes this idea to a hyperbolic extreme, of course, but the emotional foundation remains excruciatingly similar.
And then there are those tangential elements which serve to cement the parallel. Rather than the bonding experience for comrades-in-arms which is the heart of Starship Troopers and John Wayne war movies, The Forever War replicates the alienation and isolation that comes with killing enemies in battle for reasons that are never made clear to you. In addition, every effort was made by the folks back home in the real World War II (the one that John Wayne notably did not appear in) to keep connected with soldiers overseas as grounded as possible. The lapse in the time-space continuum which allows the war against the Taurans to go on forever makes this impossible and adds to disconnect between the world of war and the world back home. The failure to create and maintain a systematic support system connecting soldiers serving in Vietnam with a unified America served to engender the same sense of an isolation and alienation as if living in two different universes.
The definitive parallel linking the forever war against the Taurans with the war against North Vietnam is the discovery that it all started as a result of a dangerous commingling of intellectual misperception and political calculation inevitably fusing into deceptive corruption easily twisted into misplaced patriotism.
