But this war … the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional — more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.
That the novel draws an allegorical parallel between its own forever war and the Vietnam War has never once been in doubt or subject for contention. Throughout the narrative, the allegory is made manifest and demonstrable. Any number of quotes could be extricated within context to highlight this thematic aspect of the story, but few are so easily adaptable when taken out of context as this one. In fact, with just a minor alteration to the number of years and the number of returning veterans one could read this quote completely divorced from any context whatever and easily enough leap to the conclusion it is derived from a literary work referring explicitly to the social conditions surrounding the controversial war in Vietnam.
`Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.’ The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant. I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy.
In concert with its thematic standing as a thematic allegory about the Vietnam War is the novel’s post-Catch-22 perspective toward the idea of the conventions of war literature. The Vietnam War changed everything about how military training and being a soldier was presented in fiction with the anti-establishment tone of Heller’s anachronistic World War II satire leading the way toward making it suddenly acceptable to suggest there was no automatic correlation between being an officer and being intelligent or that war is a glorious opportunity to prove heroism through blind devotion.
As the reality that brutality during wartime could be committed by our side just as easily as the other, the door opened to finally admitting the entire point of the military is to turn nice young mentally stable men into pathological killing machines with the expectations that once they returned home they could go back to normal. That may have worked out well when the home soldiers returned to was pretty much the same one they left, but such was the not case with Vietnam veterans and that disconnect is made even more extreme through the novel’s science fiction tropes of time travel.
Many of the early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The ex-military men were suspicious. They armed the colonizing vessels, and the first time they met a Tauran ship, they blasted it. They dusted off their medals and the rest was going to be history. You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.
It is only late in the novel and more than millennia since the war with the Taurans began that Mandella finally discovers what he’s been fighting for all along: propping up Earth’s economy. The war began as a simple mistake attributable to the controlling emotion of the military mindset: paranoia. An effect was imprinted upon a cause that aligned with preferred expectations at the expense of serious analysis of potential alternatives. This is, of course, yet another very strong parallel with the Vietnam War in which those insisting that all the political justifications being given for the necessity of conducting a war so far away from America’s borders were lying were first ignored. Then when they claimed that part of the real reason the war kept going on was to sustain profits for American corporations working within the military-industrial complex, they were ridiculed. Then they were proven right.
