Coming of Age
The novel is often categorized within its larger science fiction genre as an example of military Bildungsroman. These are stories (such as The Red Badge of Courage) in which the hero’s movement for innocence to experience is situated within the construct of enlisting in the military and fighting in war. Because of the science fiction elements, the novel becomes a rather extreme example of demonstration this theme as its protagonist makes the trek from raw recruit to attaining a high military ranking as the oldest survivor of the ongoing war despite taking only four years in his personal timeline to make that trip from innocence to experience.
The Vietnam War
Allegorical allusions thematically infuse the story despite it futuristic settings and trappings of time travel. The forever war against the Taurans recreate the social circumstances of the war America fought against North Vietnam throughout the 1960’s and the first half of the 1970’s. The soldiers are alienated from life back home, from each other, and from the politics of the engagement in a way that adheres perfectly to the sense of isolation experienced by soldiers fighting in Vietnam. The war is also perpetrated for murky reasons never adequately explained for most of the time it lingers on which is again one of the defining characteristics of the war in Vietnam which ultimately made it so controversial and unpopular. The time travel dislocation in which soldiers age at normal rates while returning home to an earth that has progressed by decades since they left also replicates the sense of being out-of-sync that afflicted many Vietnam War veterans upon coming home.
The Military is Inherently Dehumanizing
The legend of the origin of The Forever War is that it was partially composed in response to and as a reaction against Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Not literarily—the author is on record as greatly admiring Heinlein’s novel—but thematically. The central historical element which defines the gap between the publication of Heinlein’s novel and the publication of Haldeman’s is precisely that stretch of time in which the war in Vietnam commenced and began grinding to an end. Over the course of those fifteen years Joseph Heller published Catch-22 and Robert Altman adapted the film version of MASH.
The view toward war being a glorious thing which made boys into men and men into heroes had been eclipsed by a more pessimistic if realistic realization that war actually turned humans into killing machines and a military was only as efficient as its success in turning individuals into a collective entity serving the same mindset without questioning authority or purpose. What Haldeman’s novel did was simply take this prevailing attitude from mainstream literature to situate into the generic conventions of science fiction so that this dehumanization could be made literal through the introduction of clone technology.
