Friday, February 16, 2007
Timely traveler
Joe Haldeman wrote "The Forever War" as a metaphor for his experiences as a veteran of the Vietnam War. The war was ongoing as the work was published. Having read it with the benefot of hindsight more than thirty years after the war, how successful was he? And how much do you think the book applies to today's wars and what our vets might be going through?
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8 comments:
I think it applies 100% ... Joe Haldeman's one of the finest writers around. I'm still grateful for the blurb he gave my first novel, The Silk Code.
The world of the novel seemed completely foreign to me. I don't think war is really like that, but I wouldn't really know.
I'm inclined to agree with Mr. Levinson here (despite his shameless plug for his book). I think the war of the novel applies quite well to the Vietnam War or the Iraq War or whatever. The emotions of the soldiers, for instance, and the relationship between the officers and the troops -- that stuff seemed very human and timeless to me.
I also made note of this bit from the end, which some might say parallels today's wars:
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.
The fact was, Earth's economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.
Oh, that's excellent, Erin. That is REMARKABLY like a certain war today. I'd almost say today's war is more like Vietnam than Vietnam was.
Right, all except the unifying humanity part. I suppose we'd have to be attacking aliens for that to happen.
I think it actually applies more than Vietnam. In Haldeman's world, the soldiers returned home to a world that no longer had a place for them. Vietnam vets only had a tour of duty of 12 months, and there conscription terms would be met. Today's war, with a lot of guardsmen making up the troop force, are having to stay in a lot longer than they bargained for, and coming home to find they no longer have a job, leaving the best option as signing up for more duty, kinda like what Mandella ended up doing.
Except that they wouldn't go back if they didn't want to. Veterans of the Iraq war could find a much better job back here if they didn't believe in what they were doing.
I think the analogy still applies to Vietnam because even if the soldiers were only gone for 12 months, they still often returned to find that everything had changed. Their wives now had boyfriends, their children were alienated from them, they had lost friends, they were sometimes reviled and spit on for having served. That's on a personal level, not a global one, but I think that's what Haldeman was getting at.
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