Our Forever Wars

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is a timely novel of remarkable depth, despite its brevity. Its premise is simple: humanity discovers interstellar travel by speeding toward collapsed stars, seemingly covering light-years in moments, though actually with extreme time dilation. War soon breaks out with the Taurans, a strange alien race from near Aldebaran that supposedly attacked human ships.  

William Mandella, a physics student, is conscripted for an elite United Nations task force to fight the Taurans. After returning from what was for him a two-year expedition, he finds that 26 years have passed on Earth. Extensive class wars have led to the abolition of most private property, most are unemployed and living on government income, hunger has been eradicated through technological developments, and many nations encourage homosexuality to control population size and prevent more class conflict. Mandella and his occasional lover Marygay grow closer, sharing a feeling of alienation in a changed world, and eventually reenlist with the promise of a safe posting on Luna. When they quickly receive updated orders to return to combat, Mandella laments that he does not know which is worse: the feeling that this was bound to happen, or that he was returning to the only place he can call home.  

After another tour, Mandella is separated from Marygay, so with time dilation they will likely never see each other again. Mandella throws himself into his military service, the only life he knows now, but he is too different from those under his command, who are all homosexual, ethnically identical, and speak a new form of English. He does not hate these soldiers; in fact, he knows that he is the real “other,” so out of time that he cannot rightfully judge them. Mandella returns from his final tour to learn that his arrival marks the end of the “Forever War.” Mankind had become a fully cloned species that could communicate with the similarly collective Taurans, whose first utterance was a somber “Why?” The Taurans had not initiated the war. Generals had blamed the accidental disappearance of human ships on the aliens to create a war, in order to spur a weak economy. Catharsis does come for Mandella, however, as he eventually reunites with Marygay, who dramatically slowed her aging by continuously jumping between collapsed stars until he returned. But many soldiers do not enjoy such a happy ending to their struggle. 

Many view The Forever War as a foil to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, rejecting its glorification of war. But ultimately, it is an expression of Haldeman’s experience fighting in the Vietnam War, which shares obvious similarities with the novel’s conflict. Both wars started with spurious ideological justifications and economic greed. Both dragged on for many years with no real goal beyond attrition. Both ended with no meaningful change other than lives lost. Both destroyed the lives of many veterans while alienating them from normal society. These forever wars are most damaging because they persist without any conception of what victory looks like. An oft-parroted and more often mocked phrase from American generals in the late 1960s was that they could see a “light at the end of the tunnel,” satisfactory exit from Vietnam. But America did not fully exit the country until 1975. 

Much of the same can be said about American involvement in Afghanistan. After our twenty years of fighting and attempting to build a stable government and capable army, Kabul fell in less than ten days amid an embarrassingly haphazard American exit. And the persistent ineptitude of the Afghan army, from general incompetence to its notorious failure to address child sexual abuse, signifies both a lack of good management and a deep cultural divide that ridiculous amounts of time and resources could never bridge. Did anything substantively change over the course of this conflict, or was it another forever war? This seems to be a story that repeats itself. I was eleven months old when America entered Afghanistan; the conflict lasted almost until my graduation from college. I knew people who were born and passed away in that same period.  

An Afghanistan veteran once joked with me that “we fought to protect poppy fields, and we came home and became addicted to prescription opioids.” War always profoundly affects the individuals involved. Haldeman’s story is most valuable as a reflection on this tragic human element. There is usually no happy ending for those veterans who return home battered and broken. Society often rejects them, or has become unrecognizable to them. America should not allow wars to drag on forever due to moneyed interests or vapid ideology. And for the veterans, who have given their all for these protracted conflicts, the least we can do is be compassionate.  

Time’s Coronation

The R.M.S. Titanic’s story is a familiar one. The flagship of England’s White Star Line, Titanic was the largest moving object in history when it set sail in 1912, only to strike an iceberg and sink on its maiden voyage, claiming the lives of more than two-thirds of those on board. The ship was as magnificent as its sinking was tragic. It was luxuriously furnished with a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a Turkish bath, a squash court, and numerous common rooms designed to evoke the Palace of Versailles. It was also a technological marvel, equipped with an electrical plant stronger than most cities employed and a remotely activated bulkhead system with watertight doors. The Titanic’s passenger list complemented its extravagance, boasting famous names like Astor and Guggenheim. 

Mark Twain satirically labeled this era “The Gilded Age,” and the French remembered it as “La Belle Époque,” “the beautiful time.” It was a time of boldness and decadence, innovation and pride, where relative peace following the Civil War in America and the Franco-Prussian War on the European continent enabled rapid industrialization and cultural development. Exponential improvement was the faith of this era, with men believing their creations could match, or even surpass, God’s and allow resolute mastery of the world. Of course, these optimistic sentiments were often real only for the upper classes. While some reaped the benefits of this economic prosperity, most toiled for a pitiful wage and many demanded change to ameliorate their miserable conditions. On the Titanic, a few enjoyed lavish staterooms, while many impoverished immigrants packed into crowded and noisy steerage cabins, although they were still leagues ahead of most other offerings.

“Titanic as Gilded Age,” emphasizing the class component of the disaster, is a tired trope, true but exhaustingly explored. Ultimately, neither rich nor poor could predict the ship’s sinking. Both wealthy and destitute passengers believed in some form of civilizational progress, the former enjoying a comfortable ocean crossing impossible a hundred years before, and the latter searching for better lives that only the New World could provide. Few believed this progress would stop; fewer predicted it would stop in such a spectacular fashion. Two pieces of fiction did imagine such a disaster, both emphasizing a lack of enough lifeboats to save passengers. One of the authors actually died on the Titanic. 

And so, the tragedy was an unfathomable event in a world that crowned man master of all, limited only by his whim and wonder. The claim that the Titanic was an “unsinkable” ship, likely offhand bravado, ultimately cemented the disaster’s legacy as a testament to mankind’s hubris in this age of limitless possibilities. It was almost as if nature had intervened to humble mankind. The Titanic’s sinking heralded an age of immense uncertainty and incredible loss, the resulting disbelief surpassed only by the First World War, which erupted little more than two years later. As Titanic survivor Jack Thayer wrote, the disaster “was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start – keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction, and happiness.”

Historians often wonder whether an event represents change or continuity. In many ways, the Titanic’s sinking signifies change. Its place in historical memory is worth considering. When the ship sank, more than 1,500 people went into the cold Atlantic, so frigid that Thayer purportedly compared it to a thousand knives stabbing you at once. Recovery teams found only about a fifth of the victims’ bodies; most were lost to the sea forever. And few tangible records of the Titanic’s fateful voyage survived. Notably, a vacationing Catholic priest, Father Francis Browne, took numerous photographs of life on the ship before he departed at its penultimate stop, his superior having ordered him back. The photos are endlessly fascinating. Father Browne took one of the last known pictures of the ship, and likely the last one of its captain, Edward J. Smith, ominously peering down from a higher deck, the photograph itself taken at such a jarringly sharp angle that it looks like Titanic is already sinking.

The wreck lay undisturbed for more than 70 years, until a 1985 expedition led by Robert Ballard finally located the watery grave, more than two miles below the ocean’s surface and remarkably preserved. Humans had gone where no man should go, piercing the void and granting the majestic ship an audience once again. Ballard’s team knew they were on the right track when they entered a debris field, first spotting a boiler on the ocean floor on their grainy video feed. The next day, the Titanic’s bow emerged from the darkness. Later expeditions extensively photographed the area. The debris field looks like a battleground, with anything the depths’ primordial creatures could not devour strewn about as if a bomb had gone off. Yet it is strangely peaceful. A bottle of champagne remains unopened, a stack of dishes unbroken, and a lifeboat davit still attached to the ship. Most poignantly, matching boots sit next to each other in the sediment, where their owner came to rest more than one hundred years ago.

But the Grand Staircase’s ornate carving, “Honour and Glory Crowning Time,” is lost forever, having either immediately splintered during the ship’s plummet or gradually disintegrated over time. Judging from its supposedly identical companion on the Titanic’s sister ship Olympic, the carving was beautiful, and its allegorical value rich. Even if its practical purpose was to hold a clock, what does it mean for time to be “crowned,” especially in an age of limitless possibility when mankind’s progress seemed inevitable? Maybe the carving meant that despite this progress, man and his creations are ultimately temporary, subject to forces greater than ourselves. For the Titanic, which will eventually fade into a pile of rust, time has ultimately prevailed, recording the exception to progress that nature had forced.