Joe Haldeman is a great writer. His novel, The Forever War, is an amazing piece of satire on the Vietnam War, comparable to Catch 22. It happens to be science fiction, but if you don’t read SF don’t let that stop you. You’ll be missing out.
I heard that Joe will be in a documentary on Iraq war veterans on April 16 on PBS. It’s called "Operation Homecoming" (part of the series "America at a Crossroads") and it tells the tale of the war through the words of soldiers. The trailer is on YouTube, and it looks to be a powerful show.
Joe is a veteran of Vietnam Nam, and much of his work is based on his experience there. His writing influenced me when I was in high school, and I got a chance to meet him once or twice at conventions and such. He’s a good guy (and his wife, Gay, is maybe even nicer than he is, which is saying something). Someday I’ll write a good, detailed name-dropping post about them. It’s a funny story.
But anyway, I’ll be watching "Operation Homecoming" if I can. It really does look very good.
April 8th, 2007 at 8:22 am
I’m lucky enoughto know Joe and Gay … they live here in Gainesville for much of the year. Everything BA says is true.
April 8th, 2007 at 11:00 am
I read many years ago that Mr. Haldeman and Robert Heinlein first met sometime after the initial publication of The Forever War, and some in the we-think-we’re-smarter-than-we-really-are contingent thought that Mr. Heinlein would be frosty to Haldeman for taking his powered-armor soldiers in a different direction then Heinlein did in Starship Troopers. As it turned out, Heinlein was cordial, and complemented Haldeman for making clear “the evil of conscription.”
April 8th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Just gotta chime in and agree that The Forever War is an outstanding book. One of my favorite sci-fis. I’ve been planning to read it a second time but never gotten around to it.
April 8th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
If you can’t get around to re-reading the actual novel, you might want to try out the three-part graphic novel adaptation of The Forever War. Won’t take as long to read (picture’s worth a thousand words, and all that), and I thought it was pretty good.
April 8th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Joe and Gay are some of my favorite people in the world. They offer practical advice and are always fun to be around. And Joe’s a great writer, I’ve enjoyed his works.
April 8th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
I loved The Forever War. I had no idea it was a satire on the Vietnam war, though.
April 9th, 2007 at 6:43 am
David K mentions “the evil of conscription.” If he means that having a draft is a bad thing, I would like to show another perspective. I am a veteran of the sixties, and my outfit had dozens of kids from the wealthiest homes in America. I had four different roommates whose fathers were unbelievable movers and shakers in business and on Wall Street, and all of these young men were graduates of schools such as Yale, MIT, Harvard, Rutgers, and so on. But not one of them would join today’s army because there is no draft to fear. And so we now have a modern army of robots, so to speak, that will go anywhere and do anything that it is told, whereas the army of those days was filled with young men who protested, resisted, and called home and told their dads to call their senators. And senators had sons who faced the draft as well, and this caused a lot more pause and thought than we have today when the whole process is so impersonal. Yes, the draft became a horrible tool for our power-mad, short-sighted politicians of those days, but it also resulted in a a lot more veteran-protestors, which I like to think helped stop the debacle.
I’m about as patriotic as a toad, but I do believe that if you reap the rewards of a decent country, you should pay something other than your taxes, and to me that means every person in this country who is not a quadraplegic should give some time to a civilian or military corps, whether to plant trees or stand guard. Today, young people are too much like the wealthy who own dogs (and children) and who have someone else clean up their messes. They are disconnected from much of the reality of life and political decisions, and indifferent to the pain of so much of the world. A couple of years spent in the service provides insights that a thousand hours on the internet can never bring. And, now, let’s turn to page 47 in our songbooks…….obesa cantavit.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I realize that it’s been referred to as satire, but The Forever War didn’t read that way to me. Commentary, most certainly, but satire?
April 9th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Vietnam Nam?…
April 9th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Awesome novel. Loved the ‘Forever War’ - Haldeman is a great writer, no doubt of that at all.
Wish that was being made into a movie too ..
Hmnn.. lets see though :
Vietnam, based on a dodgy theory of international relations, pushed by black-heareted, profiteering ideologues, America needlessly invades a distant third-world nation that posed no real threat to it in a wasteful, stupid, counter-productive war causing enormous suffering and a devasting legacy to both sides.
Bay of Pigs, Cuba, based on dodgy intelligence, ridiculously optimistic forecasts and a bunch of self-interested ideologues, America invades a nation that posed no real threat to it and suffering a humiliating defeat in a attack that should never have been launched and which was never going to work.
Iraq, based on the beliefs of neo-Fascists calling themselves “conservatives” justified on outright falsified and distorted “intelligence”, America needlesslyand counter-productively invades a nation that posed it (& others) no real threat. Thiscreates abloodbathand awhole new theatre of war that destabilised thergiopn, cost zillions of $ and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives along with three thousand and counting US dead.
You know there’s a bit of a pattern developing here. A few points need making about it that should really be pretty obvious but obviously aren’t :
1) We haven’t learnt from our mistakes. We *really* need to stop reapeating thesame old error.
2) Whenever “leaders” motivated by self-interest &/or profit,religion (incl. the cult of Israel which is giving Jews a bad name worldwide) or some BS political theories say “lets invade this place on the other side of the planet that has nothing to do with us” - dion’t trust ‘em. They’re wrong. Indeed, NOT only are they wrong; they are downright evil & deserve to be promptly removed from power & kept out of it until they’ve changed totally. You (Americans & everyone else) simply DO NOT have the right to go around invading whichever land you dislike - & it almost (99.9999 % of the time) always does more harm than good. Or to put in a way that even George ‘Shrubya” the Second II can get it :
JUST LEAVE OTHER COUNTRIES THE HELL ALONE!
3) Perhaps the best idea is for the self-declared “peace-loving” USA (along with other nations) to adopt the clause you forced in Japan’s post WWII constitition : No war, only the right to self defence - & that’s strict self defence when attacked by others none of this “Pre-emptive” hitting them back first nonsense. Then you could disarm significantly, improve your diplomatic ties with many natiosn wholoathe thebullying you’veengaged in previously and actually spend money on decent things like science, medical programmes, ending povery and space exploration rather than wasting it on killing innocent children, women & men, your own troops and the occassional “Enemy”.
Just think if all nations adopted that clause and stuck to it; if a reformed and properly organised and democratic United Nations was the sole enforcing power for international law and applied it equally & consistently, eg. to the Israelis as much as the Iranians and the USA as much as China - We’d sure be a lot better off than we can possibly imagine now! While we may never create Utopia, we can -anmd I think must - always strive to get closer to it than we are now ..
If you want a solution to global problems - well, there’s one I’d say is worth very serious consideration!
—-
BTW. Feel free to quote & forward this elsewhere everyone, I’d love to see this message spread ..
April 9th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Be nice if we could edit the posts here Phil!
April 10th, 2007 at 8:10 am
While the Forever War is a wonderful novel, very little else that he’s written is worth the effort. It’s possible that Forever War sets one up for disappointment but honestly the sequel is flat out awful.