53 pages • 1 hour read
The Forever War
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Chapters 28-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary
Now a major in command of his own strike force, Mandella reports to Stargate for “indoctrination and education” (181). He is immersed in an oxygenated fluorocarbon bath and hooked up to a virtual reality computer, from which he learns “the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb” plus millennia of military theory (182). After two weeks of rehabilitation following his “education,” Mandella meets Colonel Kynock, his temporal orientation officer. They discuss the past few centuries of Earth history—a cycle of improvements followed by regressions. Kynock also brings up Mandella’s psychological profile—he’s a pacifist who has killed, which results in a sort of cognitive dissonance that causes him to transfer “the burden of guilt to the Army” (187). In short, he has the potential to be a good officer, but that potential is so far unfulfilled. Kynock also cautions Mandella that his entire strike force—as well as nearly everyone on Earth—is gay (heterosexuality is considered an “emotional disfunction”), and his psych profile suggests he is not as tolerant as he thinks he is. Also, a genetic revolution has taken place on Earth where babies are “quickened” in artificial wombs, but only when someone dies, keeping the population relatively stable.
Chapter 29 Summary
In 2458, Earth society is quite different. After a newborn is quickened, they are nurtured and educated in a creche until age 12, at which point they are assigned a job or allowed to continue their education. Everyone is drafted into military service at age 20. Onboard his ship, Mandella has reservations about his second-in-command, Lieutenant Hilleboe. He prefers a more relaxed, open-door policy for his soldiers, while Hilleboe enforces a strict, chain-of-command discipline. Mandella informs his enlisted personnel of their mission: to build and occupy a base on the largest portal planet orbiting the Sade-138 collapsar, a planet outside the Milky Way galaxy and the farthest outpost yet established in the war. After preparing his troops for the eventuality of live combat, he meets with his senior officers. He asks if his heterosexuality will be a problem. They assure him it will not, although he admits to feeling confused over how to deal with people socially.
Chapter 30 Summary
Mandella tours the starship—the Masaryk II—that will transport them to Sade-138, a 20-month series of collapsar jumps. His executive officer (XO), Captain Moore, warns Mandella that Hilleboe could be a problem, fearing she might try to subvert his authority. As the crew prepares for hibernation in the acceleration tanks, Mandella and Moore explore the navigation room. The officer in charge explains the potential hazards of a tiny computer miscalculation, especially since the Sade-138 collapsar is in another galaxy. Getting lost could set them back months in ship time but 150,000 years in Earth time. He then tours the armory. All weapons are stored in a “stasis field” that renders them inert during high-speed maneuvering. The stasis field also functions as a highly efficient weapon, killing anything that becomes trapped within it.
Inside the acceleration tank bay, Mandella finds a sergeant with a pet cat, a crew mascot of sorts, specially modified to withstand 25 gees of pressure. Although he hates cats, he lets them keep it because it’s good for morale. They make their first collapsar jump and emerge from the tanks 10 days later with no sense of the passage of time.
Chapter 31 Summary
Within a week after their first jump, one of the enlisted men is distilling alcohol, and one of the sergeants creates an underground economy based on the buying and selling of it. When Mandella finds out, he allows it to continue so long as no one is impaired on duty. When Diana Alsever, the company doctor, gets drunk on the homemade alcohol, she passes out in Mandella’s quarters. Meanwhile, Mandella deals with discipline issues and language barriers—English has changed in the centuries since Mandella was first drafted, and the platoon has to learn 21st-century English to communicate with him, one of several causes of resentment.
After a series of jumps, they arrive at Sade-138 and discover a suitable planet on which to establish a base. The cold temperatures and thin hydrogen/helium atmosphere make movement slippery and dangerous. Four members of the platoon die during construction. The base is defended by a massive arsenal of lasers, landmines, tachyon grenades, and even archaic hand weapons like swords and spears. Once construction is complete, the platoon establishes a duty roster with short periods of rest allowed outside the base.
After five weeks of relative peace, violence breaks out between two soldiers. Even discipline and counseling fail to quell the fighting. Mandella decides to banish the more aggressive of the two, Private Graubard, to the orbiting Masaryk II, but as he is announcing his decision to the platoon, Graubard attacks him. Although Mandella is injured in the attack, he disables Graubard with a well-timed kick to the solar plexus.
Chapter 32 Summary
As commander, Mandella is well within his rights to execute Graubard. His executive officers advise him to delegate the job, but Mandella worries about the implications of “getting somebody else to do my moral dirty work” (220). They assure him that doing it himself would be an abrogation of his authority. While they debate possible methods of execution, Graubard is wheeled into the medical bay on a gurney after an attempted suicide. Despite Alsever’s attempts to save him, Graubard dies. Mandella, however, suspects the doctor has injected him with something. He has no evidence, and Alsever won’t admit it, so he lets it go, grateful he has been relieved of the obligation. Rumors that Mandella has ordered Graubard’s execution persist, however, giving him a newfound respect within the ranks.
As time passes and the routine becomes drudgery, Mandella occupies his time with physical activity, but the root of his discontent is clear: He yearns for Margay. The company therapist argues that he is too rigid in his choice of partner and that what he really needs is simple, uninhibited sex. Mandella, however, clings to the romantic notion of love above all else.
Chapters 28-32 Analysis
With a promotion and an entire strike force under his command, Mandella feels the pressures and obligations of leadership for the first time. On the grunt side of the command chain, Mandella could indulge in easy criticism of his superiors, dismissing their orders as bureaucratic hackwork. Now, as a full major, Mandella finds himself doing things by the book and accepting his platoon’s resentment as a matter of course. He tries, however, to find a suitable middle ground between aloofness and fraternization, something less rigid than his former commanding officer Stott, yet more respectful to his authority than the Marxist militias of the Spanish Civil War (military history he has retained from his three-week education and orientation). For the first time, he feels the responsibility of life and death, an obligation he fears he is not suited for. In Mandella’s moral quandary, Haldeman suggests that effective leadership requires a certain cold-blooded detachment, the ability to throw subordinates’ lives into the jaws of death without blinking. Moral equivocation, while soothing to the conscience, can disrupt the fabric of unit cohesion. When Mandella wrestles with whether to execute Graubard, his XO Moore responds, “You should have killed the bastard outright” (221). While Mandella favors a more indulgent approach—he has an open-door policy for every soldier—he fears it may undermine company discipline, and he is inwardly grateful for Lieutenant Hilleboe’s more hardline attitude. Mandella struggles with an age-old conundrum: how to prioritize discipline without destroying morale. One keeps the troops happy while the other may keep them alive.
Through it all, the heartache of losing Margay weighs ever more heavily on him. The passage of time has revealed him to be a romantic surrounded by a culture that dismisses love as a quaint anachronism. In many ways, The Forever War is a story of one man’s struggles to adapt to a changing world. Time dilation, a complex principle of physics as well as a clever narrative device, preserves Mandella’s youth while the Earth centuries pass, leaving him alone in a sea of shifting cultural tides. Many Vietnam veterans came home to a domestic landscape they didn’t recognize. While World War II veterans were celebrated with ticker tape parades and the GI Bill, many Vietnam vets were scorned for their participation in an immoral war. The 1960s was one of the most turbulent decades in American history. Protests for civil rights and against the war—indeed, against many aspects of American life that had been considered sacrosanct—fractured much of the social structure that Americans assumed were rock solid. Veterans returning from Vietnam were struggling with not only the trauma of war but the added trauma of a splintered society at home. Mandella’s plight is tragically analogous. While the tropes of lightspeed travel, nova bombs, and genetic engineering give the narrative its sci-fi cred, the character of William Mandella, struggling alone against the cruel passage of time, gives the story an emotional resonance that is its timeless anchor.
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