Timewaster's Guide Archive
Departments => Books => Topic started by: The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers on November 10, 2005, 03:37:19 PM
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reference: http://www.timewastersguide.com/view.php?id=1196
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A few comments:
1. I do not consider Starship Troopers "the other great Sci-Fi War book", as if there were no great Sci-Fi books apart from Starship Troopers and The Forever War
2. At this point, Population trends seem to be such that overpopulation will never be a problem - it is expected that the earth's population will cap at somewhere between 10 and 15 billion people. (www.overpopulation.com is one good resource for information on overpopulation and demographic trends).
I'm also curious how women in the military fail to procreate and why this procedure could not have been adopted on the earth so that homosexuality would have been unnecessary…
Some brands of Sci-Fi just rub me the wrong way, I fear.
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I'm pretty sure that Joe Haldeman would be upset if he knew we were calling him Hoe Haldeman. We can really claim to know nothing about his social and/or work habits.
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Did Eric write Hoe?
Arrrgghhh!!!
Interesting comments. I feel like I should address a few.
1. Like it or not, Starship Troopers is a universally and phenominally popular Sci-fi war book. While there are plenty of Sci-Fi war books, only a few are considered "great" Although I may conceed and slide Enders Game up and expand it to a top 3.
2.Considering the book was written in the mid 70's when population problems were considered an issue its not a horrible point. Plus overpopulation is still a popular debate in the scientific community. Future society with future tech may squeeze more people into less space than the human mind could possibly take.
3. The allegory was less about the actual homosexuality and more about the alienness of coming back to a home where everything had changed. It was a common experience for vietnam vets (and the author Haldeman was one) Mainly I think the author intended it to have more shock value than anything. Especially taking in to account a mid 70's Sci-fi fanbase that was coming to grips with Sci-fi of the 60's.
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On the surface that plot seems very similar to the plot of Starship troopers except that’s where Haldeman decided to diverge wildly from the bright eyed patriotism of Heinlen. Haldemans soldiers are bright, thinking humans who aren’t particularly enthused about being in the Army, they cry when friends die, they space out, do drugs, and disassociate themselves from the horror in their lives.
I'm intrigued that you think Heinlein's soldiers were not bright or emotionally involved in their lives. Is it because they were portrayed as having "bright eyed patriotism" that you think they were stupid and unfeeling? Or is it that they volunteered that marks them as stupid?
Not having read the book I can't say with any authority but from what you describe, the difference between the Taurans and the Bugs is the fact that the bugs bombed Earth and the Taurans didn't. Kind of a telling point if you're going to compare the two.
From your description "The Forever War" sounds like just another anti-soldier diatribe. I'm surprised that didn't bug you, being a volunteer in the military and all.
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The "bright eyed patriotism" in Starship troopers did bother me yes. But the main fault is that Heinlens characters arent all that deep to begin with in lots of his books. Not that I meant to imply that his soldiers were stupid. Id like to think I never implied that at all. But we dont see that side much in Starship troopers, because Heinlen just doesnt give us the time. For him the War is more important than the people, generally, (however there are a few key exceptions.
Starship troopers is a variation on a theme he developed early with an emotionally immature boy eventually surpassing his father (Heinlen has an Oedipal thing)
The reason I didnt hate Forever War for its lack of patriotism is threefold.
1. It was one of the first real sci-fi war books to say ... hey maybe fighting in space isnt all that glorious after all.
2.Real fighting occurs, its bloody, and desperate, and often humans arent fighting with an advantage.
3. Its definately not anti-soldier. It portrays a more accurate soldierly persona, or at least more accurate from my perspective as a soldier than almost every other Sci-fi novel I have read. Sure there are a few changes, mixed genders and free sex at the beginning but mostly they come across as real soldiers. They arent saints, or boy scouts, they dont always do the things they should or want to do, they squnder their money, their leave time, they grumble, but at the end of the day, they get the job done.
It is important to realize that Mandella and his unit arent Volunteers like us Skar, they were drafted. Mandella also has lots of chances to get out of the military, but doesnt and even though the reasons are sometimes complex they are pretty real too.
For instance, I considered mustering out this year, but decided against it because I havent gotten an associates degree yet. Its easier to do that while Im in. Mandella doesnt get out because his degree is now meaningless, (Physics changes a lot in 1500 years) and he will have difficulty getting a job outside of the Army unless he gets training.
I think this book has merit, even as an anti war book because its author brings a sense of realism to the sentiment. Something that is often missed by anit-war writers who have never had to deal with the actual elephant in the room... ie. War.
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The bigger difference between the Taurans and the Bugs is that no human knows what they look like, or anything about them at the beginning of the book.
Also
Spoiler..... (skip if you think you might want to read the book.
Plus untill humans came they had eradicated war in their civilization. They are a hive minded alien race, and were expanding outward into the galaxy.
Humans, also expanding but with worse technolgy lost several ships due to accidents and decided that they had to have been caused by something.
When they came across a Tauran ship they attacked vaporizing it completely a Tauran ship got away in that encounter and very quickly they learned to rearm their civilization.
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Jade, you have to remember that a lot of Sci Fi authors couldn't give tuppence about technology, realism or any of that. It's all about using sci fi to create messages and themes. That's why William Gibson was writing about the internet 2 decades before he ever started using it himself.
Of course, there is some sci fi that doesn't work that way - the Red Mars series, the Transhuman Space setting for GURPS are both examples where the technology and such is carefully thought out.
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the key science element of the novel is sound....
Relativity.
And it changes our idea of intersteller war bigtime. Would we be as quick to fight if we knew we'd come back 20 years later and be close to the same age we left at, while our friends and family aged... or 100 years... or 1000. Not to mention, how do you pay someone for something like that,...
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hoe. that is hilarious.
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Man thats annoying,... I dont think I wrote Hoe, Im positive I wrote Joe...
So I dont know what happened.
Grrr
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I didn't know the names, so I didn't bother correcting them. . . however, "Hoe" has now been changed to "Joe".
At any rate, some of the discussion you bring up here would have done well in the review.
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didnt realize it untill you guys brought it up :)
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It is important to realize that Mandella and his unit aren't Volunteers like us Skar, they were drafted.
Fair enough. And, of course, Vietnam had a lot of drafted soldiers in it, maybe including Haldeman, so that's fair enough for him to be writing about that situation. I just got my back up over the dichotomy (not-bright vs. bright) you presented in those two sentences I quoted. If you didn't mean it that way I withdraw my objection.
Of course, WWI and WWII and the Civil War all had largely drafted armies as well but we don't get the "soldiering is evil" mantra from most books about those wars.
It's probably pretty obvious I have a huge chip on my shoulder about Viet Nam and the largely false impressions touted around by the press and the liberal academic establishment concerning it. Having served in combat in a country where Marijuana and heroin were insanely easy to get (Afghanistan) I can tell you just how likely it is that any actual fighter (thus excluding the remfs who outnumber the fighters something like 8 to 1 and have a penchant for making up macho stories about themselves) would either take drugs or allow those on whom they depended daily for their lives to take them, draftee or not. Not at all likely.
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actually my fathers personal experiences in Vietnam tend to agree with the history as presented by the media and he's a 25 year Veteren with the Silver Star. And having sat through his 10,000 slide show from all the pictures he took in country it got pretty bad. But like everything in military life, it didnt happen all the time. See thats the thing people dont get about the military. Theres a lot of downtime, even when your in the Front. So dad has pictures of stuff that happened in Saigon, that ... well he never showed his mother thats for sure. Now 90% of it was just drinking, but as Morale fell in the last few years of the war things went down the toilet. The Draft was the biggest problem, but also the fact that the war just dragged on and on. 10 years, its a long time, and it wasnt a popular war. Draftees had less of a reason to get behind Vietnam than say Korea or World War II. Since they didnt understand the fight, or why they were there, in fact since they resented being there they got involved in some horrible stuff. The big issue was morale.
To say that the stuff never happened is kind of looking at the later war through blinders. The Army has tons of released documents about the drug trade, and drug problem and crime that exploded after about 1971 in vietnam. Especially the Heroin problem. In fact, its one of the main reasons why the army has lobbied against the draft since the Vietnam war inspite of low recruiting numbers.
Its not at all an isolated occurance either. Alcohol was a huge problem in World War II even on the front line, and the most common offense prosecuted for the duration was in fact drunkeness.
Now that isnt meant to impune the proffesionalism of our military, which beats every standard the world has when it comes to soldiery.
The army, heck the whole military has learned a lot of lessons from vietnam, and soldiers are not only educated about drugs, (and tested for them which is a huge deterrant with a zero tolerance policy) but better trained with a better esprit de corps than the draftees of the end of the Vietnam war ever were.
as an anecdote, my dad and a bunch of other pilots were in some Mamasan bar at 3 am when the company XO came in; they had been drinking since about 4 pm and were all really drunk. The XO walks up to the table and says...
"ok, how many beers did you have" to each man.
He gets the numbers from about half the guys (the rest cant remember or are too drunk to string a sentace together) and then says "Ok, well If you remembered how many beers you had your sober enough to fly, you got a mission at 0600, now get back to base for your briefing."
Not only was going to the Bar off limits anyway and drinking prohibited in the field, but it was doubly taboo for pilots at the time. Course no one ever got UMJ, or administative punishment for it either.
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Its also worth pointing out that there are plenty of people in the military,... most in fact who live by a higher moral code and have strong standards of right and wrong and that has been true from the days of the minutemen up to today.
Im not implying that everyone did drugs,... only asserting that drug use was a problem in the 1970's in the Army. (it became a problem again in Germany in the 1980's)
Alcohol has been and will probably continue to be the militarys greatest foe,... after the enemy of course.
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Alcohol as a problem certainly isn't limited to the military, either.
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Another thing that people tend to forget about war is that everyone has a different experience.
My father was a platoon leader with the 101st in 1967 and 1968. He also won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart. His personal experience disagrees diametrically with the popular history. I'm not saying either your dad or mine was right or wrong in how they remember what went on. Everyone's experience was different.
My beef is that the common perception both percieved and proffered is almost totally one-sided. The mainstream press, who hated the war and the men who fought it for political reasons, almost exclusivel spent their time trading stories with one another in the Saigon bars and writing it home as truth. I've told the Walter Cronkite anecdote on the forum before, if your interested I'll repeat it.
Now, admittedly, your dad's experience as a pilot was totally different from my father's as a line infantryman. While pilots were in no way REMFs they spent their down time where all the REMFs hung out. Not so the grunts.
Nor am I saying that there weren't drugs in VietNam. It just pisses me off that, according to the mainstream press, and hollywood, and academia, being a VietNam vet is synonymous with being a drug addict. Our literature, even the SF that obviously draws heavily on the VietNam experience, always portrays the soldier in VietNam as either a struggling drug addict who hates America and deeply resents being called upon to help with the common defense or someone who is even more noble because he is the rare exception to the rule. It's a wildly skewed perspective and people are still buying it hook line and sinker.
My father volunteered for VietNam and to this day it just kills him that the people he fought and bled for were abandoned by our government because the partisan press was making it harder for them to get re-elected. He understood the war and got behind it. He's not a draftee, I understand the difference. Now ask yourself why the draftees in WWII, who were away from home for far more time than your average VietNam soldier, had such a different attitude.
I submit that many of the vets who had good experiences, like my father, learned not to talk about it because they got sick of being booed down and vilified by the liberals who disagreed with them and the war enough to do things like spray ovencleaner in the faces of returning wounded veterans.
I apologize Jeff. I've reread my posts and they sound like I'm trying to bait you. That's unintentional. Like I said, I just have a huge chip on my shoulder about VietNam and the perception thereof. If the Pro-America propoganda that the press indulged in during WWI and WWII was one end of the spectrum, the anti-soldier/anti-america orgy the press perpetrated during VietNam was at the other. The truth lies in the middle. Maybe someday it will get aired out.
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well he was a pilot his second tour, he was with the 5th SOG in Lang Vei for his 1st (course that was during Khe Sahn)
As for the baiting thing... not a big deal.
But I do think I have a reason that draftees in WWII dealt with the War better than ones in Vietnam. Winning mattered. Not for pride, or national status, but for millions and millions of people all over the world. The Nazi's and Japanese were on the road to mass murder. People could see daily the effects of their "benevolent" rule in the countries they conquored. Ask Nanking how it feels about the Asian Co-prosperity sphere, or Holland or France how they felt about Nazi rule. And it was a real possability here. I very much feel that WWII was a war against evil unleased on the earth... and I think that many people living then understood that fact all too well.
It had to be fought.
Vietnam it can be debated didnt. Vietnam has a vibrant society, and hasnt suffered as bad as we gloomed and doomed it would. Certainly not as badly as Cambodia or Llaos its neighbors. Part of that was that the South Vietnamese government was really that corrupt. Yes communism was bad, but the Domino theory obviously didnt exist. If it had, then our loss in Vietnam would have allowed it to continue to spread. Not that I belive that the current Communist system in Vietnam is all that great,... try being a montagneyard there. Still millions werent sent into the ovens in vietnam and I think a lot of people caught on to that. Of couse hindsight is 20/20 and it can be argued that we didnt know about deathcamps or genocide. Still wars feel a lot closer when they happen near Paris or London or Hawaii than they do when they are by Phnom Pen, or Saigon. Sure there were a lot of Unnamed or alien places in WWII, (it was a world war after all) but the end result was concrete... Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome...
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Im not trying to fight with you though.. just musing outloud.
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Actually it wasn't until very shortly before VE day that the death camps became known. Before that it was scattered reports to high level command, who didn't believe them.
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actually its come out that high command did belive them... but couldnt do anything about it.
but thats just death camps.
The germans did lots of other scary stuff (like attack Russia and take over France)
We knew what the Japanese were doing. The Rape of Nanking, Korea and the Phillipines plus Pearl Harbor did a lot to galvanize us.
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Vietnam it can be debated didnt. Vietnam has a vibrant society, and hasn't suffered as bad as we gloomed and doomed it would. Certainly not as badly as Cambodia or Llaos its neighbors.
Forgive me but I see very little practical or moral difference between allowing 6 million and 1 million people (at least that many were murdered immediately following our withdrawal) to be slaughtered for political ideology. The numbers are different but at that scale it's hardly significant. It was plenty bad after we abandoned them. And you didn't have to be a montagnard to suffer either. You just had to be a school teacher or wear glasses or etc... It's exactly the same story you get in all radical communist societies.
But as for the soldiers and civilians not having a handle on the issues at stake (which were functionally the same, helping to defend our allies against a murderous common enemy) you can thank the press, and many American's tendency to swallow whatever the press handed them whole.
Yes communism was bad, but the Domino theory obviously didnt exist. If it had, then our loss in Vietnam would have allowed it to continue to spread.
Actually, according to current historical thought as taught at BYU in the history classes I took (The professor's main area of emphasis was the Far East, China in particular.) our presence in VietNam for those ten years prevented the Chinese from expanding throughout the pacific rim during and after the war. During, because they knew we were right there ready for them, they were directly supporting the VietNamese along with the Russians, and after because during those ten years other countries made significant strides toward self-sufficiency.
And for that matter, the khmer rouge conquered Cambodia only because they had North Vietnamese Regulars at their beck and call. The NVA were used extensively by the communist rebellions in Cambodia and Laos. Communists supporting each other and spreading their ideology by force to other countries. Sounds like the domino theory to me.
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Murdock?
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Well the Khmer Rouge conquored Cambodia because the CIA (which wasnt in Cambodia to begin with) rigged elections and installed a puppet government sparking off a civil war. They did the Same in Llaos only they kicked off a civil war by creating a new capital and a rival government.
Secondly the only people the vietnamese hate worse than the French are the Chinese. Two Brands of Communism, the Vietnamese brand was a Marxist brand and it was very different than the Maoist Communism of China. Thanks to the Korean war China and Russia were at their own odds and threat of Russian intervention in Vietnam was a greater threat to the Chinese. Remember its the Communist government of Vietnam thats mobilized the Vietnamese army and held it at bay at the Northern Border. Since the early 80's theres beens some pretty bloody fighting, on and off at the border because of it.
As for numbers for genocide in vietnam, we dont have a lot of good ones. And the US numbers stated cant be verified because they are still classified. The best guess is that 3 million people may have died due to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence from both sides in 45 years. (both sides being a misnomer because we're talk the French, Viet Minh, The First South Vietnamese regime and the second the Viet Cong, the NVA and The US)
Untill the US declassifies its numbers we wont really know though.
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All true/unverifiable as you point out. No objection from me to any of it. Except you seem to be implying that the fall of Cambodia and Laos did not carry out the predictions of the Domino Theory. Those kinds of thing were exactly what the domino theory predicted. The revolutionaries were only able to win against the local governments in Cambodia and Laos, whether it was puppet or not, because they had NVA troops to back them up and do the hard fighting for them. And those revolutionaries were not created by the CIA. They were there already. The CIA may very well have screwed up but the NVA would have given the communists the strength to take over in those countries anyway. If the military had been allowed to conquer or at least contain them in North VietNam things would have been very different in that part of the world today. Almost certainly for the better.
China did not have a free hand to expand through conquest in the pacific rim because we were in VietNam.
And whether the Vietnamese hate the Chinese or not, they accepted money, weapons and advisors from them while they were fighting us. And also from the Russians. The enemy of your enemy is my friend and all that.
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shrug...
I think the big problem is that we refused to understand why communism took hold there in the first place. Initially it was a nationalistic impulse and the result of Japanese conquest, but became more endearing to the popualtion (im talking about south vietnam here) because of crushing debt and antiquated rent laws (the french didnt exactly practise "enlightened rule" outside of France) that kept people in rural and urban areas astoundingly poor. Early on a restructuring of rent and tax laws to favor the majority of the people could have prevented the "revolution" from taking hold.