53 pages • 1 hour read
Joe HaldemanThe Forever War
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 33-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 33 Summary
A little over a year (Earth time) after their arrival on the planet, the Masaryk II detects a Tauran ship. With 11 days until they reach the planet, Mandella calculates the odds of the Masaryk II intercepting and destroying the Tauran ship at 50-50. While waiting for a possible Tauran assault, Mandella orders the platoon to engage in weapons training outside the defensive perimeter of the base. Advancements in human weapons technology are impressive, but because of the time lag between battles, Mandella’s platoon cannot anticipate what kind of weapons the Taurans may have in response. While supervising the training, Mandella is informed of a second Tauran vessel emerging from the collapsar. The Masaryk II may destroy the first ship, but it can’t handle both. Mandella’s troops will most certainly see a ground assault.
During the next two weeks, Mandella and his platoon await the Tauran attack on the planet’s surface while the battle commences in space. After the Masaryk II destroys the first Tauran ship, a Tauran drone destroys the Masaryk II in return. The remaining Tauran vessel establishes orbit around the planet, and Mandella and his platoon prepare for an aerial assault. Moore suggests booby-trapping the base and hiding everyone inside the stasis field, but Mandella argues that, at best, they will only kill a Tauran scouting party and destroy the base in the process.
The Taurans send in attack drones first, but the perimeter defenses destroy them. Mandella worries that the heat from all the explosions will affect the lasers’ response time. He decides to evacuate all personnel to the stasis field—except himself—in case the lasers malfunction and the Taurans penetrate the perimeter defenses. The Taurans launch 16 more drones. The lasers destroy them, but the atmospheric temperature has risen above the threshold for the lasers’ targeting systems. A 17th drone approaches, but the lasers cannot aim properly, and it descends over the dome of the base. Mandella and Moore brace for the inevitable explosion, but the drone hovers briefly and flies away. A few hours later, the Taurans launch troop carriers. Mandella orders some of his unit into a defensive line outside the base, keeping the rest in reserve.
While waiting for the assault, Mandella considers possible Tauran strategies. Feeling guilty for ordering troops into battle like sacrificial lambs, Mandella decides to join them on the front line. Moore tells him that, if he does, the troops, feeling Mandella is punishing them, will likely mutiny and try to kill him. Before they can sort out the confusion, the troop carriers approach. One is destroyed by a mine, but the others make it through safely. The Taurans debark, and the ground assault begins. While all attention is on the battle, one of the Masaryk’s pilots, who Mandella thought had escaped through the collapsar, returns to the fight and destroys the Tauran cruiser before it can react. However, one of the fighter’s errant drones crashes into the planet, and Mandella worries that the impact will trigger a seismic event. He orders everyone topside. When the quake hits, bodies are flung in the air, the subterranean structures crumble, and the lasers are buried beneath the rubble.
Flung out of the safety of his trench, Mandella scrambles for cover. He dives into a ditch with the two cooks. Lieutenant Hilleboe informs him that only 10 people made it to the stasis dome. The rest, presumably, are buried in the rubble below. A second wave of troop carriers arrives, larger than the first. Outnumbered, Mandella orders everyone into the stasis dome. While the various platoons lay down cover fire for the others, the remaining members of Mandella’s strike force beat a hasty retreat to the safety of the dome.
Chapter 34 Summary
The stasis dome renders all electronic weapons inert, so the remaining soldiers arm themselves with swords, shields, spears, and bows and arrows. After two long-range dart attacks, the ground assault begins. The Taurans enter the stasis field, but the arrows and spears penetrate their flimsy shields easily. By the time they are close enough for hand-to-hand combat, Mandella’s troops have narrowed the odds significantly. After a bloody battle at close quarters, the Taurans finally retreat, leaving only 28 of Mandella’s soldiers alive. Far more Taurans are killed, “but there was no satisfaction in it” (252). The Taurans now wait until the exhausted humans lose focus and become vulnerable to a second attack. As a last-ditch strategy, Mandella orders two nova bombs to be placed outside the stasis dome and detonated. The resulting explosion would kill any Taurans within several kilometers. The bombs are successfully detonated, and they wait for six days until the atmosphere has cooled enough for them to shut down the stasis field.
Chapter 35 Summary
After a week, the planet is cool enough, communications are restored, and the crew emerges from the stasis field. They spend time inside the single remaining ship—in shifts so as not to overtax its life support systems—and send a message to the last fighter ship, which is on a return trajectory after destroying the Tauran cruiser. After six weeks, the fighter returns. With enough acceleration tanks to accommodate everyone, they blast off from the planet and set course for Stargate. They arrive 10 months later (340 “objective” years).
They discover hundreds of cruisers orbiting Stargate, a ramped-up military presence that doesn’t bode well for Mandella’s furlough plans. They shuttle down to the base, change out of their space suits, and convene in a lecture hall. There, they are informed that the war is over. As the last group of soldiers to return from active duty, when they depart, Stargate will be destroyed, an act of cleansing. Stargate is currently staffed by clones created from a single individual and collectively known as Man. They share a collective consciousness and are considered “perfect,” so all humans are cloned in the same pattern, but only as replacements when another dies. Man offers the soldiers an alternative if this new Earth culture is too foreign: They may relocate to any other human-colonized planet with more traditional social and cultural norms.
After 1,143 years, the war ends when the two sides finally communicate, only to discover the first shots were fired out of misunderstanding and paranoia. Since the governing authorities at the time were mostly old military guard, the war escalated quickly, and as it propped up a shaky economy and unified a divided humanity, it continued with no serious attempt to stop it. When Man-clones assumed military duties, they saw the folly of war and were able to communicate with the hive mind of the Taurans and reach a peace agreement.
One day, while sitting in a makeshift bar on Stargate, Man brings Mandella a thick folder: his service record. Stapled to the first page is a note from Margay. After being discharged, she relocated to a garden planet called Middle Finger. Using a starship, she regularly flies out for five years before returning, using time dilation to slow her relativistic aging. She is waiting for him regardless of his age: “If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse” (264).
Epilogue Summary
The brief coda is a simple birth announcement. Margay Potter, having waited for 261 years, is reunited with Mandella. They give birth to a boy. Mandella and Margay are the two longest-surviving veterans of the Forever War. Dr. Diana Alsever-Moore delivers the baby.
Chapter 33-Epilogue Analysis
Mandella’s final battle of the war, in a future marked by sophisticated military hardware and miraculous technology, is, in the end, fought hand-to-hand with the most primitive weapons. As computers and drones have assumed much of the dirty work of war, human beings have been relieved of the moral burden of watching others, human or Tauran, die at their own hands. The first Persian Gulf War was criticized for its use of “smart” bombs—ultimately not as smart as advertised—and for masking the devastation and death behind clinical video game visuals. Grainy footage of an exploding building seen from thousands of feet in the air conceals the real carnage felt below. Similarly, when Haldeman’s gigawatt lasers vaporize Tauran scout ships, no one on the human side feels the pain of loss. Killing an enemy at close range with a sword is a different matter. By reducing warfare to its most primal roots, Haldeman suggests that too much technology robs war of its immediacy, of the sight of blood and the stench of death. When killing becomes as easy as pushing a button, death becomes emotionally and morally distant and, in some way, ceases to be war. In order for war to remain true to its own nature—horrifying and bloody and something to be avoided—humans must see it for what it is.
Haldeman’s brief Epilogue is a single point of light in the miasma of darkness and death. Until this point, the narrative has been marked by relentless killing and grief. Interestingly, Mandella’s most profound sorrow comes not from the death of most of his strike force on Sade-138 or even from the loss of his leg. It is a different kind of loss that haunts him most deeply: the loss of separation. When he and Margay are assigned to different units, the thought that they will never see each other again pains him more acutely than any death. The only time he cries is when he reads her note and realizes she is alive and waiting for him. Haldeman chooses to end his bloody scourge of a war story with hope—hope for humanity that it will one day see the value of life over death, the value of a newborn child over the paranoia and aggression that have led to countless wars over the course of human history.
