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.
Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Basic training complete, Mandella’s platoon ships off to Stargate 1, where they are given their first assignment: a planet orbiting the star Epsilon Aurigae, on which the Taurans have built a base. That night, a raucous orgy ensues, the sex decreed by law and military custom.
The platoon spends the rest of its time on Stargate 1 building the logistical and tactical headquarters for the war. Then, they all board a ship, the Earth’s Hope, for their first real mission. Freefalling into the planet’s orbit, they are officially in “enemy territory.”
Chapter 11 Summary
In space for nine days, they encounter their first combat action—an attack launched from a pursuing Tauran vessel. The Earth’s Hope responds, destroying the enemy ship and heads back to the planet circling Epsilon Aurigae. Approaching the planet, the Taurans launch “three abortive attacks” (49), but the real danger will come with a ground assault. Their orders are to attack the enemy base and capture at least one Tauran alive. However, they themselves are not to risk capture; a simple order from the battle computer will activate a small bit of plutonium in their battle suits, turning them into “rapidly expanding, very hot plasma” (50).
Deploying 12 scoutships to the surface, the platoon rendezvous on a nearby beach, where they regroup into an assault formation. Mandella is assigned to the “command platoon”—the platoon buffered on all sides by the other units, making it the safest place to be during the assault. The command platoon is reserved for recruits with special skills or training, making their lives slightly more valuable than the rest.
Chapter 12 Summary
The unique topography of the planet makes camouflage difficult, but they vary the settings on their suits to accommodate the changing landscape, brittle stalks of trees opening up to greener grassland. After two days of marching, Potter’s lead platoon spots movement. After several platoons join Potter’s for support, Sergeant Cortez orders them to fire. Without knowing what they’re shooting at, they kill everything in sight. Mandella is sickened by the carnage. Although the creatures are physically quite different from humans, it is the similarity, the clotting red blood, that repulses him. After examining some of the bodies, Rogers, the biologist, concludes that they aren’t dangerous. Moments later, however, they find a member of the platoon, Ho, dead from unknown causes. When someone remembers that she was “Rhine-sensitive,” they suspect a possible connection between her death and the creatures. They decide to avoid them when possible. As they move on, the ship vaporizes Ho’s body from space.
Chapter 13 Summary
They set up camp, and Potter and Mandella share a collective guilt over the death of the creatures, nicknamed “teddy bears.” After a brief sleep, Mandella takes guard duty. While he is watching the horizon, one of the creatures appears through the grass directly in front of him. He doesn’t shoot, but he sees creatures standing in front of every soldier on watch. The creatures don’t attack, but Mandella senses something invasive in his mind, as if the creature is “trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know” (61). The other perimeter guards experience the same sense of communication. They don’t feel hostility, only curiosity. The guards back away without firing a shot.
Cortez orders them to break camp and move out. The creatures follow. Exhausted after only a brief rest, the soldiers are allowed one “stimtab” each, but only one. More than that can result in impaired judgment or hallucinations. After a nine-hour march, they stop again. Before he falls asleep, Mandella considers the possibility that this may be the last sleep of his life.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
The transition from training to live field conditions brings unexpected dangers. As with any real-world combat situation, death is omnipresent, potentially lurking in the most mundane situation. Even an encounter with a seemingly benign indigenous creature on an alien world can kill. The impulse to shoot first is a brutal but understandable reality for soldiers operating in the dark and driven by fear. Vietnam provides plenty of examples—My Lai and the Mekong Delta, to name just two—in which soldiers were provoked by fear and ignorance. Better to kill first than risk death yourself, the logic goes, and Mandella and his platoon, following orders, slaughter a group of native creatures for no other reason than uncertainty. The resulting guilt gives Mandella the courage to hold fire during his next encounter with the creatures, although he may be the outlier, a compassionate soul in a squad of trigger-happy warriors. By now, these recruits have seen enough death to become inured to it, but individual soldiers react differently. Some, like Mandella and Potter, may never reconcile the killing part of their job with their own personal moralities. Others, like the more experienced and more jaded Cortez, see killing as a necessary part of survival. He will likely not shed a tear over the deaths of the creatures but rather use the death of one of their own, Ho, as motivation for further vengeance.
The constant threat of death elicits in these soldiers a powerful sexual drive; platoonmates “sack” together at every opportunity. While it may seem an unnecessary distraction at first, the impulse has well-researched roots. The psychological connection between sex and death is primal and instinctive. Sex embodies the very essence of life and living. It confers intimacy and connection. It “substantiates, humanizes and incarnates existence” (Diamond, Stephen. “The Psychology of Sexuality.” Psychology Today, 10 May 2014, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evil-deeds/201405/the-psychology-sexuality. Accessed 26 Aug. 2021). Death is the precise opposite. Death is the ultimate isolation, the end path beyond which no further human communion is possible. Reaching out for the nearest human body when death lingers ever more closely is, in many ways, the most human response possible. Holding on to one’s life by clinging to another’s is sometimes the only way to fend off the existential dread of mortality.
