Starship Troopers: Some of the comments during the show made me think that the speakers had only seen **the movie** and not read the book. The two are **very different**. For one thing, Heinlein talks about you getting the “franchise” (ability to vote) by doing civic service. A forest ranger would have gotten the vote, a firefighter, a teacher, possibly even non-governmental civic workers; volunteering to work in a third-world nation, perhaps. More than the “military” got the vote.

A MilSF classic that you should look up: “Armor” by John Steakley (DAW, 1984 edition is the most recent one I have). Makes a good counterpoint to both of these (Heinlein and Haldeman).

Regardless, as a good Ninja trainee I’m revisiting the novel (available on Audible.com, though I’m not crazy about the narrator in their version).

Both The Forever War and Forever Peace (1998 Hugo, Nebula & John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner) are available on Audible.

Excellent point about the parallels to today’s military climate.

Did anyone notice that they had Slidewalks? I’m convinced that all good Sci-Fi cities must have slidewalks, or dirigibles, or a relativistic dilemma. Fortunately this novel has all three.

Good pick crew.

1. Training Casualties: Some casualties in training are expected, even in RL. In this case, Haldeman was demonstrating the foolishness of command in insisting on useless, dangerous training, when they had no clear understanding of what the war would be like.
2. The psychic aliens weren’t killed “for no reason.” The soldiers didn’t know what they were. There was discussion in the book about whether or not to kill them. The soldiers killed them because they didn’t know if they were Taurans. They erred to the side of caution.
3. The sketchy beginnings of the war were a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which started the Vietnam War, not a logical flaw. That’s just bad reasearch on the part of the Ninjas. I though you guys were old enough to know about Tonkin?
4. Why were they still fighting a bogus war after 1000 years? To quote our current commander in chief, they “Stayed the Course.” We stayed in Vietnam for 10 years, which is longer than the relative time of the protag in this story.

Aside from those, I agree that he put way too much emphasis on sexuality. It realy dated the story, much as the funny sexual references dated Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.”