THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman

Glucose and electricity.

They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That’s an “accelerated life situation computer.” It kept me busy.

I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.

I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that’s what all those electrodes were for. Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.

Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn’t in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.

Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don’t. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I’ll never forget the poetry of “the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party commander will detail one platoon sergeant. . .” and so on.

That’s from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader’s Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.

If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.

One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.

I hadn’t met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers’ Club after dinner.

TABLE OF ORGANIZATION

Strike Force Gamma

Sade-138 Campaign

IECHN:

MAJ Mondella

COMM Anwpol

2ECHN:

CAPT Moore

3ECHN:

ILT Hilleboe

4ECHN:

2LT Riland

2LT Rusk

2LT ALvever MD

5ECHN:

2LT Borgstedz 2LT Brill

2LT Gainor

2LT Heimoff

6ECHN:

SSgr Webster SSgt Gillies

SSgr Abram:

SSgt Dole

7ECHN:

Sgt Dolins Sgz Bell Cpl Geller Cpl Kahn

Sgt Anderson

Cpl Kalvm

Sgt Noyes Cpl Spraggs

8ECHN:

Pvt Boas CpJ Weiner

Pvt Lingeman Pvt IkIe

Pvt Rosevear Pvt Schon

Pvt Wolfe, R. Pvt Shubik

Pvt Lin Pvt Duhl

Pvt Simmons Pvt Perloff

Pvt Winograd Pvt Moynihan

Pvt Brown Pvt Frank

Pvt Bloomquist Pvt Graubard

Pvt Wong Pvt Orlans

Pvt Louria Pvt Mayr

Pvt Gross Pvt Quarton

Pvt Asadi Pvt Hin

Pvt Horman Pvt Stendahi

Pvt Fox Pvt Erikson Pvt Born

Pvt Miller

Pvt Reisman

Pvt Coupling

Pvt Rosiow

Pvt Huntington

Pvt Dc Sola

Pvt Pool

Pvt Nepala

Pvt Schuba

Pvt Ulanov

Pvt Shelley

Pvt Lynn

Pvt Slaer

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