One of the B-25âs used in this mini-series is Planes of Fameâs Photo Fanny. They actually flew it across the Atlantic to film on the Island of Sardinia and back again for the series.
Sounds promising. Sarcasm is Clooneyâs forte, the cast is great and production seems super well done. Besides a strong book to adapt from, with a perfect form for a multiplot series⊠Very curious to see that one.
Man that thing just keeps getting more relevant over the years huh. forever war indeed. <.smack!> Bad schurem! no politics!
Didnât it also have a sequel called Forever Peace? I have a beautiful comic book adaptation of Forever War, as well as those two novels in my bookcase. My wife keeps wanting me to throw out âbooks you already read and what are they doing there but taking up space huh?â But sheâll pry those from my cold dead hands lol.
Actually, without getting political, Haldeman meant the reference to be to the Vietnam War which at the time was the longest war the U.S. had been involved in. Nowadays, although not the original intent, the current fighting in Afghanistan would be an apt analogy. Were we writing this in the late 14th/early 15th century, it cold have been a reference to the 100 Years WarâŠalthough the back and forth of posts between the Americas and Europe would have taken a bit longer.
Well, The Forever War was innately political, notably as a response to Starship Troopers as well as the authorâs Vietnam experience. It doesnât really fit the past two decades though because Forever War was more about how things change back home compared to the people going out to fight. Much the same as the MASH TV series was more co-opted into a Vietnam war message rather than fitting the original novelâs Korean war message. Forever War canât really be paralleled with the modern War on Terror because of so many cultural and societal changes since Vietnam, especially toward the military and service members. This is especially true when we look at the casualties of Vietnam vs the past 20 years.
So while nowadays you can usually find someone whoâs gone overseas in service for the WoT, back during Vietnam it was everyone knew someone who was killed in service. Thatâs a pretty marked difference and especially so when considering the number of folks who were drafted vs volunteered, keeping in mind that those who volunteered did so because they figured they were going to be drafted anyways (my uncle felt this way). The Forever War was a unique viewpoint of all this because you had people go who didnât want to be there, then coming back to people who treated them as murderers for something outside of their control â and more often than not, they didnât pull a trigger in anger and kill someone, typically being in some support role doing simple jobs. My uncle, for example, was an avionics technician for helicopters.
To illustrate just how much this affected people in the USA, when I was born in the '80s and my mother found out I was going to be deaf, the first words she said was âwell, at least he canât be drafted.â Thatâs illustrative of just how much the country had been affected by the conflict, to say nothing of the people in Vietnam. Today, with an all-volunteer service, thereâs a general acceptance that they may be called upon to go out and yes, potentially die in a conflict that seemingly has no end. Itâs a huge cultural shift that makes The Forever War apply in name only.
So to keep this from going totally off topic, Catch-22 was more about bureaucracy and military bureaucracy in general that makes absolutely no sense, notably that if one is doing these insane, suicidal missions, they must be crazy, and thus unfit to be involved with them, but knowing that makes one sane and thus eligible to do them. If that makes any sense (spoilers: it doesnât). To give a real-world example, itâs a case of where we had to log onto the Army network to troubleshoot our own networking equipment on post, but that meant going to an outbound connection to a post on the west coast where all the management software and access was. The problem is that if you have networking issues, chances are you wonât be able to make a connection off-post anyways, which means you canât fix the issue. And you canât communicate at all because the entire communications network has been put onto a single point of failure (phones shifted to VOIP and run on the same network).
heh. a succinct example of a catch-22 (the phrase) in real life military life in response to the novel where the phrase got its name from.
I think one of the ways Haldemanâs Forever War is increasingly relevant is in the utter disconnect between the people back home and the why, how and by whom the war is fought. That is happening.
Another thing that (IMO) most definitely is happening as well is that these âwars on terrorâ are bullshit. Just like the war vs the Taurans ended up being the result of a lack of translation capability, a misunderstanding in the book. Our wars on a concept (war on poverty!, war on drugs!, war on terror!) are just as senseless, if not more. They are sustained because⊠the machineâs gotta roll?
Slap me down for talking politics, but I just had to for a bit.
Sure, but the nature of the disconnect is very different. Halderman had to deal with soldiers being spat on and told theyâre baby killers; those in service today are told theyâre heroes just for signing a dotted line. The circumstances leading up to the two violent conflict are also so markedly different that thereâs few parallels.
Part of the reason you see âwarâ thrown about is because the perception is itâs a lot easier to get public support in a âgood vs badâ conflict than a morally ambiguous grey area. How does one prosecute and succeed in a conflict where itâs difficult to define what the goal and the enemy is? âThe machineâs gotta rollâ is probably about as accurate as youâll get, because so much of it goes beyond just one single little cause to get to where it is today. Same was true of Vietnam. The groundwork for where things are now (and even then) was laid decades before the outbreak of hostilities. Complex and convoluted, much of which I have some personal experience with, as well as a huge portion hinging on my own opinions and convictions. At the end of the day though, thereâs no simple answer and I donât feel it is right for me to go more in-depth here.
Hence why I added:
For that, Iâll quote my uncle: âI understood exactly why they hated us being there.â
Well, I grew up during the Vietnam war. Nobody I knew, my family knew, my extended family knew, any of our neighbors knew nor anybody in their extended families was killed in the war. The total number of KIA was somewhere around 58,220 (Wikipedia),
The deaths in Afghanistan is 2,216 (761 less than those killed on 911) and in Iraq is 4,497 for a total of 6,713âŠjust over 1/10th.
So way less but it seems to me to be a greater awareness nowadays⊠24 hr news cycle? social media? YouTube? All the Above?
Regardless, my big take away from the Forever War was the tremendous gulf between never-served civilians and military that grew as the story progressed. I thought Haldeman was incredibly prescient on that point. It is an issue we have been facing as the all volunteer force has grown and developed over the decades since Vietnam. It is something I have faced and something my son will have to face.
An interesting discussion.
Back to the subject at hand, Iâm not sure George Clooney can pull it off in Catch 22âŠbut it will be good to see B-25s.
I enjoyed the book back in high school, but didnât like the original movie. It seemed a littleâŠstiff. Watching the trailers to this one matches the environment I imagined back when I read the book.