During Mandella’s training, a superior officer informs them that any disobedience is punishable by death. After his platoon’s first simulated battle on Charon, Captain Stott tells the troops that they are an “investment” worth less than a full human life. Throughout the novel, Mandella chafes at the military bureaucracy’s disregard for soldiers’ lives. Scanning a room full of new recruits, he wonders, “How many of these young soldiers filing into the auditorium knew they were doomed?” (192). Haldeman’s future army flings new recruits on to the battlefield with some basic training and a battle suit and hopes to win the war by sheer volume of bodies. War, to the military mindset, is a numbers game, an accounting ledger on which victory means fewer debits than assets. Even the story’s advanced technology, meant to make war cleaner, safer, and more removed, cannot minimize the body count. It merely provides new ways to kill and maim. In the end, when the lasers and nova bombs are rendered useless, the killing continues, as it must, with decidedly low-tech weaponry.

While Haldeman’s experience was in Vietnam—and the story is rife with parallels—a perfect example of this disposability is from an earlier war, World War II.