Private William Mandella is a physics student conscripted into an elite military unit and shipped across the galaxy to fight humanity's first interstellar war against a mysterious alien species called the Taurans. Trained on a frozen world, hurled between the stars through collapsar jumps, he survives combat that is as often absurd and bureaucratic as it is terrifying.
But the true enemy is time. Because Mandella's ship travels at relativistic speeds, a few subjective months of soldiering translate into decades and then centuries back home. Each time he returns, Earth has become more alien than the aliens — its language, economy, sexuality, and values transformed beyond recognition — until the war itself outlasts everything he ever knew. His only anchor is fellow soldier Marygay Potter, and even she is bound by the same cruel physics.
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards and drawn from Haldeman's own service in Vietnam, The Forever War is a landmark of military science fiction: a bracing, humane, and quietly furious meditation on war, alienation, and the soldier's impossible homecoming.