Starship Troopers

“I just want to remind you apes that each and every one of you has cost the gov’ment, counting weapons, armor, ammo, instrumentation, and training, everything, including the way you overeat—has cost, on the hoof, better’n half a million. Add in the thirty cents you are actually worth and that runs to quite a sum. […] So bring it back! We can spare you, but we can’t spare that fancy suit you’re wearing.” 

With dark humor and strictness, the sergeant reminds his men that their job is tough, demanding, deadly, and often thankless. The “suit” is a weapon, heavily laden with ordinance, powered and capable of flight, and difficult to destroy. With it, the soldier is deadly. 

“A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.” 

In class, Johnnie recites the textbook answer to Mr. Dubois’ question about modern civic virtue. A soldier, risking one’s life for others, answers the highest possible call of duty.

“‘You apes—No, not ‘apes’; you don’t rate that much. You pitiful mob of sickly monkeys…you sunken-chested, slack-bellied, drooling refugees from apron strings. In my whole life I never saw such a disgraceful huddle of momma’s spoiled little darlings in—you, there! Suck up the gut! Eyes front! I’m talking to you!’ I pulled in my belly, even though I was not sure he had addressed me.” 

The sergeant starts his training of raw recruits with finely honed insults that have the effect of shaping their behavior. By the end of training, the cadets will hate their sergeant but respect him, love their squad, and stand at attention with eyes that shine with pride. 

“I made a very important discovery at Camp Currie. Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you’ve ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don’t need them.” 

Their work makes exhausting demands on the Mobile Infantry; at day’s end, they sleep well. Their jobs matter—the survival of humanity depends on them—and that great task simplifies their lives and makes matters straightforward for their bodies, which need only the basics to be sound and healthy. 

“I may have given the impression that boot camp was made harder than necessary. This is not correct. It was made as hard as possible and on purpose.” 

Training must be tough so that recruits grow into soldiers who can withstand the trials of actual combat. Most of them drop out, unable to handle the demands. Those who remain have the will and stamina to complete their assignments amid the extremes of warfare. 

“There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men. We’re trying to teach you to be dangerous—to the enemy. Dangerous even without a knife. Deadly as long as you still have one hand or one foot and are still alive.” 

A soldier who gives up isn’t a threat, and one who never gives up is always dangerous. Part of training is to develop grit, persistence, and follow-through. 

“War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him…but to make him do what you want him to do.” 

Sergeant Zim explains to his recruits that war isn’t random mayhem but a purposeful endeavor intended to achieve a particular political result in the real world. All military training is meant to enable soldiers to accomplish that end.

“It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how.” 

Zim emphasizes that a warrior’s duty is to obey the directives of his government. The soldier must not second-guess his civilian authority. The Terran Federation relies on its military but does not take orders from it. 

“The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.” 

Johnnie’s high school instructor in History and Moral Philosophy, Mr. Dubois, writes to him and congratulates him for getting past the “hump” of the hardest part of basic training. He adds that Johnnie is starting out on the road to citizenship in the most honorable way possible within Federal service, the Mobile Infantry.

“Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero.”

Mr. Dubois teaches that what a thing is worth depends on whether people want it, and how much, and that the “market value” of an item is merely the average of everyone’s estimate of its worth. People who get things for free don’t value them, and those who believe they can vote themselves freebies will find their societies collapsing around them.

“In a way, an administrative flogging is the mildest sort of a compliment; it means that your superiors think that there is a faint possibility that you just might have the character eventually to make a soldier and a citizen, unlikely as it seems at the moment.” 

Johnnie receives five lashes for gross negligence when he cheats during a simulated field maneuver and lobs a pretend bomb in a way that could have killed a squad mate. After the flogging, everyone treats him normally, but he never forgets the pain. 

“‘Law-abiding people,’ Dubois had told us, ‘hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons…to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably—or even killed. This went on for years, right up to the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony. Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism were commonplace.’” 

In his class in History and Moral Philosophy, Johnnie learns from Mr. Dubois that, late in the 20th century, general disorder caused by overly lenient training of society’s youth led to the collapse of the North American republic. The society that rose from the ashes reinstituted corporal punishment, and crime plummeted. 

“Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not—and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.” 

Dubois argues that people grow up to behave morally only if they’re trained to understand their duty to others—to their family, community, nation, and species. Lacking such training, people remain merely selfish, and some become criminals. 

“Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.” 

According to Mr. Dubois, there are no human rights, life and liberty must be obtained through effort, and the pursuit of happiness is a motive natural to all whose success is guaranteed to none. Therefore, people must be responsible for their own freedom and happiness, and expecting others to provide it is a fool’s wish. 

“Zim did everything with precision and style, as if he were on parade; Captain Frankel did the same thing with dash and gusto, as if it were a game. The results were about the same—and it never turned out to be as easy as Captain Frankel made it look.”

Both Zim and Frankel are at the top of their profession, yet each performs with a different style and personality. The best in any field, from the military to the arts, always put a stamp of originality on their work.

“But it seems to be a standard civilian reaction to scream for defensive tactics as soon as they do notice a war. They then want to run the war—like a passenger trying to grab the controls away from the pilot in an emergency.” 

Skirmishes between Earth and two alien species quickly expand to all-out war when the aliens attack and destroy Buenos Aires. Earth’s civilian population immediately tries to backseat-drive the military’s strategy and tactics, demanding more defensive maneuvers. Wars, however, are won by taking the fight to the enemy, and the Mobile Infantry, Johnnie included, is sent to the planet Klendathu to wage war directly on the Bugs. 

“[…] less than a week later when we had made one combat drop with them, we were full-fledged Roughnecks, members of the family, called by our first names, chewed out on occasion without any feeling on either side that we were less than blood brothers thereby, borrowed from and lent to, included in bull sessions and privileged to express our own silly opinions with complete freedom—and have them slapped down just as freely.” 

Rasczak’s Roughnecks are a company of Mobile Infantry aboard the Rodger Young; Johnnie joins them when most of his previous company are killed in the First Battle of Klendathu. He learns that full social membership in a military outfit isn’t achieved until a soldier has served alongside the others in battle. Thereafter, they become, quite literally, blood brothers. 

“Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one MI it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo.” 

The Federation takes a year to train an 18-year-old soldier; the Bugs can replace their losses within days from eggs waiting in reserve. Smart from birth, deadly capable, and replaceable, the Bugs are winning the war. 

“Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part…and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.” 

Johnnie recalls these words from Colonel Dubois while pondering his future in the military. He joined up to receive the right to vote, but now he realizes that a soldier’s life is itself an act of citizenship, and a heroic one at that. If he makes a career of it, he can’t vote, but he will serve his world. 

“Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. And that is the one practical difference. He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.” 

At OCS training, Major Reid, teaching History and Moral Philosophy, asserts that the only consistently successful system of governance depends, not on superior intelligence or diligence, but on the voters’ proven willingness to volunteer their lives for the sake of others. 

“We don’t expect kittens to fight wildcats and win—we merely expect them to try.” 

Commandant Nielssen explains to Johnnie and three other OCS cadets that, while in training during live action, they may be called upon to assume command when their superior officers are killed, and they may find the odds heavily against them. Even if it’s the last living thing they do, the cadets must go down giving proper orders to their subordinates. 

“At O.C.S. we studied armies in history that were driven like galley slaves. But the MI is a free man; all that drives him comes from inside—that self-respect and need for the respect of his mates and his pride in being one of them called morale, or esprit de corps. The root of our morale is: ‘Everybody works, everybody fights.’” 

The Mobile Infantry has a sense of spirit and dedication unlike any other branch of the military, and require the fewest officers. Because they all participate in battle and share the other workloads, they bond uniquely and take orders without question. 

“I have searched the regs carefully…and I can’t find the one that says an officer mustn’t get his hands dirty.” 

Captain Blackie explains that Johnnie can volunteer to repair powered suits as a cadet officer. In MI, everyone, including officers, pitches in to make sure all equipment is in order and ready for battle.