I had occasion to re-read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers recently after a pleasant encounter with Helldivers 2, which constitutes a delightful parody of the 1997 Verhoeven film that is, in turn, a missed-the-mark parody of the 1959 book.
There is a long ongoing controversy over ST over whether or not it is fascist. I’m not completely disinterested in that debate, but I’m not going to get into it much here. Rather, I would like to talk about how I’ve read the book differently over time.
ST is one of those books I re-read every ten years or so, like Lord of the Rings or Dune; there is something about it that makes it special, and that core shifts depending how old I am. I read it first as a teenager, then as various versions of a twenty-something, a thirty-something, and now, a late forty-something. The text has not changed; I am still reading the same tattered second-edition paperback. I am the variable.
What strikes me now are these observations.
Heinlein chose to write in first person for Johnny Rico. This is a good move for a bildungsroman variant. Rico transforms several times over the course of the plot; once when he reaches the “hump,” again after his first drop, again when he decides to “go career,” and again after OCS.
Rico is also writing from the future, looking back, so ST is also a variant of a military memoir, an genre way older than science fiction, and typically uneven in quality. Heinlein uses one of that genre’s tricks, time compression, extensively; Rico bounces between lingering on brief encounters that maybe took a few minutes, and skipping weeks or months at a time. He obsesses over the righteousness of the hanging of a deserted soldier that killed a young girl for several pages, but refuses to depict the actual hanging; “The drums held a sustained roll and it was all over.” The minutiae of rank and company composition are described in almost excruciating detail, but we learn almost nothing about the structure of government behind the military or how the “franchise” of voting after military service actually plays out as Rico seemingly never leaves the MI.
I recently finished a chapter on utilitarian ethics for a book, so I was especially interested in revisiting the Colonel Dubois/Major Reid lectures. They are not the only two characters that deliver what are effectively sermons on deontological or “duty” ethics (the Commandant is another), but they are the most obvious and clear in their pedagogical purposes. Debois’s last lecture sums up the general thesis:
“… But duty is an adult virtue – indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he began with.”
Rico is depicted as taking this message to heart, though it takes some time into his service before the full “embrace” occurs. And returning to what I said I would avoid, I don’t find this statement or any of the “moral philosophy” in the book to be fascistic. It’s just Kantian duty ethics through a military lens, compatible with any society with a standing volunteer force, and while the book is certainly pro-military, that doesn’t mean the Mobile Infantry are willing pawns of a Mussolini-style regime. While fascism by definition places the military at the center of society, as the central goal is conquest and expansion, any given military is not automatically fascist, or even right-wing.
The most pressing question for me is if Rico understands duty.
Dubois has given him the knowledge of duty, and he eventually embraces it (using Dubois’s own words here), but does Rico understand the choice he has made?
I’m not sure he does.
Rico’s father Emilio may illustrate my concerns. Emilio returns in the last third of the book as a new MI recruit himself, having discovered with the help of a “hypnotherapist” that he was dissatisfied with his relative wealth and he needed to do something:
He stopped, and then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal – but a man.”
A man Emilio’s age going into therapy and changing as a result is pretty progressive for a 1959 novel, and still so in 2024 – and it perhaps anticipates the entire “male studies” idea a few decades in advance, which is a typical slow Thursday for Heinlein.
But I’m not sure Emilio understands duty either. Knowledge is not understanding, and commitment, however faithful, is not understanding either.
My 2024 read is this. Both Rico and his father have different but related male identity problems that they resolve by joining the MI. Their choice is an adult one and made with considerable and generous consent: Heinlein goes to great length to show that the exit ramps from the MI are plentiful, starting with a 48-hour grace period after signup and countless ways to be mustered out at any stage of one’s career. The MI do not want anyone who is not 100% committed and capable; they are not cannon fodder, but highly trained professional technicians.
However, I get no real sense from the book that anyone who is not in the MI or perhaps the Navy is, well, human. Civilians are a sentient species, but lesser.
And so Rico and his father cannot be men unless they are MI or at least military-adjacent. This is where the duty ethics falters. Can a truck driver be a man, in this vision of the future? A grocery store clerk? A programmer? Schoolteachers can be if they are former military like Dubois, but as Heinlein does not hide, Dubois and the MI are haughty and place themselves as a cut above hoi polloi. Dubois’s treatment of Rico changes completely after he enlists, and this same “you’re one of us” treatment has multiple layers as Rico advances through the ranks – the officers have their own mini-society, the cap troopers that have dropped have another (and if they have dropped together, that’s another level), and so on.
I give Heinlein, whose Navy career ended at lieutenant j.g. due to illness, credit for describing these social structures with accuracy and how advanced technology could change them and also fail to change them at all. Some Rico’s episodes seemed pulled straight from Heinlein’s experiences on the “wet navy” Lexington, the first American aircraft carrier.
But there’s a tunnel vision there. Can a man be a man without military experience? Do all men share that same restlessness that would drive one toward voluntary service? Is Dubois right when he claims:
“The best things in life are beyond money: their price is agony and sweat and devotion… and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself – ultimate cost for ultimate value.”
There are only 10,000 MI, Heinlein states, on a planet with seemingly billions of other men. Are they all as “dissatisfied” as Emilio Rico? I suspect that many are not, and that they have successfully found other ways to both embrace and understand the adult virtue of duty without military service. They became fathers, husbands, businessmen, doctors, technicians, engineers, artists, among many other respectable and valuable roles, and few, even, perhaps, writers of science fiction. And they performed such roles with selfless abandon while others did not, as happens in any human organizational structure.
Heinlein is not claiming otherwise, of course; rather, he is focused on one duty path that he himself could not complete due to circumstances beyond his control, and writing a good yarn at the same time. Yet I wonder if Rico knew he had other options to be a man, as his father puts it. Does any 18-year-old? Are all of them doomed to stumble, as I did myself, from role to role, trying to find one that worked? Some find one quickly and stay there. Others never find one and stay trapped in a perpetual childhood. Others find a place to stand eventually.
ST is still on the bounce in 2024. And yet I wonder, by placing the MI on a pedestal, that the value of Heinlein’s call to duty is diminished. You can of course add the fascism critique to this if you wish, but having read the entire Heinlein oeuvre that veers across the entire expanse of political philosophy, it just doesn’t hold up.