In the spring of 1958, Heinlein woke up to find a full-page ad in his newspaper urging Americans to write the President and Congress and urge them to stop all nuclear testing. It was the first major action by a new organization known as the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, afterwards known as SANE and now known as "Peace Action". Heinlein was right, I think, to view this organization as a threat to America. Fifty years of history have certainly shed some light on the organization. If you check out the wiki link above, you'll see that they have specifically protested every military action taken against anyone for any reason by the United States. They didn't protest Saddam when he invaded and raped Kuwait. No, they protested the US for driving Saddam out. They had nothing to say about Milosevec's genocide, but they were incensed when the US – at the request of the UN and NATO – bombed Kosovo. All they are opposed to is US success in any military endeavor of any kind, they don't care a wit for the rest of the world.

This group is made up of what Communist insiders (see my essay on Yuri Bezmenov) call "Useful Idiots." These are people who can be used by enemies of their country to sprout propaganda that demoralizes their country, but who are too foolish to know they're being used. As Bezmenov notes, they're also people who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution succeeds because they're going to be the first to be disillusioned by the effects of their participation. Heinlein had the ability to spot a "Useful Idiot" at a thousand paces.

Heinlein sprang into action and tried to start a letter-writing campaign of his own (he had been working on the book that would be called Stranger in a Strange Land). Called "Who Are The Heirs Of Patrick Henry?", he ran a campaign that urged patriotic Americans to fight back against SANE and write their own letters to the President and Congress (the text of this can be found in Heinlein's anthology Expanded Universe). Here's what Heinlein had to say about the ad in Grumbles From the Grave:

I don't know when I'll get any more fiction written–maybe never. This effort is taking up all of our time. On the other hand, we are spending money on it even faster than we spend money in traveling, so I may be flat broke soon and forced to go back to cash work.

But I refuse to worry about personal aspects of the future. I am convinced in my own mind that the United States is washed up and we will cease to exist inside of five to fifteen years–unless we quickly and drastically pull up our socks, bother at home and in foreign policy. I was simply triggered into doing something about it by this pacifist-internationalist-cum-clandestine Communist drive to have us treat atomics and disarmament in exactly the fashion the Kremlin has tried to get us to do for the past twelve years.

In the end,it was a terrible flop, he got no traction at all. I suspect it's always that way: only Useful Idiots are the sort that can be stirred up by pamphleteering. Intelligent, thoughtful people are not usually called to action by the amount of argument you can put in a one-page newspaper ad; they take articles and books. The Heinlein archives have recently been opened to the public, and I put down $2 to get a PDF of Heinlein letters from the 1940's to the 1970's. Most of it is dull, personal stuff of marginal interest, but I did find a letter from Heinlein to his friend Hermann Deutsch, who ran the New Orleans Item newspaper. In it, Heinlein mentions the "crusade":

The "Patrick Henry" crusade has flopped. It has cost me a thousand dollars to put about five hundred signatures in the White House; as an old ward heeler I can see the bleak fact that my methods did not work, especially as the movement did not effectively take root elsewhere. So, having no taste for running in circles, I am now looking for some means to be effective. Any suggestions?

So, Heinlein turned to other methods. He had a group of many thousands who were customers for his books. So, he set out to write a book to put forward his case and that book would become Starship Troopers. The book would prove to be one of his most controversial and one very difficult for Useful Idiots to understand.

It "glorifies the military"

Why is the book so hard to comprehend, at least for a certain segment of the population? Well, after fifty years or so of being preached to by Useful Idiots, most Americans are at least slightly uncomfortable with the idea of military force. Some Americans, however, have been driven mad by the Useful Idiots. They find that any writing that mentions the American military – unless it performs a literary evisceration of it – must be the ravings of an immoral warmonger (note that this applies to the American military only: Castro can send troops to Africa and Communists can invade Czechoslovakia all they want with no hint of protest). Thus, for some people in the US, Starship Troopers represents a sin far worse than killing defenseless baby seals and deliberately forcing their carbon into the atmosphere: it glorifies the military.

Heinlein admitted it. After all, he had served with pride in that military and so had many of his friends. The gloriousness of the institution was a small part of the reason wrote the book in the first place. What was the larger reason? He wanted to write a book that explained "why we fight". The problem Heinlein saw was that the general public was largely ignorant (as always) of this simple concept. Why do we fight for our country? What are the roots of patriotism? Do soldiers and civilians have different reasons? Is there a moral difference between soldiers and civilians?

It's worth noting that already, by 1959, these were unpopular subjects. Starship Troopers was passed on to Scribner's like each of his twelve previous, hugely-successful juvenile novels and Scribner's rejected it out of hand. Not just Heinlein's editor, but the entire editorial board simply gave it the raspberry. They didn't even see fit to explain their actions to Heinlein – he just got a cursory rejection slip in the mail. Heinlein was justifiably scalded and never sold them another word (costing them millions of dollars in the long run – he certainly laughed last). Instead, the book went to Putnam.

It's "fascist"

Another charge often brought against Starship Troopers is that it is "fascist." This was the interpretation brought to it by Paul Verhoeven (among many over the years); who would reach some sort of pinnacle of misunderstanding in 1997 with a movie based on the book that should win some sort of Oscar for "Movie adaptation with the least fidelity to its source". Useful Idiots are quite prone to misunderstanding "fascism" by thinking that it has something to do with glorifying the military or having a strong military or using military force. I don't know where they get this. Here's how dictionary.com defines fascism: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism. Nothing military mentioned there, eh?

And you can certainly see how these same Useful Idiots today decry Bush as a "fascist", right? Once he had himself made dictator, shut down the newspapers, nationalized all of the industries and started blaming the Arabs for everything it was pretty obvious, wasn't it? Oh? Bush is leaving office as scheduled in 2008? Uh... Our enemies still free to speak publicly and criticize our President at our major universities? Well... No nationalization of industry? Hmmm. The phrase "War on Terror" was specifically chosen so as not to target a racial or religious group? Dang. Sigh. Being a Useful Idiot requires detaching yourself from the actual facts of the world and taking your brain to some higher plane where it can "reason" in an echo chamber.

The funny part is that Starship Troopers also explicitly rejects each of these. There is no dictator, no oppression of criticism, nothing but free market capitalism, no nationalism (people from all over the world enlist in the same service Johnnie does) and complete rejection of racism: the main character is Juan Rico, a Filipino. We'll get to the reasons that the Verhoeven's of the world can see fascism without any evidence of actual fascism later in the essay: there actually is a way to "prove" a sort of postmodern, intellectual-backflip version of fascism, but I don't want to give it away yet.

If you haven't read the book, you must be thinking, "Yikes! This must be some hot stuff!" But, no, it's not offensive or even in poor taste. It's not Heinlein's best work, not even close. As a novel, it's got it's high spots and low spots, but it's generally pretty good. As a lecture on "why we fight", it's arguably brilliant. It's not a juvenile novel, really, even Heinlein said, "it's an adult novel about an 18 year-old boy." I suspect he tried to sell it into Scribner's juvenile line because he wanted to influence his youngest readers (the premise of this series of essays, by the way).

What it's actually about

So, what is it about? Simple, Starship Troopers is an adventure novel about a young man joining the military forces of a world organized around a libertarian ideal, being trained, going to war and serving his country. Along the way, he learns answers to the questions mentioned above. Pretty odious, huh?

The novel starts off with thirty incredibly well-crafted pages. Straight off the bat, with no explanation, we're plunged into battle. Johnnie, along with the rest of his platoon, is dressed in a powered exoskeleton, sealed into a capsule and dropped onto a planet from orbit. He descends through the atmosphere, jettisons the capsule, lands and begins to lay waste to his enemies. Because of his powered suit, he can jump over buildings and carry heavy weapons. He's armored against small arms and shrapnel (but not heavy weapons). He rampages through the city that is their target; causing all of the destruction he can within the rules of engagement for this particular drop (in this case: destroy infrastructure, but try not to kill civilians). He carefully coordinates with his mates to avoid friendly fire. When the mission is complete, those who are still able (all but one of his platoon) rendezvous at a "retrieval" ship, which picks them up and takes them back to their ship. The whole battle lasts less than an hour, but lays complete waste to a small city. Still, after fifty years, it's probably the best description of a special-forces assault in the year 2075 that has ever been written: the technology, the powered exoskeletons, the military strategy and maneuver - – it's all just spot on.

I can't believe no one has made this into a good movie or video game. It's tailor made for it. The powered suits lead to great game play and the Bugs would make cool enemies. The rules of engagement could be different for each drop and players would advance based on their performance relative to those rules.

After this, we back up and find out what has brought Johnnie to this place and time. It turns out that he never intended to sign up:

I never intended to join up. And certainly not the infantry! Why, I would rather have taken ten lashes in the public square and have my father tell me that I was a disgrace to a proud name.

Oh, I had mentioned to my father, that I was thinking over the idea of volunteering for Federal Service. I suppose every kid does, when his eighteenth birthday heaves into sight–and mine was due the week I graduated. Of course most of them just think about it, toy with the idea a little, then go do something–go to college, or get a job, or something. I suppose it would have been that way with me... if my best chum had not, with dead seriousness, planned to join up.

No, Johnnie eventually signs on for that eternal reason soldiers have always had: he wants to impress a girl. Even worse, it's not even a girl he has a steady relationship with, just someone he's gone out with a couple of times. In any case, Johnnie, and his two friends Carl and Carmencita, sign up for government service.

Heinlein, however, has a curious idea of government service and herein lies some of the greatest controversy in the book: it seems that you can't be drafted, service is entirely voluntary. But if you don't serve, you don't get to vote after your tour of service is done. You also don't get to pick the form of your service, you might wind up in a civilian job, doing weapons research or typing. Or you might wind up in the Infantry, the government gets to pick whom they think is suitable for each job. Even worse: your term of service is only nominally two years. If they need you, say if war breaks out, they can extend that service indefinitely.

Heinlein hated the idea of a draft, but he believed in service. It just had to be voluntary. He thought that forcing patriotism on someone didn't result in very good service. It's interesting to note that he got his way: the US military today is an all-volunteer outfit and almost everyone agrees that it's the better for it.

After he joins up, Johnnie is sent to boot camp in what is now Canada (at Camp Arthur Currie, the successor in the book to an actual Canadian Forces Base in Canada, named after an actual Canadian war hero). Johnnie undergoes the usual travails of a man being made into a soldier, but he also learns answers to questions about the military and its relationship to its government and civilian population. A good deal of the revelations are flashbacks to Johnnie's high school lectures in History and Moral Philosophy – a required course in Heinlein's universe which would probably induce mass apoplexy the pedagogic population of our universe.

Later on, Johnnie graduates from boot camp and is assigned to various units and gets into fights like the ones that start the book. The war is against the "Bugs" – essentially giant, intelligent spiders. Heinlein carefully keeps human politics and even race out of the equation. They can't even communicate with the Bugs, they don't even know if the Bugs have language. All they know is that they Bugs want us dead: it's fight or die. This reduces the answers to those questions to their most basic, understandable form. It also makes the enemy pretty scary.

Johnnie is eventually selected for Officer Candidate School and goes of to learn even more about "why we fight." The only real weakness of the book is that a good deal of Johnnie's learning comes during actual lectures in a classroom. It's a slam dunk to accuse an author of "lecturing to his readers" if he is indeed writing about actual lectures.

I'm not going to try and convey Heinlein's arguments here. They're complex and use actual logic and philosophy and I wouldn't be able to do them justice. To put it mildly, Heinlein rejects completely the idea that we fight out of some abstract sense of "patriotism" or indeed any innate characteristic at all. Instead, he argues through a sort of moral calculus that we fight for practical and concrete reasons that are arrived at by reason and education. He also shows that, in a properly functioning society, the military itself must be completely subordinate to the civilian government when it comes to setting policy, deciding who the enemy is and when it's time to fight them. But, once those questions are settled, then the civilian government must not try to micromanage the actual combat.

Most of these "lectures" are actually pretty well written and they express the very heart of Heinlein's libertarian philosophy:

...Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not... We aquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind... What is 'moral sense'? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations.

You can also argue that the book is about something even bigger than "why we fight". If you notice how often Heinlein uses the words "government service" instead of military service and if you notice the numerous instances where he uses phrases like "civic virtue" or "moral values", then you can see that he is really just using military service as a stand-in for all civic virtue. Heinlein is actually making the case that all of us owe a certain level of "service" to our society. The only societies that last in the long term are those whose citizens are willing to put the benefit of their society ahead of their own personal benefit. He's probably right about that, but you'll have to read the book to get the proofs of his theorem.

There is also a subplot involving Johnnie's relationship with his father. Johnnie comes from a rich family and his father intends for Johnnie to go into the family business, not fool around with government service. This little bit is nicely done, it winds through the plot from the beginning to the end.

This book is also one of the most handicapped-freindly books ever written. I'd say about 25 percent of the characters in the book have one sort of handicap or another. Many characters are missing limbs (Sergeant Ho is missing both legs and an arm), others have lost their sight. Still other characters have lost their mobility and are confined to wheelchairs. I doubt any other book in existence has as many handicapped characters as this one. It's also full of non-white characters. Starting with the main character and filtering down to most of the characters in the book. Less than half of the characters in the book are white males, but you have to be alert for the clues to pick out the ones.

It's still facist!

So, how can this be a fascist novel? Well, it's easy if you twist things around. Think of it the Bugs not as spiders but as beings who are "different." They're just like gays and minorities! Heinlein is racist because Johnnie takes satisfaction in killing Bugs. Johnnie is complacently Bug-o-phobic. The society in the book is fascist because they don't try to negotiate when the bugs attack them, instead they just fight back. Yes, I know, this doesn't play to the real definition of fascism, but it works for Useful Idiots who don't really care about the details anyway.

The last juvenile novel

This would be the last of the Heinlein juveniles, even though several of them hardly qualify as juveniles. He tried to sell all of them into the juvenile line at Scribner's and that's enough for me. Starship Troopers is also the only "juvenile" to win a Hugo Award (although Farmer in the Sky would win a "retro Hugo" in 2001). Heinlein had established his cadre of readers, he no longer needed the juveniles to indoctrinate the youth. From here on out he would use the base he had created to make his future works best sellers and Hugo winners.