Joe W. Haldeman, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was raised in and around Washington, D.C., where his father was an administrator for military health programs. After high school, he obtained an M.A. in English and a B.S. in astronomy at Iowa State, and spent three months at postgraduate studies in computer sciences at the University of Maryland. In the U.S. Army from 1967 through 1969, he served for a year in the central highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer, an experience that cost him a serious leg would which resulted from "having stood too close to a boobytrap when a booby set it off." The wound caused him to undergo four months of painful therapy.

Having sold a few stories sporadically, Haldeman became convinced at one of Damon Knight's Milford Conferences in the early 1970s that he could make a career from his writing. Under...