In his award-winning science fiction novel The Forever War, Joe Haldeman combines his experiences as a soldier during the Vietnam War, in which he was severely wounded, with a realistic, scientifically-accurate presentation. The novel tells of a war that stretches across intergalactic distances and long periods of time, the soldiers involved traveling to remote battlefields via black holes. Because the soldiers travel at faster-than-light speeds, they age far more slowly than the civilians for whom they fight. This difference in relative age--the soldiers a few years older, their society centuries older--results in an alienation between the soldiers and the people they defend.

"Haldeman exercises his literary license," James Scott Hicks wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "to comment on, and ultimately to expunge from his memory, America's last ground war [Vietnam]." Hicks points out that Haldeman's first novel, War Year, based on his army diaries, deals with...