He has no family, few friends and those few can be killed or transferred at any moment. As the war progresses, he has little or no chance to understand the men placed under his command, since they are products of Earth cultures about which he knows nothing. I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I'd be picking six at random. Under such circumstances, war becomes meaningless, a situation no one controls, as the protagonist learns as he moves from raw recruit to commanding officer without ever getting a firm grasp on the events around him.
Truth is, of course, the first casualty of war.
In The Forever War , Haldeman gives us several intriguing glimpses of how public opinion is artificially shaped to build and maintain support for the prolonged fighting. A hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters. I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-lust. These images mirror common themes in wartime propaganda, including those promulgated by publications like Reader's Digest throughout the Vietnam War.