Starship Troopers

Floggings are rare; it’s easier simply to kick out the recruit. Lashings for lesser offenses often are administered to recruits who trainers believe are still salvageable as soldiers. Desertion during training gets 50 lashes, though the authorities rarely search for the offenders. Desertion under fire, however, can draw the death penalty. One deserter, N. L. Dillinger, later kidnaps and kills a child; he is captured and sent back to Mobile Infantry: “The MI take care of their own—no matter what” (115). The recruits fall in and must watch as Dillinger is ceremonially stripped of all insignia and then hung. This is followed by 30 days of mourning and formal disgrace for the regiment.

Johnnie rolls the idea of capital punishment around in his mind. If Dillinger knew what he was doing, his penalty wasn’t painful enough. If he was crazy, death wasn’t any sort of lesson, but he’d remain a lethal danger to society. if he somehow could be cured, the knowledge what he’d done might drive him to suicide. Every way Johnnie looks at it, Dillinger ends up dead. Thinking back to his high school Moral Philosophy class, Johnnie recalls Mr. Dubois explaining that widespread disorder and crime, followed by an international war, led to the collapse of the North American republic. The theory of the time was that leniency leads to law-abiding citizens, but the opposite occurred.

Dubois asserts that “a human being has no natural rights of any nature,” and that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” must be wrested from nature and from tyrants (125). Furthermore, there is no such thing as a “juvenile delinquent,” because juveniles don’t yet have a fully developed moral sense. Johnnie wonders where young Dillinger would fit on that spectrum. In any event, no more children would die at Dillinger’s hands. 

Johnnie’s trainee regiment has dwindled from 2,000 to less than 400; his own H Company is down to a single platoon. They move to “Camp Sergeant Spooky Smith” (127), high in the Canadian Rockies. Captain Frankel spends more time with the recruits, his training customized to each student. Learning to fly powered suits in rough terrain is difficult at best; two recruits die and one retires on a medical discharge.

Recruits can spend Sundays in uniform on leave among the civilians—Vancouver is available by shuttle—and Johnnie quickly discovers how much he has changed by how strange the city appears, with so many useless items for sale at stores, “not a weapon among them” (131), and so many attractive young ladies. Recruit Pat Leivy offers to pay for shuttle tickets if Johnnie and “Kitten” Smith join him in Seattle. They agree and zip south to the big city. At a bar, they’re taunted by merchant-marine sailors and young civilian men. The three recruits leave but they’re followed and assaulted; in seconds the attackers are laid out, unconscious. The police arrive, but the lads don’t press charges, as they’re under orders to avoid trouble. Johnnie realizes he defended himself entirely by reflex, and he understands why all recruits go on leave unarmed.

The trainees begin practicing powered-suit landings from orbit: “go aboard, space, make a drop, go through an exercise, and home on a beacon. A day’s work” (134). Each company gets roughly one drop per week, week after week. The landings become harder—over mountains, desert, the Arctic, and finally the Moon—and more recruits quit. Most washouts resign or receive medical discharges, but 14 die. Johnnie gets his first case of the drop shakes; they never go away. Of the original complement of 2009 recruits, 187 finish the training and receive their certificates on graduation day.