55 pages • 1-hour read
Old Man's War
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Part 2, Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, cursing, and death.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary
Maggie is the first of John’s group to die. Outside a planet named Temperance, she is deployed to fight an invading species called the Ohu. However, the CDF ship explodes on the way down, hurling Maggie into the atmosphere. In her final moments, she uses her gun to shoot several rockets at nearby Ohu ships. Then, she sends a message to John’s group—a “jisei,” or death haiku, in which she tells her “friends” not to mourn her, as she “fall[s] as a shooting star / into the next life” (185).
After three months in the military, John finally feels like he fits in with the other soldiers. He realizes that this is likely because he has completed his first battle. He also notices that he has started to treat other recruits how he was treated—with distance and uncertainty—until they, too, prove themselves in battle.
One such soldier is Thaddeus Bender, a former ambassador and senator. Bender tries to force his fellow soldiers to like him, which John feels is a form of “campaigning” that Bender is used to from his life on Earth. In one instance, Bender offends Viveros and, by extension, John when he suggests that the CDF is not trying diplomacy often enough with alien species. After Viveros angrily dismisses his ideas, John tries to reason with Bender but finds no success.
For his next mission, John is sent with a group of soldiers, including Viveros and Bender, to the home planet of the Whaid people. The Whaidians and humans have been fighting for control of the same planet system for over a decade. The CDF decided to damage the Whaidians by attacking their home planet and destroying their infrastructure; John and the others are under strict orders not to directly attack civilians.
After several hours of taking out Whaid infrastructure, including their space ports, power sources, and dams, the CDF soldiers land near the Whaidians’ government buildings. John and Bender go first, making their way to the top of an office building and killing several snipers. When John reports back to Viveros, she orders him to return to their landing area. There, John and Bender find Viveros and the other officers looking into an amphitheater, where thousands of Whaid have gathered. They are chanting something that is untranslatable. Because they appear to be civilians and are not attacking—just holding clubs in the air—the officers are debating whether to attack.
Bender excitedly insists that the chanting is a religious prayer for peace. He breaks free from Viveros and the others and runs toward the mouth of the amphitheater. Viveros orders him to stop, but he ignores her. When Bender gets before the Whaid, he starts speaking to them only to be immediately killed as the clubs fire thousands of microscopic needles at him. In response, the CDF soldiers immediately kill all the Whaid.
On the way back to the station, Viveros admits to John that Bender was “right.” She, too, believes that the CDF uses force far too often. However, she insists that Bender was going about changing things the wrong way. Though she, John, and the others must follow orders now, she plans to move up the ranks until she can change those orders for the better. Two months later, however, Viveros dies on a mission. She sacrifices her life to seal off a tunnel, allowing John and the others to escape. Shortly thereafter, John takes her place as corporal. He notes that the CDF “replaced a cog” (204), but he “misse[s] her.”
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary
Thomas dies on an unnamed planet from a mold-like substance that the CDF has never encountered. After the mold takes over a planet and kills the colonists, Thomas’s platoon is sent in to see what happened. While Thomas is trying to retrieve a body for an autopsy, the mold enters his lungs and secretes an acid that destroys his insides. The mold seems to be sentient, as it launches attacks on soldiers in Thomas’s platoon nearly simultaneously. His death reminds John that the CDF soldiers often “can’t imagine what [they’re] up against” (208), as the enemy is often so different from humanity as to be unfathomable.
After dozens of battles and about a year into his service, John begins to become disenchanted with the CDF. He finally gets pushed over the edge when he is fighting the Covandu—one-inch-tall beings who are similar to humans in every way except their size. John’s platoon is ordered to take back the planet Cova Banda and does so by summarily stepping on thousands of Covandu. The Covandu’s strongest weapons feel like “sand” when they strike the CDF soldiers.
During the battle, John sits down in frustration, flinging a Covandu several meters in annoyance. Alan tries to talk to him about what’s wrong, and John does his best to explain his feelings. He feels like he is no longer connected to humanity anymore; instead, he feels like a “monster,” constantly destroying sentient beings without a second thought. He admits to Alan that it scares him.
John speaks with Keyes and the other commanders about how he feels. They admit that it’s normal for a soldier to begin to feel that way—usually a year into their service. One suggests that he think of the things he misses on Earth that made him feel human. They discuss things like reading, sunsets, and more. John admits that he misses being married—not necessarily his wife, but the comfort and human connection of having a wife.
Susan dies shortly thereafter. She is sent to the planet Elysium, where human oil drillers are on strike. The drillers take her captive and then feed her to a vicious scavenger fish. As she struggles to free herself from its throat, the drillers kill it, causing Susan to sink to the bottom of the ocean, where she dies from the extreme pressure. In retaliation, CDF soldiers kill dozens of drillers and feed them to the same scavenger. Susan’s death is “clarifying” for John. It makes him realize that humans can be just as violent and inhuman as the aliens they are fighting. He notes that he would have gladly killed the drillers in revenge without feeling any remorse.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary
John is sent to Coral, which is the fifth planet that the CDF colonized and the most Earth-like. Humans have lived there peacefully for years; however, a species called the Rraey attacks and takes over the planet, desperate to mine coral.
Keyes briefs John and the others on what will happen. The plan is to quickly attack Coral before the Rraey know what is happening. John’s forces will be outpowered and outnumbered, but the hope is that they can do enough damage to wait for the rest of the CDF forces. Several dozen ships will skip to Coral, appearing just beyond its atmosphere. One of the ships contains the Ghost Brigades—the CDF special forces.
On the day of the attack, John’s ship skips to Coral and is immediately hit with missiles. Because John is in a smaller ship and prepared to go to the surface of Coral, he convinces his pilot, Fiona, to take off immediately. Thanks to her skill, they make it out just as more missiles strike. As John watches, he sees another CDF ship arrive. At the exact moment it appears, several Rraey missiles hit it. Fiona notes that this should be impossible; no one should be able to track a ship that has skipped.
As soon as Fiona enters the atmosphere of Coral, their ship is attacked. She manages to get as close to the surface as she can but is forced to crash land. John is ejected from the ship and scrapes the ground as he lands, breaking his femur and becoming pinned beneath a large branch. As he looks up, he sees Alan stuck in a tree above him, blood dripping down. Alan sends a final message via his BrainPal about wanting to see constellations in his next life and then dies.
John lies on the ground, pinned beneath the branch, for a long time. He finally hears several human voices that are excited to find someone alive. He recognizes one of the voices as belonging to his wife, Katherine, so he decides that he must have died.
Part 2, Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Throughout this section of the text, several people from John’s initial core group die, including Maggie, Thomas, Susan, and Alan. Their deaths emphasize John’s continued disconnection from his humanity. As he becomes more entrenched in CDF warfare, he loses any sort of human connection, both literally and figuratively. Additionally, the narration of these characters’ deaths emphasizes both John’s disconnect as well as the brutality of the war. With the exception of Alan, their deaths are recounted quickly as sidenotes to John’s story, the details given in an almost systematic way. The pragmatic tone with which John discusses their deaths highlights the growing normality of death and his own detachment from it.
As this disconnect within John grows, the primary internal conflict that he faces is his struggle to maintain his emotion and his humanity. The battle with the Covandu people is an important moment in John’s character development, as he comes face to face with this conflict and attempts to grapple with it. The Covandu resemble humans in nearly every way, as they are skilled in the arts, focus on colonization and land acquisition, and even look like humans. In this way, the Covandu serve as a metaphorical mirror for John to examine what he and the CDF are doing, further developing the theme of Colonization and the Conflict Between Self and Other. While it is comparatively easy to kill a species that looks vastly different from humans without sympathy, John struggles with killing a people so similar to humans. As he explains to Alan, “I’ve just spent three hours stepping on intelligent beings like they were fucking bugs, that’s what’s wrong with me. I’m stomping people to death with my fucking feet” (212). He then goes on to point out how the dehumanization of other species serves this end, as the CDF soldiers “know only what [they] need to know about these people in order to fight them. They don’t exist to be anything other than an enemy” (213). These thoughts emphasize the conflict that is occurring within John as he questions the brutality and inhumanity of the systemic war that the CDF is waging, as well as his own role within it.
The conversation that John has with the other officers in his platoon reveals that he is not alone in his feelings. Rather, each of the CDF soldiers grapples with the orders that they must carry out. When he tells them what he is struggling with, another squad leader suggests that he “ma[k]e a list of the things that [he] misse[s] about Earth” (215). They then discuss what that list might include, such as Shakespeare, swimming, chocolate chip cookies, and books. Collectively, these mementos represent humanity, which their service has distanced them from. Tellingly, what John misses most is the literal human connection of marriage.
Part 2 ends on a cliffhanger, leaving the reader to wonder whether John will survive his crash landing on Coral. In these moments, Scalzi uses vivid imagery and slowed pacing, giving a detailed description of John’s near-death experience. John notes the “wrenching, tearing sounds as the nose of the shuttle rip[s] downward,” “a still shot with mouths open, screams silent in all the other noise,” and the “gurgling as [he] tr[ies] to scream,” ultimately “com[ing] to ground somewhere where branches are still falling” as he looks up and sees Alan’s lifeless body dripping blood from the trees (238). This diction and imagery emphasize the importance of this moment for John. While he will ultimately survive, the experience will serve as a moment of rebirth, as he will afterward grapple more extensively with the loss of his humanity and his role in the colonization of the universe.
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