Old Man’s War - John Scalzi

2005, 320 pages
This is not a book I would usually pick to read. Descriptions of wars and combats bore me. But after I started reading this book, I thought this is something completely different.
John Perry is going to join the army at the age of 75. Not a regular army, but the Colonial Defense Force (CDF), that fights for humans living in distant planets.
Joining the army at the age of 75 doesn’t make much sense. How can an old person, at the last stage of his life, be useful as a soldier? But the fact is, the CDF wants these people. And that’s the motivation behind leaving everything they know on earth, their family, their home, and going towards the unknown: somehow, the CDF will have to make them strong and healthy again to be able to fight. And though it doesn’t seem much for someone who is still strong and healthy, things look completely different at the age of 75.
The first part of the book was great. Very touching, interesting and funny. It describes John’s life when he enlists. How he misses his wife who was supposed to enlist with him but died of stroke. His dealing with old age and deteriorated health. His relationship with friends and family. His moral dilemma between resistance to war and violence and his will to be young again and escape dying of old age, at least for a while. And a very funny description of the enlistment process. The book sure promised a lot in the first part.
The second part, describing the process of becoming a CDF soldier, unfolding the mystery of how the CDF uses 75 year olds as fighting soldiers, is pretty interesting, with lots of science-fiction technologies and theories. It was OK, but not as touching as the first part.
I was hoping that the next part will be interesting and touching again, but unfortunately it was only worse, just what I was afraid of: endless descriptions of combats and wars, weapons and fighting tactics. I was extremely bored. I was still hoping it leads somewhere, maybe back to the moral dilemmas of the first part, but was disappointed. These subjects were merely touched and not really handled seriously, and what I was hoping would be a serious discussion of the morality of combating and killing and looking for other ways to deal with difficult situations concerning “others” (aliens, in this case), just turned out to be a regular story of a war hero.