William Mandella

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William Mandella is the main character in Joe Haldeman's Forever War series, the soldier protagonist of the The Forever War and Forever Free novels, who also is the main character of the Forever War graphic novel. The name's origin is an anagram of Joe Haldeman's surname, with Marygay Potter's name taken directly from Haldeman's wife of the same name.

Mandella, born on Earth in 1975, majored in physics during college. Following the start of the war with the Taurans, in 1996, he was conscripted to join the newly created United Nations military force. Only soldiers of extremely high intellectual and physical abilities are recruited to fight in this infantry force, conscripted under military legislation that presages the future takeover of all of Earth's governments by the military.

It is through his eyes that the reader experiences both the war against the alien Taurans and the changes in society and technology on Earth during the thousand-year conflict (made possible by time dilation, a relativistic consequence of traveling close to the speed of light, which allows Mandella to age only two decades biologically in a millennia).

Mandella is a very reluctant soldier (and even more so, officer), whose pacifistic leanings and somewhat resigned attitude are at odds with his tasks. A very small wheel in what at times seems more a bureaucracy than a military force, he only remains in the military because Earth had already changed so much at his first return that he has nothing to return to except the military life that he knows.

During the war, he falls in love with Marygay Potter, another soldier (and like him, later officer) of the force. Tragically separated by the uncaring military, they are only reunited hundreds of years later after the conclusion of the war, which both survived against all odds. With civilisation absolutely changed - humanity has become a cloned group mind, though it is now at peace with the Taurans - he marries her and they move to the planet "Middle Finger" to raise children, on the only planet left where individualistic humans are allowed to exist.

The novel Forever Free begins after Mandella has lived on "Middle Finger" for a couple of decades.