William Mandella has issues, and he's going to deal with them frankly. A conscript for an interstellar war against the Taurans, he finds himself flung through collapsars to distant maybe-battles, engaged in automation-mediated combat that wipes out most of his unit. Finally making it back to Earth and out of the service, he finds it impossible to adjust to a civilian life that has changed markedly in the twenty-one Earth-years that he has been gone (aging only a couple years himself due to lots of near-relativistic-speed space travel).
