(By way of a response)

“The hand he had offered me was the one that wasn’t there” (39)

Several amputees are featured prominently in Starship Troopers. This is not exactly surprising; the dangerous combat and training to which “cap troopers” are subjected result in frequent death and maiming. The specific mention of people’s amputated limbs serves a couple different purposes that are immediately distinguishable: on the one hand (pun regrettably intended), there is the Fleet Sergeant Ho model, in which the amputated limb is a warning, a “horror show” (39); on the other hand, there is the Dubois model, in which a nonlimb is displayed prominently as a badge or marker denoting experience, sacrifice.

The book is careful not to lay out these two alternate significances too schematically. Chronologically, the first amputee whom Johnnie encounters is Mr. Dubois, the History and Moral Philosophy teacher. Of Mr. Dubois Johnny recalls: “He would just point at you with the stump of his left arm…” (25). Clearly, Mr. Dubois cannot fall under the “horror show” category—although Johnnie does claim that Mr. Dubois “discourages” his students from serving (23). However, it is somewhat misleading to say that Mr. Dubois is the paradigmatic example of the missing-limb-as-ultimate-badge-of-honor character, if only because Johnnie does not immediately recognize what, exactly, Mr. Dubois’s missing limb means—that is, Johnnie does not know until much later exactly how much experience Dubois had, how much he sacrificed. When Johnnie is in boot camp, he receives a letter from Dubois, the signature of which bears a surprisingly high rank: “We supposed (if we thought about it at all) that he must have been a corporal or some such who had been let out when he lost his hand and had been fixed up with a soft job teaching a course that didn’t have to be passed…” (91). Dubois’s rank—Lieutenant Colonel—raises his status in Johnnie’s eyes, such that Dubois’s having taken a job teaching high school suddenly seems to him sort of heroic, rather than an easy retirement option; such that Dubois’s amputated limb becomes not a mere ticket to a “soft job” but a distinguishing sign of “honor.”

This reading of characters’ phantom limbs is more immediately accessible both to Johnnie—and, by proxy, to the reader—when Johnnie reaches officers’ training: “Most of the instructors, especially the officers, were disabled. The only ones I can remember who had a full complement of arms, legs, eyesight, hearing, etc., were some of the non-commissioned combat instructors—and not all of those” (174). Johnnie’s thinking at this point parallels neatly with the thoughts of his high-school self: “At first I wondered why those obvious candidates for physical retirement and full-pay pension didn’t take it and go home. Then I quit wondering” (174). At first blush, “Then I quit wondering” sounds sort of like “if we thought about it at all.” However, in the later case, Johnnie recognizes in his instructors’ actions the “virtuous” tautology of military service; MI fight because they are MI, we are repeatedly reminded; so, too, Johnnie concludes, it can be said only that his instructors did not retire because they are not retirees. Point being, Johnnie stops thinking about their reasoning not because he doesn’t care but because he recognizes the valor that inheres in these men’s actions.

Only in the second model is the violence of war—the fact that necessitates or realizes amputation—actually implied. The second model is peculiar, too, because singular and short-lived: Fleet Sergeant Ho is the only given example of the Fleet Sergeant Ho model: “A fleet sergeant sat at a desk there, in dress uniform, gaudy as a circus. His chest was loaded with ribbons I couldn’t read. But his right arm was off so short that his tunic had been tailored without any sleeve at all…and, when you came up to the rail, you could see that he had no legs” (28). Although Johnnie says that “it doesn’t seem to bother” Ho very much, it does make an impression on Johnnie.

A couple days later, Johnnie meets the same man outside the recruiting station, walking and gesturing with a full set of prostheses: “I don’t have to put on my horror show after working hours,” he explains to Johnnie (39). Here, the second model collapses into the first; Ho congratulates Johnnie on joining the MI, shakes hands with him using a prosthetic limb, and Johnnie, only briefly “horrified,” never looks back.