Review: Big Boys Don&#8217;t Cry
<p><cite>Big Boys Don&#8217;t Cry</cite> (Tom Kratman; Castalia House) is a short novel which begins innocently enough as an apparent pastiche of Keith Laumer&#8217;s <cite>Bolo</cite> novels and short stories.  Kratman&#8217;s cybernetic &#8220;Ratha&#8221; tanks, dispassionately deploying fearsome weapons but somehow equipped to understand human notions of honor and duty, seem very familiar.</p>
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<p>But an element generally alien to the <cite>Bolo</cite> stories and Kratman&#8217;s previous military fiction gradually enters: moral doubt.  A Ratha who thinks of herself as &#8220;Magnolia&#8221; is dying, being dismantled for parts after combat that nearly destroyed her, and reviews her memories.  She mourns her brave lost boys, the powered-armor assault infantry that rode to battle in in her &#8211; and, too often, died when deployed &#8211; before human turned front-line war entirely to robots. Too often, she remembers, her commanders were cowardly, careless, or venal.  She has been ordered to commit and then forget atrocities which she can now remember because the breakdown of her neural-analog pathways is deinhibiting her.</p>
<p>The ending is dark, but necessary. The whole work is a little surprising coming from Kratman, who knows and conveys that war is hell but has never before shown much inclination to question its ethical dimension at this level. At the end, he comes off almost like the hippies and peaceniks he normally despises.</p>
<p>There is one important difference, however. Kratman was combat career military who has put his own life on the line to defend his country; he understands that as ugly as war is, defeat and surrender can be even worse. In this book he seems to be arguing that the morality of a war is bounded above by the amount of self-sacrifice humans are willing to offer up to earn victory. When war is too easy, the motives for waging it become too easily corrupted.</p>
<p>As militaries steadily replace manned aircraft with drones and contemplate replacing infantry with gun-robots, this is a thought worth pondering.</p>
