[1] Drawn in the ligne claire style and originally published in Dutch as De Eeuwige Oorlog, it tells the story of William Mandella, an elite soldier fighting for Earth in a centuries-long interstellar war against the 'Taurans'.

Most importantly, it portrays personal experiences of a soldier who, due to pure luck and the Einsteinian time dilation of interstellar travel, fights in and survives the whole length of the war, to end up in a world he does not recognize anymore.

Due to time dilation, the two main characters experience the whole of the war, biologically appearing to be in their early thirties at the end of the hostilities.

The first volume mainly describes the training of the Earth elite force, and their first combat with Taurans, focusing on how military ideology is used to form humans into fighting machines, and in how typical the results end up being.

The story starts on Earth in the early 21st century, where Mandella and about a hundred other young men and women of especially promising physical and mental capabilities have been drafted into a special force designed to combat the extraterrestrial threat.

The Taurans are at this stage almost fully unknown to humanity, except for the apparently unprovoked destruction of some of the first Earth colonization ships sent to another star system - an act witnessed only by an automated drone probe.

Eventually arriving at the collapsar 'portal planet' Aleph, many light years away, the force lands near a Tauran planetary base, which remains unaware of their presence.

Suddenly turned into frenzied, hateful attackers - far different from their much less aggressive and more contemplative normal personalities – the soldiers raze the base and kill all but one Tauran, who successfully escapes the planet.

Though feted as heroes, being the first ever soldiers to fight Taurans, Mandella and his compatriots find their sceptical views on the war and on their own military mission edited by all-present censorship - their own complaints during talk shows are digitally replaced by positive, propaganda-inspired comments.

Both Mandella and Marygay end up having wounded limbs amputated by automatic 'guillotine' systems in their space suits, and only recover in a hospital, shaken and traumatized.

Allowed to recover on Heaven, a hidden colony planet used for the recovery of war veterans, they spend a few brief months of tense bliss while their bodies are regrown.

The different locations of their goals - Mandella's mission is to be the greatest series of sequential collapsar jumps ever made - make an eventual reunion almost impossible.

Also, his troops – genetically engineered individuals born many hundreds of years after his own 21st century – are distrustful of him and his heterosexual nature (Earth having long since made homosexuality the norm, originally for population control), which they perceive as barbaric.

Mandella survives by virtue of quick reflexes and long training - but is now faced with the difficulty of making a command decision: Should he execute the soldier for attacking his officer, or can he show leniency without losing the remaining respect of his charges?

Mandella and some of his troops survive only by taking refuge in a stasis field device which slows down all movement to a crawl, including that of all energy – and thus makes them immune to all modern weapons and most outside forces.

However, instead of dying in the meantime, she has used the funds accumulated during centuries of duty to purchase an old spaceship to use as a 'time capsule' to wait for him, via continual time dilation travel.

Mandella is finally reunited with her and several other veterans and relocates to Middle Finger, the only planet in the universe where humans are still allowed to live the type of life they did before the war, as individuals, conceiving and raising children in the old-fashioned way.

Unlike the first trilogy, this series is not directly based on the original novel (taking place mainly several decades after the end of the Forever War and the arrival of the veterans on Index), though it is strongly connected to the follow-up novel Forever Free, and the novella A Separate War, describing the time of separation between the two main characters from Marygay's perspective.