War Veteran

"War Veteran" is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K.

The plot concerns an old man who claims to have travelled back in time from a future in which Earth has lost a devastating war to its own Martian and Venusian colonies.

The man turns out to be a synthetic human, designed to trick the Earth people into believing they could never win the war, forcing them to make peace.

This type of android is a forerunner of the type appearing in Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

A similar, supposedly time-displaced "war veteran" character appears in Dick's novel The Zap Gun.