Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

they made the Ngumi more afraid of the soldierboys. Actually, the opposite was true, according to the people who studied the enemy's psychology. The soldierboys were most fearsome when they acted like actual machines, controlled from a distance. When they got angry or went crazy—acting like men in robot suits—they seemed beatable.)
    More than half of the stablilizers did crack before their term was up. In most cases it was not a sudden process, but was preceded by a period of inattention and indecision. Marty and Ray would be reviewing the performance of stabilizers prior to their failure, to see whether there was some invariable indicator that would warn commanders that it was time for a replacement or modification.
    The unbreakable jack fail-safe supposedly was to keep people from harming themselves or others, though everybody knew it was just to maintain the government monopoly. Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn't true. It wasn't quite true that you couldn't modify a jack in place, either, but the changes were limited to memory—usually when a soldier saw something the army wanted him or her to forget. Only two of the Saturday Night Special group knew about that.
    Sometimes they erased a soldier's memory of an event for security reasons; less often, for humane ones.
    Almost all of Marty's work now was with the military, which made him uncomfortable. When he had started in the field, thirty years before, jacks were crude, expensive, and rare, used for medical and scientific research.
    Most people still worked for a living then. A decade later, at least in the "first world," most jobs having to do with production and distribution of goods were obsolete or quaint. Nanotechnology had given us the nano-forge: ask it for a house, and then put it near a supply of sand and water. Come back tomorrow with your moving van. Ask it for a car, a book, a nail file. Before long, of course, you didn't have to ask it; it knew what people wanted, and how many people there were.
    Of course, it could also make other nanoforges. But not for just anybody. Only for the government. You couldn't just roll up your sleeves and build yourself one, either, since the government also owned the secret of warm fusion, and without the abundant free power that came from that process, the nanoforge couldn't exist.
    Its development had cost thousands of lives and put a huge crater in North Dakota, but by the time Julian was in school, the government was in a position where it could give everybody any material thing. Of course, it wouldn't give you everything you wanted; alcohol and other drugs were strictly controlled, as were dangerous things like guns and cars. But if you were a good citizen, you could live a life of comfort and security without lifting a finger to work, unless you wanted to. Except for the three years you were drafted.
    Most people spent those three years working in uniform a few hours a day in Resource Management, which was dedicated to making sure the nanoforges had access to all the elements they needed. About five percent of the draftees put on blue uniforms and became caregivers, people whose tests said they would be good working with the sick and elderly. Another five percent put on green uniforms and became soldiers. A small fraction of those tested out fast and smart, and became mechanics.
    People in National Service were allowed to reenlist, and a large number did. Some of them didn't want to face a lifetime of total freedom, perhaps uselessness. Some liked the perquisites that went along with the uniform: money for hobbies or habits, a kind of prestige, the comfort of having other people tell you what to do, the ration card that gave you unlimited alcohol, off duty.
    Some people even liked being allowed to carry a gun.
    The soldiers who weren't involved in soldierboys, waterboys, or flyboys—the people mechanics called "shoes"—got all of those perquisites, but always faced a certain probability of being