Armor

Powered armor may enhance speed and strength and keep you from being vaporized instantly, but each drop may kill you. Usually there is a rota and limits on the number of missions: but the record-keeping machine slips up and one soldier is sent down over and over and over again, and survives. The setting is more or less cribbed from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but the emotional core of the book is the leeching away of hope and humanity, the numbness and burn-out of war. Plot twists and a strange, disconnected coda round out the story.