Some cautionary words from Orson Scott Card

...in examining what Ender's experience might be like, I have drawn upon much reading, of course, but also from correspondence and conversation with good men and women who have served our country in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other trouble spots where our responsibilities as the only nation with the strength and the will to help beleaguered people against tyranny have been fulfilled. You bear a burden for us all, and I salute you.

I grieve for those who have fallen, or who, surviving with dire injuries or broken hearts, have been deprived of much or most of the future that you once dreamed of. As a citizen of the United States, I bear some of the responsibility for sending you where you have gone, and certainly reap the benefits. Like Ender, I might not have known what was being sacrificed in my name, but I recognize the connection between us.

And for those who you are visibly whole after your service, but who bear inward changes that no one sees, and carry memories that no one shares, I can only hope that I have done an adequate job of representing, in Ender Wiggin, something of what you feel and think and remember.

Orson Scott Card, afterword to Ender in Exile