This study theorizes the “forever soldier”: a figure whose fight never truly ends but shifts from one battlefield to another. In northeastern Myanmar, these battlefields include protracted conflict, illicit drug economies, and Christian moral reform movements. I trace how cycles of addiction, rehabilitation, and war shape the everyday lives of forever soldiers and their communities in one of the world’s longest-running civil wars and largest drug economies. The central argument is that addiction, rehabilitation, and war sustain one another, pulling soldiers into cycles with no exit. Drugs are central to these cycles. They fuel conflict through profit and pain relief, act as bargaining chips in peace deals, drive development and labor, serve as moral targets in Christian anti-drug campaigns, and operate as social currency within illicit economies. Each domain produces a distinct form of soldiering, fought on overlapping political, economic, moral, and biochemical planes. Through four ethnographic chapters, I trace how the forever soldier is shaped across these planes. I examine balance in ceasefire economies; Christian conscription in anti-drug campaigns; patronage in illicit war economies; and refusal as a response to revolution. I suggest that soldiering is not a fixed identity but an assemblage of shifting figures—revolutionary, criminal, addict, redeemer, laborer—each conscripted by war’s changing demands. Dominant approaches to peace and conflict assume a post-war world. Terms like post-conflict, post-combatant, and post-traumatic reflect a temporal logic in which war ends, soldiers are demobilized, and healing begins. Yet as protracted conflict becomes increasingly common across the globe—in places like Afghanistan, Colombia, and northeast India—soldiering is not temporary, but an enduring condition. Centering the forever soldier, this study shows how war persists—not through battles alone, but through the erosion of any path out. Recognizing this invites a shift in how we imagine peace and recovery: not as endpoints after war, but as ongoing challenges within it. It opens up space to reconsider how efforts toward demobilization, rehabilitation, or reintegration might respond when war does not end and the soldier is forever.