Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

[ShuraNoDougai]

I'm not perfect okay? Not like I took political science.

 

[Geedubs]

I'm not perfect okay? Not like I took political science.

Click to shrink...

I'm sorry if it seemed like I was criticizing or mocking you, I didn't intend that.

 

[veteranMortal]

Home Front USA

Article:

TAOS, NEW MEXICO

[Arthur Sinclair, Junior, is the picture of an old-world patrician: tall, lean, with close-cropped white hair and an affected Harvard accent. He speaks into the ether, rarely making eye contact or pausing for questions. During the war, Mister Sinclair was director of the U.S. government's newly formed DeStRes, or Department of Strategic Resources.]

Ah joy, another powerful, sophisticated hero of the American public, another Junta weirdo. DeStRes is one of their funnier incredibly powerful bureaucracies, I will grant. The hatchet men of all the nasty little infighting the American military immediately engaged in once they realised how absolutely badly they'd ratfucked themselves.

Article:

I don't know who first thought of the acronym "DeStRes" or if they consciously knew how much it sounded like "distress," but it certainly could not have been more appropriate. Establishing a defensive line at the Rocky Mountains might have created a theoretical "safe zone," but in reality that zone consisted mainly of rubble and refugees.

The initial Rockies Reclamation was probably the last Sound And Thunder war the Americans are likely to have. Quick and dirty air strikes on the LA swarms blew half the city to pieces, but broke the back of the ghouls behind the mountains.

The most they had to deal with from a refugee perspective was internal, though - they brought a lot less people out west than you'd expect them to have, if they were actually in the business of trying to save as much as they could.

Article:

There was starvation, disease, homelessness in the millions. Industry was in shambles, transportation and trade had evaporated, and all of this was compounded by the living dead both assaulting the Rocky Line and festering within our safe zone.

Much as I consider them all contemptible - you'll rarely find a unit of border guards for a Redeker Zone that doesn't have numerous allegations of extortion and criminal brutality against refugees - the American troops on the Rocky Line had one hell of a first year, guarding passes which were either just funnels for the undead in the summer or waist deep snowdrifts in the winter. Someone can be a monster and still have fought bravely.

I shan't shed tears over their deaths, though.

Article:

We had to get our people on their feet again—clothed, fed, housed, and back to work—otherwise this supposed safe zone was only forestalling the inevitable. That was why the DeStRes was created, and, as you can imagine, I had to do a lot of on-the-job training.

The Americans realised pretty quick that their food came from the Midwest and their war materiel came from either out east or across the sea, and nevermind their clothes - Bangladesh wasn't going to be exporting anything anytime soon.

Article:

Those first months, I can't tell you how much information I had to cram into this withered old cortex; the briefings, the inspection tours . . . when I did sleep, it was with a book under my pillow, each night a new one, from Henry J. Kaiser to Vo Nguyen Giap.

See, the problem the Americans had - the problem that was going to mean the ghouls ate them alive, Yonkers or no Yonkers - was that their military procurement was smeared all over the place.

Huge swathes of the tail of their military got devoured before they fired a shot at Yonkers, and it got worse afterwards. By the time they were behind the Rockies, they knew they were on borrowed time.

Neither Kaiser nor Giap are going to save you here.

Article:

If my father had been alive, he probably would have laughed at my frustration. He'd been a staunch New Dealer, working closely with FDR as comptroller of New York State. He used methods that were almost Marxist in nature, the kind of collectivization that would make Ayn Rand leap from her grave and join the ranks of the living dead.

Americans are so funny about the New Deal - it wasn't marxist, babes. Also, they weren't meaningfully able to copy it - they couldn't engage in widespread public infrastructure works, they weren't especially good at reining in corporations, nor did they try especially hard. What America did instead was mostly just retooling a lot of their population into military or military-supporting industries, which was able to keep them ticking over during the reconquest.

Article:

Tools and talent?

A term my son had heard once in a movie. I found it described our reconstruction efforts rather well. "Talent" describes the potential workforce, its level of skilled labor, and how that labor could be utilized effectively. To be perfectly candid, our supply of talent was at a critical low. Ours was a postindustrial or service-based economy, so complex and highly specialized that each individual could only function within the confines of its narrow, compartmentalized structure.

America absolutely still had a proletariat who could - with a surprisingly short lead-in time - successfully retool America into a somewhat functional state with a surprisingly limited reduction in quality of life or technological level.

They left most of it behind.

Article:

You should have seen some of the "careers" listed on our first employment census; everyone was some version of an "executive," a "representative," an "analyst," or a "consultant," all perfectly suited to the prewar world, but all totally inadequate for the present crisis. We needed carpenters, masons, machinists, gunsmiths.

The dumb motherfuckers. They followed the Redeker plan to the letter, and one of the things that consequently slipped through the net was to prioritise evacuation according to income - this makes a sort of sense. Middle to high income citizens are the least likely to cause trouble for a fragile government.

Of course, Redeker didn't write his plan on the assumption anyone would attempt to break out into the rest of America after leaving it to die, so he didn't consider the need to rearm to this extent.

Article:

The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation. We required a massive job retraining program. In short, we needed to get a lot of white collars dirty.

So they had to do this, lol. The Junta realised pretty fast that they'd gotten themselves into a pickle - Redeker's plan always hinged on the idea that you just held your redoubt. As Orange Eighty-Four this was "until we can convince another country to save us" and in the apocalypse, it was simply indefinite - but they couldn't do this, they were only able to hold power through the nationalistic lie they sold the people - that this was all necessary for the reconquest.

Article:

You would have entire suburban neighborhoods of upper-middle-class professionals, none of whom had possessed even the basic know-how to replace a cracked window. Those with that knowledge lived in their own blue-collar "ghettos," an hour away in prewar auto traffic, which translated to at least a full day on foot. Make no mistake, bipedal locomotion was how most people traveled in the beginning.

It remains wild to me that even now, American trains are, like… terrible? This is the obvious solution to not having enough cars or fuel for cars, which remains a problem even now, but they just… barely build any trains. They've got a handful of passenger trains, more than they used to? But like… Christ.

Article:

Solving this problem—no, challenge, there are no problems—was the refugee camps. There were hundreds of them, some parking-lot small, some spreading for miles, scattered across the mountains and coast, all requiring government assistance, all acute drains on rapidly diminishing resources. At the top of my list, before I tackled any other challenge, these camps had to be emptied.

This is part of why I never understood the claim that the Americans always meant to retreat behind the Rockies - they'd been planning these huge processing sites along the Mississippi which they then just… abandoned, and meanwhile behind the Rockies, they just have the 10 million refugees who made it over the mountains in these, like, random shanty-town camps?

It was an extremely ad-hoc attempt to salvage a completely fucked plan.

Article:

Anyone F-6 but physically able became unskilled labor: clearing rubble, harvesting crops, digging graves. A lot of graves needed to be dug. Anyone A-1, those with war-appropriate skills, became part of our CSSP, or Community Self-Sufficiency Program. A mixed group of instructors would be tasked with infusing these sedentary, overeducated, desk-bound, cubicle mice with the knowledge necessary to make it on their own.

The great re-education. Most places had to do this, but the Americans gave themselves deliberately skewed demographics, so they had a steeper hill to climb. The weird prescriptivist gender norms they outside of the military itself didn't help, either.

Article:

It was an instant success. Within three months you saw a marked drop in requests for government aid. I can't stress how vital this was to victory. It allowed us to transition from a zero-sum, survival-based economy, into full-blown war production. This was the National Reeducation Act, the organic outgrowth of the CSSP. I'd say it was the largest jobs training program since the Second World War, and easily the most radical in our history.

Reshaping your entire economy into a furnace for the eternal military machine is not archetypical of, like, the New Deal, or even the Stalinist-era Five-Year-Plans. No, this sort of radical reshaping of your economy is… Not social democratic or leftist, delicately.

Which is part of why it kinda just… fell apart? As the war ended. The New Clique is trying to rebuild a more functional sort of military dictatorship, and they've kept America mostly functional, but they're at the limit of what you can do with this sort of corporatist economic organisation, I think.

Article:

You've mentioned, on occasion, the problems faced by the NRA…

I was getting to that. The president gave me the kind of power I needed to meet any physical or logistical challenge. Unfortunately, what neither he nor anyone on Earth could give me was the power to change the way people thought. As I explained, America was a segregated workforce, and in many cases, that segregation contained a cultural element.

The Junta in these early days wasn't really interested in removing these thought patterns, either. They weren't, like, exceptionally racist, not like the civilians they deposed or the CSA they ended up fighting? But they got a lot of mileage out of penal labour and so on, and you don't need me to tell you that those systems in America are built to be fed by racism.

Article:

A great many of our instructors were first-generation immigrants. These were the people who knew how to take care of themselves, how to survive on very little and work with what they had. These were the people who tended small gardens in their backyards, who repaired their own homes, who kept their appliances running for as long as mechanically possible. It was crucial that these people teach the rest of us to break from our comfortable, disposable consumer lifestyle even though their labor had allowed us to maintain that lifestyle in the first place.

They do still have this weird fetishisation of the low-income immigrant worker? Like, they keep begging for immigrants because there's a deep seated ideological fascination with the idea that they are "harder workers" intrinsically, and can teach that, can improve the weak will of the American worker or whatever.

Not that they were expected to work harder for less because of racist systems and a lack of support, no no, they just are… inherently harder workers?

Article:

Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You're a high-powered corporate attorney. You've spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That's what you're good at, that's what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money.

It's funny that the example he uses is a classic of the Professional-Managerial Class - this is because they destroyed this class. Not the bourgeoisie small business tyrants, or the franchise owners of fast food restaurants, or the car dealership owners. Not even the Silicon Valley brain trust. No, they were useful for the industrialisation process, or for understanding how to go about feeding the people, or the important innovations which bring hope to America or whatever.

Blowhard.

Article:

Now they were being trained as custodians for a munitions plant in Bakersfield, California. One woman, a casting director, exploded. How dare they degrade her like this! She had an MFA in Conceptual Theater, she had cast the top three grossing sitcoms in the last five seasons and she made more in a week than her instructor could dream of in several lifetimes! She kept addressing that instructor by her first name. "Magda," she kept saying, "Magda, enough already. Magda, please." At first I thought this woman was just being rude, degrading the instructor by refusing to use her title. I found out later that Mrs. Magda Antonova used to be this woman's cleaning lady.

This is where I get to talk about some of the weird gender politics of the Old Clique - isn't that fun.

The American Junta for the duration of the war allowed women to serve in the military. Frontline, backline, footslogger fighting ghouls, neckbreaker killing dissidents, you name it, they let women do it.

The American Junta also consistently ingrained in the civilian population an undeniable gender segregation; women were trained to be "custodians" in munitions plants, not the actual line workers. Women could train women for support roles like this, but the actual work was the province of men. Women were caregivers and caretakers, men were workers, producers.

And soldiers were soldiers, independent of this. I know someone from America who wrote an essay about the way "soldier" was essentially a third gender under the Junta during the war, a distinct, separate group which could run roughshod over anyone else.

Article:

I met one gentleman on a coastal ferry from Portland to Seattle. He had worked in the licensing department for an advertising agency, specifically in charge of procuring the rights to classic rock songs for television commercials. Now he was a chimney sweep. Given that most homes in Seattle had lost their central heat and the winters were now longer and colder, he was seldom idle.

Remember at the start of the book, when our boy was sniping at Chongqing because they lacked a centralised power grid?

Interesting, isn't it?

Article:

I know it sounds a little too Norman Rockwell, but I hear stories like that all the time. "You see those shoes, I made them," "That sweater, that's my sheep's wool," "Like the corn? My garden." That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.

The Americans love repeating over and over, with increasing volume, that actually it's so much more fun to live in a country with a life expectancy 20 years below the pre-war average and an economy barely outside of subsistence.

You'd almost believe they were lying about it.

Article:

Ask anyone how the Allies won the Second World War. Those with very little knowledge might answer that it was our numbers or generalship. Those without any knowledge might point to techno-marvels like radar or the atom bomb. [Scowls.]

This is part and parcel of an old American cope. The Allies won the Second World War because the Soviet Union bled herself white training and equipping tens of millions of young men and women to fight, kill and die to defeat the fascist beast. They prefer to focus on the logistical elements further from the front than that.

Article:

Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of that conflict will give you three real reasons: first, the ability to manufacture more materiel: more bullets, beans, and bandages than the enemy; second, the natural resources available to manufacture that materiel; and third, the logistical means to not only transport those resources to the factories, but also to transport the finished products out to the front lines.

It isn't even intrinsically wrong - this was all necessary! - but it just bugs me. It is an erasure of the human cost of resisting fascism.

Article:

This time we were the Axis. The living dead controlled most of the world's landmass, while American war production depended on what could be harvested within the limits of the western states specifically. Forget raw materials from safe zones overseas; our merchant fleet was crammed to the decks with refugees while fuel shortages had dry-docked most of our navy.

The US Navy remained active throughout the war; ask the survivors along the Gulf of Mexico how they stayed out of the Christian States, lol.

The reason the Americans didn't get raw materials from safe zones overseas was that by and large when they arrived at some poor fucking country trying to resist the rising horde after their American protectors fucked off into the sunset and asked for some rubber or, I don't know, aluminium? They'd tell them to fuck off.

Article:

California's agricultural base could at least erase the problem of starvation, if it could be restructured. The citrus growers didn't go quietly, neither did the ranchers. The beef barons who controlled so much prime potential farmland were the worst.

Ranchland sucks shit for farming on. That's why it is used for ranching instead. The Americans very nearly stumbled into a famine until someone finally got it through their fucking heads that the reason their grain crops kept failing over and over was that the soil wasn't up to it.

They were able to farm on what used to be crop growth for cattle, I guess? But they still needed the meat, they weren't exactly growing a lot of high-protein vegetables.

I remember, once we'd linked up with Cardiff and Swansea, we went north, salvaged the sheep farms across Wales. Fortunately for us, we didn't have morons in charge, so we didn't end up trying to grow fucking barley in a mountain valley or whatever.

Article:

Did you ever hear of Don Hill? Ever see the movie Roy Elliot did on him? It was when the infestation hit the San Joaquin Valley, the dead swarming over his fences, attacking his cattle, tearing them apart like African driver ants. And there he was in the middle of it all, shooting and hollering like Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun.

I was on herding duty for a solid year and a half before rotating to the Red Guards as part of the land thrust on Merseyside once I turned 18. It wasn't… like this? We didn't have swarms properly behind our lines, we just had the ghouls that wandered past the Anglesey cordon, the ones that stumbled out of isolated villages, or across from places like Wolverhampton - this was before we'd broken the Brummies out of their siege, remember.

We'd build these little watchtowers (you can still see them, if you're in the Welsh Valleys) and you'd be up there in teams of four, with eight hour shifts - one on duty, two off duty and one sleeping - with a spotlight for night observation, and a couple quad bikes at the bottom of the tower. At first they had these shitty old guns; bolt action hunting rifles and shotguns with rust patina up the outsides of the barrel, but they didn't need to be any good. By the time I was posted there, they'd gotten trade and supply set up outside Britain, and the Shepherds were issued with little armalites from our friends across the Irish Sea. We'd see the sheep starting to flee - they could outrun a ghoul on their pastures, but not forever - and whoever was on duty would grab the walkie-talkie and their gun, head downstairs and drive out to kill the handful of ghouls menacing the sheep.

If there were too many, you retreat and tell the tower to radio for backup, and they mobilise the Red Guard at the nearest garrison. I only lost three sheep to enemy action in 18 months.

Article:

I warned him that when the hordes of starving refugees showed up to finish what the living dead started, he'd have no government protection whatsoever. Hill was a brave, stubborn bastard, but he wasn't an idiot. He agreed to surrender his land and herd only on the condition that his and everyone else's breeding stock remained untouched. We shook on that.

Don Hill is, from what I can tell, a horrible piece of shit, but he got the absolute last laugh here; the government very literally came to him hat in hand to restore some of the ranches, and he'd gotten a monopoly on breed stock west of the Rockies.

Article:

We had an entire industry of over a hundred thousand employees working three shifts, seven days a week: collecting, cataloging, disassembling, storing, and shipping parts and pieces to factories all over the coast. There was a little trouble, like with the cattle ranchers, people not wanting to turn over their Hummers or vintage Italian midlife crisis mobiles.

Mostly pointless, doing this. There's not a lot of use for the more complicated parts in one of these cars except "running one of these cars" - and the roads still work. We just seized all the cars, used them for a large part of our logistical network, and when a part broke, someone could look it up and crack open one of the cars from that same company to harvest it. Disassembling all of them was pretty silly.

But this was all a sideshow. The Department of Strategic Resources mostly existed for…

Article:

Of all my adversaries, easily the most tenacious were the ones in uniform. I never had direct control over any of their R&D, they were free to green light whatever they wanted. But given that almost all their programs were farmed out to civilian contractors and that those contractors depended on resources controlled by DeStRes, I had de facto control.

… This. DeStRes mostly acted - a little early on, but an awful lot later - to be the weapon wielded in the bloody internal war the Junta waged on its more fractious subdivisions - a lot of the air force retreated south, not west, and the ones who went west were the recipients of that scorn from the rest of the military.

Article:

"You cannot mothball our Stealth bombers," they would yell. "Who the Blank do you think you are to cancel our production of tanks?" At first I tried to reason with them: "The M-1 Abrams has a jet engine. Where are you going to find that kind of fuel? Why do you need Stealth aircraft against an enemy that doesn't have radar?"

The American Air Force essentially no longer exists. They were increasingly folded back into the Army as their planes and bases got defunded, and eventually the Army conducted a hostile takeover to seize their remaining assets before the Navy could.

America stopped producing tanks because America lost their tank factories. The Army was in ascendance throughout the crisis, and it's only post war, as it factionalised, that the Navy was able to align with some of them to form the New Clique.

Article:

They were insufferable, with their all-hours phone calls, or just showing up at my office unannounced. I guess I can't really blame them, not after how we all treated them after the last brushfire war, and certainly not after almost having their asses handed to them at Yonkers. They were teetering on the edge of total collapse, and a lot of them just needed somewhere to vent.

Lip-service must always be paid to the poor, mistreated pre-war military, and their excesses after the retreat dismissed as "needing somewhere to vent"

Even now, America has refused to acknowledge or apologise for the brutal treatment of civilians - especially women, in ways I shan't touch on - by retreating GIs who "needed somewhere to vent".

Article:

[He grins confidently.]

I started my career trading on the floor of the NYSE, so I can yell as hard and long as any professional drill sergeant. After each "meeting," I'd expect the call, the one I'd been both dreading and hoping for: "Mister Sinclair, this is the president, I just want to thank you for your service and we'll no longer be requiring…" [Chuckles.] It never came. My guess is no one else wanted the job.

Bollocks.

He never got removed because he made himself indispensable, like a horrible little spider at the centre of a web, holding a position with ill-defined limits which everyone one day wakes up to realise is incredibly, horrifically powerful. Similarities between this and figures within the Soviet Union at critical points in its history need not be made explicit.

And he was aligned with the President's backers, anyway.

Article:

[His smile fades.]

I'm not saying that I didn't make mistakes. I know I was too anal about the air force's D-Corps. I didn't understand their safety protocols or what dirigibles could really accomplish in undead warfare. All I knew was that with our negligible helium supply, the only cost-effective lift gas was hydrogen and no way was I going to waste lives and resources on a fleet of modern-day Hindenburgs.

I've been told subsequent to my previous post that apparently dirigibles do, actually, have a space in anti-ghoul warfare, so I suppose I'll just eat crow on this. I still contend the Americans use the damnable things in too dangerous a manner - they lose one every year or so, that can't be normal.

Article:

I also had to be persuaded, by the president, no less, to reopen the experimental cold fusion project at Livermore. He argued that even though a breakthrough was, at best, still decades away, "planning for the future lets our people know there will be one." I was too conservative with some projects, and with others I was far too liberal.

Trust me, it's just 10 years away. Just another 10 years, I swear, just like I said 10 years ago. You plan for the future by building hospitals and roads, clean water and sewage treatment, by settling in for the long haul. Not by funding ridiculous fucking boondoggles.

Article:

Project Yellow Jacket—I still kick myself when I think about that one. These Silicon Valley eggheads, all of them geniuses in their own field, convinced me that they had a "wonder weapon" that could win the war, theoretically, within forty-eight hours of deployment. They could build micro missiles, millions of them, about the size of a .22 rimfire bullet, that could be scattered from transport aircraft, then guided by satellites to the brain of every zombie in North America. Sounds amazing, right? It did to me.

The fact that Silicon Valley tech bros went entirely unmolested by the junta is archetypical of how much the junta remained profoundly capitalist, just a sort of capitalism which cannot afford a PMC.

Anyway, obviously this shit didn't work, just like the Infinity Ships don't work (Company has entered administration, by the by - sucks to suck)

Article:

I could have gone head-to-head against the military for the duration of the war, but I'm grateful, in the end, that I didn't have to. When Travis D'Ambrosia became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he not only invented the resource-to-kill ratio, but developed a comprehensive strategy to employ it. I always listened to him when he told me a certain weapons system was vital. I trusted his opinion in matters like the new Battle Dress Uniform or the Standard Infantry Rifle.

You shouldn't have. Both of those things are dogshit.

But yes, once Travis had secured the Chair - and his old boss was the Secretary of State - the bureaucratic purges of the military stopped. Sinclair had a good working relationship with the Old Clique. Close.

Article:

What was so amazing to see was how the culture of RKR began to take hold among the rank and file. You'd hear soldiers talking on the street, in bars, on the train; "Why have X, when for the same price you could have ten Ys, which could kill a hundred times as many Zs." Soldiers even began coming up with ideas on their own, inventing more cost-effective tools than we could have envisioned.

Why is this taken as some, like, incredible achievement? Soldiers talk shop like this all the time. I remember when we were being moved up to help to clear Birmingham street by street, headed for the siege at the centre, we were just sat in the train and this guy - Phillips, I think? - just goes "Why aren't we issued those breach and clear rams? We've gotta use crowbars instead. Doesn't make sense."

Learnt later that they'd just… not really thought about it? The rams were great, though. Meant you absolutely had to wait for backup before you could break into a locked room.

Article:

[Sinclair points above my head to the opposite wall. On it hangs a heavy steel rod ending in what looks like a fusion of shovel and double-bladed battle-axe. Its official designation is the Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool, although, to most, it is known as either the "Lobotomizer," or simply, the "Lobo."]

The leathernecks came up with that one, using nothing but the steel of recycled cars. We made twenty-three million during the war.

[He smiles with pride.]

And they're still making them today.

I have heard nothing but derision from my girl for the fucking Lobotomiser. She lost hers deliberately early in their war, and never looked back. Picked up a handaxe from somewhere, used that instead.

Too heavy. Too unwieldy. Rusts like you wouldn't believe. Almost impossible to make the damn thing keep an edge. And no, I couldn't tell you why America continues to churn out this shit. I couldn't even tell you why they made it - they didn't need to entrench on the front lines, and the people who were digging - gravediggers after battles, sanitation workers before battles… they should have, like, guards posted at their position? That's how a normal military does this.

That's all we get from this particular Junta hatchet man, and this seems like a good place to cut off, because next time I get to talk about one of the politicians involved in American democracy going for a long walk off a cliff.


Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].

Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE]; the women out of the Bratsk camps have started arriving, and… they really need the funds urgently.

Offering my critical support to the WRC in this time, also, though this isn't a call to action.

AN: The DeStRes fits way too well as a funny little agency quietly able to purge from relevance their political rivals. I had no choice but to imply their leader is similar to Stalin in this way.

Anyway, the Lobo is fucking dumb.

I've edited smthg abt the ranching bc I am a dumb baby who doesn't understand California. My bad.

 

[Geedubs]

I can only assume the 'lobo' is an axe-shovel instead of just an axe for the same reason Brooks praises the Shaolin Spade in the Zombie Survival Guide; he thinks its cool & unique. He'd probably say something about burying corpses if asked, but the real reason is because he thinks its cool and it has more flair than a 'normal weapon.'

I was that guy too. Of course, I was a teenager and Brooks was - to my knowledge - a grown man when he wrote these books. But still.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

It's funny that the example he uses is a classic of the Professional-Managerial Class - this is because they destroyed this class. Not the bourgeoisie small business tyrants, or the franchise owners of fast food restaurants, or the car dealership owners. Not even the Silicon Valley brain trust. No, they were useful for the industrialisation process, or for understanding how to go about feeding the people, or the important innovations which bring hope to America or whatever.

Blowhard.

Click to shrink...

It's also a really strange example, at least from my perspective. Like, I encountered people like this in the channel flotilla. They often had yachts so ended up joining up. Maybe this was just because most of them were yacht guys, but most of the problem with the top flight PMC guys was not that they were unwilling to do technical work, if anything the problem was they thought they were too good at fixing a boat engine. A lot of guys like that are eager as hell to be taught how to do technical stuff because they think that its manly. They've been stuck in an office forever and they'd seen too many pre-war disaster movies and now they thought they were asteroid strike dad.

The problem was they were all really fucking old, and really fucking unfit.

Like, the corporate lawyer he's describing there is probably in his late 40s or even 50s. He's been in the job for 30+ years and he doesn't have a lot of professional hobbies. He's probably done a lot of coke when he was younger, ate a lot of meals with clients and may have a bit of a drinking problem. He's now crashed down to a war time diet which has at best 1/2 to 2/3rds of the calories he's used to.

You can find useful work for him to do but he's probably not the guy you want to be retraining to do physically demanding work?

There's always this thing you get with fascists where they just drip with disdain for the PMC. Almost always the ones who hate it most are the ones who used to themselves be PMC.

The US Navy remained active throughout the war; ask the survivors along the Gulf of Mexico how they stayed out of the Christian States, lol.

The reason the Americans didn't get raw materials from safe zones overseas was that by and large when they arrived at some poor fucking country trying to resist the rising horde after their American protectors fucked off into the sunset and asked for some rubber or, I don't know, aluminium? They'd tell them to fuck off.

Click to shrink...

It sorta beggars belief to me, maybe this is just me being ex-salvage crew, that they didn't like, go closer to home and start salvage ops in cities. Like, yes, obviously, there were ghouls in a lot of the mega cities. But there's ways around that, especially if you have the resources of a navy. The footprint of a ghoul swarm, even a colossal one, is a lot smaller than the footprint of an entire city. Humans need a lot more space to live in than ghouls do, so you would think rather than heading to Chile or whatever and being like "Rubber? Give rubber?" they might have instead like... tried to salvage any of the cities along the actual American coast?

I've been told subsequent to my previous post that apparently dirigibles do, actually, have a space in anti-ghoul warfare, so I suppose I'll just eat crow on this. I still contend the Americans use the damnable things in too dangerous a manner - they lose one every year or so, that can't be normal.

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I am a total lighter than air skeptic.

There's almost nothing you can't do more safely with a fixed wing aircraft or a drone than you can with a dirigible. Maybe that's just because of how many of the early ones I saw got wrecked on the coast after "engine trouble" though.

I have heard nothing but derision from my girl for the fucking Lobotomiser. She lost hers deliberately early in their war, and never looked back. Picked up a handaxe from somewhere, used that instead.

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I saw a guy (almost) drown because of one of those heavy things after he misjudged the depth of water during a drop. It was his own stupid mistake. He should have waited for us to tell him we were actually in the shallows before he got out of the boat, but man did he have difficulty with that frying pan.

 

[ScottishMongol]

The Americans love repeating over and over, with increasing volume, that actually it's so much more fun to live in a country with a life expectancy 20 years below the pre-war average and an economy barely outside of subsistence.

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It is...was...hmm. Really what happened, and I only realized this once I got out of the army and read some theory, is that people aren't as alienated from their labor anymore. Yeah living standards are crap, but at least you're not atomized, you have a social safety net of people in your community that you can trust, and your labor is going back into sustaining that community. If you've never been outside that system...yeah, sometimes it was good, maybe even better than what you had before.

Ranchland sucks shit for farming on. That's why it is used for ranching instead.

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I know you're not from the American West so you're not as clued-in on water politics out here, but the real problem wasn't free-range cattle, it was feedlots. There was way too much farmland tied up growing low-quality feed for cattle, and that water was better off growing food people could eat. Like, I cannot stress how insane the pre-war water usage was, there's a reason we called them cattle barons.

So yeah, DeStRes went to the cattle barons, told them "we're going to take your feed, you can either watch your cattle starve or cull your herds and sell them now". And good fucking riddance to them.

They do still have this weird fetishisation of the low-income immigrant worker? Like, they keep begging for immigrants because there's a deep seated ideological fascination with the idea that they are "harder workers" intrinsically, and can teach that, can improve the weak will of the American worker or whatever.

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The US took in millions of refugees during the war, mostly from Mexico and Central America. That was, you know, mostly because it was impossible to keep the borders closed, and uncontrolled immigration was a vector for infected. Also, they were allied with Mexico - watching each other's flanks, sure, but also because nobody wants a collapsing nation next door. So what the US settled on was making it very, very easy to immigrate, to incentivize people to come here through normal channels where they could be screened.

Tons of refugees got in on work programs or the army's "Service Garuantees Citizenship" deal (they didn't call it that, but everyone else did). The big problem postwar was getting them to stick around, especially once Mexico was fully liberated and living standards there started climbing above that of the US (by some standards, they were already there before V-Day). That's why you have the dual-pronged "nation of immigrants" line as well as the whole...Aztlan line.

 

[Laplace]

Project Yellow Jacket—I still kick myself when I think about that one. These Silicon Valley eggheads, all of them geniuses in their own field, convinced me that they had a "wonder weapon" that could win the war, theoretically, within forty-eight hours of deployment. They could build micro missiles, millions of them, about the size of a .22 rimfire bullet, that could be scattered from transport aircraft, then guided by satellites to the brain of every zombie in North America. Sounds amazing, right? It did to me.

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If you want to laugh imagine if this worked and Project Yellow Jacket immediately killed 98% of the living in deployed areas due to faulty training data lmaooooo

I have heard nothing but derision from my girl for the fucking Lobotomiser. She lost hers deliberately early in their war, and never looked back. Picked up a handaxe from somewhere, used that instead.

Too heavy. Too unwieldy. Rusts like you wouldn't believe. Almost impossible to make the damn thing keep an edge. And no, I couldn't tell you why America continues to churn out this shit. I couldn't even tell you why they made it - they didn't need to entrench on the front lines, and the people who were digging - gravediggers after battles, sanitation workers before battles… they should have, like, guards posted at their position? That's how a normal military does this.

That's all we get from this particular Junta hatchet man, and this seems like a good place to cut off, because next time I get to talk about one of the politicians involved in American democracy going for a long walk off a cliff.

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On the drive east, I saw a couple of dudes get hauled into the medevac with bigass face wounds because they hit something wrong and the lobo rebounded. Anyway, when we expected to fight zeds close up we packed hammers. Carpenters mostly, but later one you'd get dudes who started making stuff with longer handles.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

On the drive east, I saw a couple of dudes get hauled into the medevac with bigass face wounds because they hit something wrong and the lobo rebounded. Anyway, when we expected to fight zeds close up we packed hammers. Carpenters mostly, but later one you'd get dudes who started making stuff with longer handles.

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We made a lot of use of boat hooks. Pretty light, capable of being used to bash a ghouls face in. Can also be used to hook a boat.

The real thing though if you plan to fight against ghouls up close is anti-bite gloves. If you end up in a situation where you have to randomly fight a Zed, don't spend a lot of time picking a weapon. Whatever will mostly do the job. Get something wrapped around your fore arms and fingers. Even if you've just lashed books to your forearms it will increase your odds of survival a lot. 90% of all casualties against small numbers of Zeds are from defensive wrist bites. Don't let it happen to you.

 

[Kadmus]

You can just use a regular garden fuckin' shovel for decapitation, push comes to shove. I've done it myself, when we had an unlucky ghoul climb the anchor chain and I was tending the potatoes. Probably wouldn't have worked well - but it would have worked, a shovel's a heavy flat piece of metal on the end of a stick, that cuts well enough and people lose toes to the things by accident every day - back at the start of things, but by the time the yanks organised themselves well enough to start making that useless fucking boondoggle, the rot had set in well enough that you could do it with your godsdamned bare hands if you had to.

And that, let me tell you, makes much more of a mess. I'm just glad I had gloves and long sleeves for that one, because I'd have been dead meat if I hadn't. I know a lot of people who had to do the same thing weren't as lucky.

But name a more iconic pair than Americans and spending all their money on useless military kit.

At least the dirigibles have some sort of purpose. It's not like the ghouls have an air-force, as our reviewer mentioned; what he failed to mention was that they could have just turned all that wasted metal into actually useful weapons for their soldiers, or body armour, or just into fucking foot-long darts you can drop by the thousand from any elevated position to fuck up some zombies.

And yeah, you'd expect them to just make the minimal investment of stationing guards for their work teams. I know that's how it's worked on this side of the pond.

 

[Laplace]

We made a lot of use of boat hooks. Pretty light, capable of being used to bash a ghouls face in. Can also be used to hook a boat.

The real thing though if you plan to fight against ghouls up close is anti-bite gloves. If you end up in a situation where you have to randomly fight a Zed, don't spend a lot of time picking a weapon. Whatever will mostly do the job. Get something wrapped around your fore arms and fingers. Even if you've just lashed books to your forearms it will increase your odds of survival a lot. 90% of all casualties against small numbers of Zeds are from defensive wrist bites. Don't let it happen to you.

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Yeah, the way my team used to do it was that we'd have a couple guys with sticks, like any sticks would do. Like pool nets with the front half ripped out. They'd push the z's down and another guy would come around and either bash in the head or shoot it. Mostly we shot, though, I mean if you have a gun just use it.

I liked my carpenter's cause it had that hook on the end, right? After I got it fitted out with a longer handle I could use it as a crowbar. Saved a lot of space, and well, it's still a hammer. You can use it to bang some nails in.

 

[hellgodsrus]

IC:
The fucking lobotomiser, jesus. The best way to tell how junta-brained someone is is to ask them their opinion on the damn thing. The only advantage to double blade is that it makes the balance a bit better but that's outweighed immediately because they make the the damn thing all of the same material so all the weight goes from the head to the damn haft - seriously you'd do better gripping it in reverse and beating zekes' heads in with the pole if it weren't for the fact that the head makes it impossible to use like that, and because they were churning them out so fast they're shit quality metal too - I have never seen a kill made by a lobo that couldn't be made faster, cleaner, better with literally any other weapon, including bare hands.

And the name, fuck me. Lobotomies were meant to be precise and they call a fucking giant two handed axe a lobotomiser - the spear I made in my first year that snapped after three days would have held the name better! Just - fuck.

 

[NobodyImportant]

God, I always forget that it's called an entrenching tool. Entrenching. Anyone will tell you, when you're fighting massed zombies, what you really want is more tight spaces! It's just flailing around for any scrap of national mythology they can find to add to their own.

The Lobotomizer is the perfect symbol of the New America. It's a society, they'll tell you, rebuilt from the ground up to face the zombie threat! As if that's hard, as if that's unique, as if that's what we still need right now, as if that justifies any of the other bullshit. In your hands they'll place the lobo, the perfect zombie killing tool. Ignore that it's not really better than an axe or a hammer or a long enough spear. Ignore that it'll dull the first time it hits a rock if you're lucky and will cut off your toes if you're not. Ignore that it's not weighted to be a shovel or to be a weapon. It's the perfect zombie killing tool! Of course they still make them. You might as well ask them to stop making flags.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

Yeah, the way my team used to do it was that we'd have a couple guys with sticks, like any sticks would do. Like pool nets with the front half ripped out. They'd push the z's down and another guy would come around and either bash in the head or shoot it. Mostly we shot, though, I mean if you have a gun just use it.

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You have to always wonder "Is this bullet seriously worth even a tiny chance of death if I fuck up and stumble into bite range somehow?"

And most of the time it just isn't.

Edit: there were a couple of crews who had specialist black powder weapons to do this to save on the good ammo, but that always struck me as another thing to lose/get wet/fall overboard. Just use your rifle.

 

[Laplace]

You have to always wonder "Is this bullet seriously worth even a tiny chance of death if I fuck up and stumble into bite range somehow?"

And most of the time it just isn't.

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Hey, the bayonets aren't that much of a waste.

I picked up wood carving!

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

Hey, the bayonets aren't that much of a waste.

I picked up wood carving!

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I mean I was carrying a krink, so there was absolutely no way I was going to be bayonetting any zombies.

 

[ScottishMongol]

We made a lot of use of boat hooks. Pretty light, capable of being used to bash a ghouls face in. Can also be used to hook a boat.

The real thing though if you plan to fight against ghouls up close is anti-bite gloves. If you end up in a situation where you have to randomly fight a Zed, don't spend a lot of time picking a weapon. Whatever will mostly do the job. Get something wrapped around your fore arms and fingers. Even if you've just lashed books to your forearms it will increase your odds of survival a lot. 90% of all casualties against small numbers of Zeds are from defensive wrist bites. Don't let it happen to you.

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Once I got to Mexico, my main job was battlefield cleanup. When you're sorting through masses of pulverized ghouls piled up in drifts, 99% of the ones that are still biting are missing legs or torsos, so all the potential bites are going to be below the waist. We settled on these thigh-high leather boots, really thick cowhide. I want whoever designed them to know that they didn't have to go the extra mile and make them stylish as fuck, but I still wear them all the time.

 

[Estro]

If there were too many, you retreat and tell the tower to radio for backup, and they mobilise the Red Guard at the nearest garrison. I only lost three sheep to enemy action in 18 months.

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I am proud to say that when I took shifts (which wasn't that common, my uncle mostly had me and my Dad repairing shit and bodging farm equipment into workable states) I did not lose any sheep for my entire period. Entire farm lost maybe two a year (to Zombies, being sheep you lose more to their continual inability to stay alive) from a flock of about nine hundred at peak. Honestly, the cowherd was worse, even though it was smaller. If a zombie spooks a cow you're going to have a fun time out there.

That said, very fun morning when my uncle went out, found two zeds, all with their torsos just utterly oblierated from when they'd woken the bull in his field one night. Honestly, I sometimes wondered if you could train a horse to knock their heads with their kicks.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

Once I got to Mexico, my main job was battlefield cleanup. When you're sorting through masses of pulverized ghouls piled up in drifts, 99% of the ones that are still biting are missing legs or torsos, so all the potential bites are going to be below the waist. We settled on these thigh-high leather boots, really thick cowhide. I want whoever designed them to know that they didn't have to go the extra mile and make them stylish as fuck, but I still wear them all the time.

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Man. I wish I'd got those kind of things. We had to settle for like, reinforced wadders and stuff which looked bad. They were also way heavy, which wasn't great when you're trying to get off a boat.

Honestly I wish we'd had better low body bite armour, it would have made getting off into shallow murky water a lot less scary and given us a lot more landing spots. As it was, we mostly used either clear water beaches or like, old port structures. It just wasn't worth the risk to jump off and then get your legs grabbed by a ghoul that's got itself wedged into the sand somehow.

 

[ScottishMongol]

Man. I wish I'd got those kind of things. We had to settle for like, reinforced wadders and stuff which looked bad. They were also way heavy, which wasn't great when you're trying to get off a boat.

Honestly I wish we'd had better low body bite armour, it would have made getting off into shallow murky water a lot less scary and given us a lot more landing spots. As it was, we mostly used either clear water beaches or like, old port structures. It just wasn't worth the risk to jump off and then get your legs grabbed by a ghoul that's got itself wedged into the sand somehow.

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Oh believe me, I saw a lot of swampland in the march east, I can sympathize. There's nothing scarier than waist-deep brackish water.

 

[Hakazin]

The US Navy remained active throughout the war; ask the survivors along the Gulf of Mexico how they stayed out of the Christian States, lol.

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I'd like to think our generous host nation helped a bit as well. I'll give credit to the Navy where it's due; for all the Old Clique's bleating about "respecting our national borders," most patrols rarely asked questions about your cargo or port of origin as long as the captain spoke English and the ship flew the stars and stripes. I can count the number of times we got asked for paperwork on one hand.

I have heard nothing but derision from my girl for the fucking Lobotomiser. She lost hers deliberately early in their war, and never looked back. Picked up a handaxe from somewhere, used that instead.

Too heavy. Too unwieldy. Rusts like you wouldn't believe. Almost impossible to make the damn thing keep an edge. And no, I couldn't tell you why America continues to churn out this shit. I couldn't even tell you why they made it - they didn't need to entrench on the front lines, and the people who were digging - gravediggers after battles, sanitation workers before battles… they should have, like, guards posted at their position? That's how a normal military does this.

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You can take the arms dealers out of the MIC, but you can't take the MIC out of the arms dealers. Our former government's system of arms procurement was an exercise in grifting Congress by promising overpriced, overhyped weapons systems that either ended up trapped in endless prototyping or were inevitably outperformed by just slapping a scope on an M-4. Is it any real surprise that institutional legacy carried over into pumping out these overdesigned zombie-fighting gadgets?

Hell, first time I got my hands on one, I assumed it was a one-off some maniac had slapped together from spare parts in a scrapyard. The idea of those things being standard issue was just... sorry, is just absurd.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

Oh believe me, I saw a lot of swampland in the march east, I can sympathize. There's nothing scarier than waist-deep brackish water.

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I don't understand how so many of them end up basically in ambush position in water. It's not like they behave that way in any other time. Like, if you're clearing a structure you only find one in a wardrobe if they hide in there while alive and then turned and you can always hear them banging on the door.

Yet somehow they hang out under water like mines. Fuck. Those. Things.

 

[The Laurent]

The idea that the Silicon Valley idea didn't look like a terrible one from the start is kinda hilarious. "Oh yes, we're going to release an autonomous swarm of drone munitions that will perfectly target zombies."

That's just pure fantasy.

 

[Kadmus]

When the water's that shallow, even our sensor kit couldn't make much sense of it. I'm not sure there's any that can; bravest people in the world, the ones who wade out in that shit as living zombie detectors. Sure, now that things are getting back to 'normal' you've got proper gear for it, shark chain over waterproofs and backup teams with guns and all, but you still couldn't make me do it if you put a gun to my head.

Always amazed me just how long it took for people to remember shark chain existed and start making more of it. If it can stop a shark from chomping your legs off, it's gonna make you immune to zombies, after all, so long as you don't get swarmed over.

 

[Laplace]

The idea that the Silicon Valley idea didn't look like a terrible one from the start is kinda hilarious. "Oh yes, we're going to release an autonomous swarm of drone munitions that will perfectly target zombies."

That's just pure fantasy.

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In the Bay Area, there was a serious thing where all the devs all considered the rope after they realized that the new America was planning to go farmer soldier nation and they didn't need Twitter or something. Of course it was pure fantasy, they were pitching pure fantasy so sil val could get a piece of the pie.

Anyway, a lot of people left after the drive east was done.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

When the water's that shallow, even our sensor kit couldn't make much sense of it. I'm not sure there's any that can; bravest people in the world, the ones who wade out in that shit as living zombie detectors. Sure, now that things are getting back to 'normal' you've got proper gear for it, shark chain over waterproofs and backup teams with guns and all, but you still couldn't make me do it if you put a gun to my head.

Always amazed me just how long it took for people to remember shark chain existed and start making more of it. If it can stop a shark from chomping your legs off, it's gonna make you immune to zombies, after all, so long as you don't get swarmed over.

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Honestly, I will say though, a lot of salvage crews, especially the first time they get chain, get overly eager to try it out. "Wow, we can put a guy in the water in shark chain and they probably won't die." Okay but they might die, and you can find another place to land. As a crazy salvage crew girl, 20 minutes finding a better spot isn't worth your life. Nor is not having to haul the swag back to a concrete landing stage. Nor, even, is having to jog away from a pack of ghouls on land where they are far slower than you are.

That said, I've heard that they're getting pretty good results from the new chemical detectors at least for "there's a zombie in this volume of water" level of detection. We'd have killed for some of those in the hottest parts of the war, and hopefully they'll make it easier for us if there's ever another big outbreak, and to do the remaining beach clearance.