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

[Parabola]

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.

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I mean, this is totally true, but...

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.

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Exactly. People really do legitimately like seeing the tangible benefits of their labor, not just having a vague idea that someone might read the spreadsheets they organized or whatever. It's not in any sense a unique thing, which is why when people like this dude talk about it, what it really does is emphasize one of the reasons people say capitalism sucks the souls of those who work for it. Having someone in your community actually do the thing you use instead of some random stranger is gratifying. Humans like being told they personally did a good job with something.

It's very possible this guy, horrible as he may be, is being legit that people went up to him and thanked him for some of those things - not necessarily the case, but I wouldn't be surprised.

 

[SemiSaneAuthor]

Ah, the Lobo. The designer lobotomised themself before coming up with it.

I ran around with multiple different pine broom handles during the war. Shame we didn't get anyone who was in those medieval recreation groups to actually have quarterstaff training. Though with Ghouls? Just go frantic mad drummer and repeatedly beat the crap out of them, though I probably could have done with something better as other people told me. I do remember one friend who armoured up and then went out with boxing gloves. And went out because it was a stupid idea and he went down screaming. Poor bastard.

Though, when some of the Rhynes (pronouced Reen, if you don't recognise the weird Somerset spelling, why is it the Welsh Spelling that actually makes sense?!) failed in Somerset due to lack of maintence and parts of the Somerset Levels became marshes again? Clearing them was a bitch and a half. We actually after a bit went and talked with other survivors on how to get the Levels back unflooded with Rhynes again rather than clearing most of them while flooded. Then we went and cleared the fields once they were unflooded.

Of course then you have to clear the Rhynes too, even where the levels didn't flood. The idealised dream of the Poor Bloody Infantry was an infinite supply of grenades and just go ghoul fishing with high explosives. Never going to happen, but when you have a frantic mad boxer dog on a lead to see if there's a Ghoul in the Reen or not and you have to figure out if she's barking just because she's nuts or if there's an actual Ghoul ...

I miss Roxie. Hell, I miss Boxer Dogs point blank. Their insanity was a lovely thing Pre-War, and they were just too high maintience to breed.

OOC: Yeah, I do miss that mad Boxer Dog, though her whole thing of barking for attention because the next door neighbour complained when she was a puppy and then we kept trying to keep her quiet while she was a puppy ... it trained her in ways you don't want. And for a dog to check ghouls it would be bloody annoying.

 

[RandolphCarter]

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

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Even fit people struggled.

Before the plague I weighed 250 to 270 pounds (120ish kilos to the rest of you non-Muricans). Yes, I worked in IT, but I wasn't excessively fat.

One of the forgotten luxuries of pre war life wasn't just food or jobs or leisure - it was going to the gym.

Nowadays most people get plenty of exercise in their day to day lives. For many years it was impossible to survive without moving a lot.

I used to work out cardio and weights 6 times a week and make myself a nice recovery protein shake after the workout.

With the available food during the plague I was carrying around an unsustainable amount of muscle mass.

But the point I'm meandering towards is that I was a reasonably fit person by pre-plague standards, and a LOT stronger than normal. I had a very difficult time adjusting to physical labor all day every day.

 

[BaseDeltaZero]

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.

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A deep trench in front of your line could be pretty handy, though.

That said it's honestly kind of impressive they managed to fuck up 'shovel with sharp edges'. Or using that metal for basically anything else.

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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Speaking of fuck-ups... they couldn't do this before the war, what makes them think they can do it now? And worse, it's not like 'small drones dropping grenades timed to detonate at roughly head level' is the worst idea for thinning out zombies remotely.

Honestly the idea that the junta, in full Light Infantry Cult* mode, ever even contemplated this amidst 'what if we deliberately made our guns shitty because... something something precision something mattel' is wild.

*Why the fuck would you want light infantry fighting zombies? They don't have supply lines to harass, they don't have an operational tempo to outpace! You want to kill as many as possible as fast as possible from as far away as possible, and that precludes going up and doing Badass Ranger Shit in their faces. They don't care about Badass Ranger Shit, they care about eating you because you put yourself undersupplied and out of support on purpose.

 

[ShuraNoDougai]

I love the world war 2 Cope from the reviewer, Lendlease is knocking and wants to kick you in the balls your Soviet union wouldn't be alive without the 11.3 billion worth of aid those darn capitalist pigs decided to mail Russia. Not to mention the Logistics they brought with them when they joined and all those bombing runs in the day before the brits took over at night. Hats off to you Author for making a perfectly human character I have no issue laughing at even if I agree with some of his points. Except the World war 2 ones because it's obvious he's on that post-soviet cope juice. But then I am depressed when I read the absolute hellfire that Max turned the american military logistics system into for muh Lobotimiser muh infantry squares.

I have the Onus of years to realize how utter shit Max was at writing how a zombie apocalypse happens but had these bursts of good world building. That I welcomed the movie canon for all it's holes as my new canon because the Game is awesome and they didn't phase out automatic weapons. who knew killing driver ant zombies with full auto could be so fun? though fuck infectors.

 

[veteranMortal]

I love the world war 2 Cope from the reviewer, Lendlease is knocking and wants to kick you in the balls your Soviet union wouldn't be alive without the 11.3 billion worth of aid those darn capitalist pigs decided to mail Russia. Not to mention the Logistics they brought with them when they joined and all those bombing runs in the day before the brits took over at night. Hats off to you Author for making a perfectly human character I have no issue laughing at even if I agree with some of his points. Except the World war 2 ones because it's obvious he's on that post-soviet cope juice. But then I am depressed when I read the absolute hellfire that Max turned the american military logistics system into for muh Lobotimiser muh infantry squares.

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Her points. The reviewer is female, and uses she/her pronouns.

And whilst she's often very biased, I find the idea that the American supply to the Soviet Union did more work than the Soviet soldiers who used that supply… puzzling.

I'm glad you're enjoying it so far, though.

 

[SemiSaneAuthor]

OCC: You know, why didn't Brooks add in the Chinese Vampire to the setting in the lore? The Jiangshi, as in the hopping corpse would imply some kind of shambling Zombie. And his whole blame China nonsense would be able to be pushed.

I mean the Chinese security apparatus would probably use the phrase Jiangshi as a thing.

 

[Jaertin]

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?

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I can think of a reason or two they'd want to smack down the self-esteem of the common American worker.

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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Sounds unwieldy. A normal-ass flat bladed gardening shovel works just fine against individual ghouls that slipped through, especially if you've got a few mates with you. If the dead outnumber you, what you use is your legs. To walk briskly away and fetch some friends.

A billhook was my go-to whenever I was on duty. Sweep the leg, crack the head. And you can use it to drag the thing to the collection point. Didn't have enough guns around here until later, when they started the trains running again.

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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Bit of a tangent, but it keeps surprising me how few places composting the zombies caught on? It's gruesome, but not any more so than 'normal' clean up duty. Use enough wood-chips and straw to soak up the juices and it'll smell less than a regular mass grave.

Our first year was as hard as anywhere else, but we bounced back into having food to trade away faster than any other community around. (Except the fishermen, granted).

Bonus point? When bastards whose cans ran out started raiding anyone doing better than them, they gave us a wide berth. Though we were cannibals

 

[Omicron]

This is such a 00s chapter, holy shit. The obsession with cubicles seems almost quaint today, and the contempt for the service sector that drips out of every word is just... so characteristic of that era. You can feel the subtext of moral fault the writer infuses in his description of the pre-war economy; the zombie apocalypse ends up being almost redemptive in the way it forces lawyers and "people with a theatre degree" (that quintessential useless degree that could only ever exist in a degenerate age that has lost track of reality, pay no mind to how long humans have practiced performance arts) to Get A Real Job and California to stop farming citrus or raising cattle. The fetishization of agricultural and industrial labour and of immigrants as inherently hard workers who haven't 'lost touch' and need to teach HR people how to work a shovel is like the cherry on top.

There's a strand of the influence of apocalyptic Christianity here as well, in a way it's impossible for Brooks not to imagine such a disastrous event as purposeful in a way, the (American) humanity which emerges on the other side as better, cleansed of the modern era's faults.

In the end you'd almost think it was a good thing most of humanity died to the ghouls.

 

[SemiSaneAuthor]

IC: You know, thinking back. It's darkly amusing that a man who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide, the person who noted historical battles between Roman Legions and The Ghouls. Who mentioned Zombies in Egyptian Tombs, then jumps in bed with the Junta's blame China notion. As if the Ghoul only comes from China.

Or the fact he wrote about surviving the Apocalypse as a band of survivors. And then he praises Plan Sacrifice and Betrayal when he wrote (admittedly US slanted) plans on how to survive the Zombie Apocalypse.

[Sarcasm] Nice to see someone growing as a person as they age! [/Sarcasm]

 

[ShuraNoDougai]

Her points. The reviewer is female, and uses she/her pronouns.

And whilst she's often very biased, I find the idea that the American supply to the Soviet Union did more work than the Soviet soldiers who used that supply… puzzling.

I'm glad you're enjoying it so far, though.

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yeah I know this but It wouldn't have amounted to much if American Lendlease hadn't been there to provide steam for the soviets the Russian logistics chain was in absolute shambles after it went through Stalin's Purge to solidify his personal power when the Purges spilled into the Red Army itself from grunts to high command and boy would the Russians be feeling that loss of experienced everything when Germany decided to break the treaty.

 

[10ebbor10]

"The M-1 Abrams has a jet engine. Where are you going to find that kind of fuel?

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Isn't the entire point of a jet engine that it runs on many different kind of fuels? I thought I saw that in a brochure somewhere.

Doesn't really matter though. The problem is not what fuel it uses, it's how much.

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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It is, apparently, an entirely sustainable loss ratio. Helps that the things tend to not crash very hard or violently. As long as you come down close enough to somewhere secure, you can just take the whole thing apart, sew the gasbag back up, and let it go again.

That said, the Americans are fools for trying to use airships near the Rockies. Airships can float perfectly fine, as long as they don't face unpredictable winds or major elevation changes, which uhm, mountains tend to feature...

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.

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Livermore (which is a hot fusion, not a cold fusion facility, that latter bit is a scam) also served as a nuclear weapons testing facility pre-war. That might have something to do with their funding priorities...

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.

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Fixed wing aviation with engine trouble tends not to make it to shore. Just dissappears into the deep.

The dirigible, at the very least, manages to float.

 

[BaseDeltaZero]

yeah I know this but It wouldn't have amounted to much if American Lendlease hadn't been there to provide steam for the soviets the Russian logistics chain was in absolute shambles after it went through Stalin's Purge to solidify his personal power when the Purges spilled into the Red Army itself from grunts to high command and boy would the Russians be feeling that loss of experienced everything when Germany decided to break the treaty.

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The problem, frankly, is not whether lend lease was useful, or decisive, or not. The problem is that you're using that to elide the very real suffering the Soviets (most prominently, but not exclusively) endured.

It is a very common pattern employed to marginalize the USSR to say that American (capitalist) Industry won the war (and perhaps it did, it certainly would have been worse without it) and therefore their sacrifice does not matter. That is what you are, hopefully naively, throwing into the ring here.

And it's being used by the fictional Junta in the same way here, that just like WW2 was won by American capitalism (and the Soviets were, at best, naive bodies), WWZ was won by American... whatever the fuck they're doing here... settler authoritarianism, and the people they sacrificed likewise don't matter. Perhaps that context makes the chill reaction you're receiving a bit more clear?

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

Fixed wing aviation with engine trouble tends not to make it to shore. Just dissappears into the deep.

The dirigible, at the very least, manages to float.

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Yeah, but it's a lot less likely to fuck up. A lot of those blimps didn't have engine trouble, they had wind.

There's a reason why lighter than air flight was almost totally abandoned before the plague.

Also fuel isn't that scarce, at least not in Britain.

 

[SemiSaneAuthor]

Also fuel isn't that scarce, at least not in Britain.

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Also, as someone who works in a living museum, I do have to cover the Bristol Balloon Disaster as something which happened. That was a fuck up and a half.

After covering it in tours of the Gorge I usually go for some puppy therapy of the in-house dog breeding. Because trying to explain the balloon which blew in here with a few Ghouls in it is not a day I like remembering.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

Also, as someone who works in a living museum, I do have to cover the Bristol Balloon Disaster as something which happened. That was a fuck up and a half.

After covering it in tours of the Gorge I usually go for some puppy therapy of the in-house dog breeding. Because trying to explain the balloon which blew in here with a few Ghouls in it is not a day I like remembering.

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To be honest, drones are better for almost everything people say blimps are good for except a sniper platform. Of course if you have a blimp and not a drone, you can make good use of them, but I think they're too dangerous.

Everything you do involving Zeds is inherently risky because there's so much risk of infection. There's no point in adding to it with stuff like a blimp. You can take your time and do a ground recon. If you think the place is too dangerous, if it smells wrong, you don't need to go in there. Hell, if you must use a blimp, get a decent electronics guy and hang a camera off of it. If the camera goes wrong? Well them scrub the op. You can always come back tomorrow.

I guess this is a very salvager mentality of course. It doesn't help if you're PBI and you get ordered to clear a town and make it safe or whatever, but the thing I'll always remember was my first Captain who told me "there can only be more of them if one of us dies." I did some crazy stuff in the War, but it was always with that in mind.

At least mostly. Speed can make it a bit hard to retain thoughts like that.

 

[Cosar]

Out of Character, drones is probably one of those big oversights that stems completely from when the book was written. Because while drones obviously existed at this point they were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they became after 2006.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

Drones is probably one of those big oversights that stems completely from when the book was written. Because while drones obviously existed at this point they were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they became after 2006.

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My OOC thing is that brooks just isn't really as up on the military as he thinks he is. Like, he has a very William Lind kind of view of the military, in that he's read a lot of articles by people who he is assured are very important military thinkers, but he's never talked to a single person who has been doing it on the sharp end in the conflicts of the time.

 

[veteranMortal]

Pain in the arse to get a drone working if you're one of the countries the Chinese aren't trading silicon chips with, though.

And wouldn't you know it, America has the world's largest dirigible fleet.

 

[Cosar]

My OOC thing is that brooks just isn't really as up on the military as he thinks he is. Like, he has a very William Lind kind of view of the military, in that he's read a lot of articles by people who he is assured are very important military thinkers, but he's never talked to a single person who has been doing it on the sharp end in the conflicts of the time.

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Yeah. Because even during this time period drones were a big thing for the military(and something that you heard about a bit). But it wasn't something people saw and understood how powerful they could be, especially when looking at how useful even normal civilian models can be. So it's very much in line with a bunch of the other flaws in his narrative regarding equipment and strategies.

 

[SemiSaneAuthor]

I guess this is a very salvager mentality of course.

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You know, if we'd gone through with plan, "Get the Yeo to be able to take small boats again like back in the 19th century," we'd have probably ended up having a small port of salvagers. It never happened, and people proposing to do it now are shut down on not only practicality grounds but we also claim historical reasons to not have to fully explain why it would be too much effort.

We did use to run Scavenger Teams out of the Gorge, or because of a bad Stargate joke we called the SR Teams or Scavenger Recoverer Teams. The joke might have gone a bit too far when we named them SR-1, or SR-2 and such, but it allowed a few laughs. We did attempt a few runs into Weston, it was too dangerous though for a bit, but we mostly went for Burnham-on-Sea. Especially after the Brent Knoll Hill Fort went up in flames and we didn't have to worry about them. I still don't know how they got all those caravans and campervans up there, and we never knew what actually happened to them. Just a team running to one of our secure points in Burnham for scavenging saw the fire.

By the time we investigated it was burnt out wreckage. Just like how Wookey Hole had something happen to it and we had to clear the cave bit by bit.

... or the Team that went out with Roxie one day and then just vanished. I didn't even get to say goodbye to her, she was assigned by a Dog Handler to the team. I know I should feel worse about Brent Knoll or Wookey Hole, but she was my dog. And that's why I just have fun with puppies these days, not getting attached to another dog for the invetiable fuckup when the Gorge has to hold against the ghouls again.

OOC: I did never get to say goodbye to my Dog. So, WWZ!Me doesn't get to say goodbye either.

 

[ShuraNoDougai]

The problem, frankly, is not whether lend lease was useful, or decisive, or not. The problem is that you're using that to elide the very real suffering the Soviets (most prominently, but not exclusively) endured.

It is a very common pattern employed to marginalize the USSR to say that American (capitalist) Industry won the war (and perhaps it did, it certainly would have been worse without it) and therefore their sacrifice does not matter. That is what you are, hopefully naively, throwing into the ring here.

And it's being used by the fictional Junta in the same way here, that just like WW2 was won by American capitalism (and the Soviets were, at best, naive bodies), WWZ was won by American... whatever the fuck they're doing here... settler authoritarianism, and the people they sacrificed likewise don't matter. Perhaps that context makes the chill reaction you're receiving a bit more clear?

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Fair enough. I know when I am in a minefield.......

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

You know, if we'd gone through with plan, "Get the Yeo to be able to take small boats again like back in the 19th century," we'd have probably ended up having a small port of salvagers. It never happened, and people proposing to do it now are shut down on not only practicality grounds but we also claim historical reasons to not have to fully explain why it would be too much effort.

We did use to run Scavenger Teams out of the Gorge, or because of a bad Stargate joke we called the SR Teams or Scavenger Recoverer Teams. The joke might have gone a bit too far when we named them SR-1, or SR-2 and such, but it allowed a few laughs. We did attempt a few runs into Weston, it was too dangerous though for a bit, but we mostly went for Burnham-on-Sea. Especially after the Brent Knoll Hill Fort went up in flames and we didn't have to worry about them. I still don't know how they got all those caravans and campervans up there, and we never knew what actually happened to them. Just a team running to one of our secure points in Burnham for scavenging saw the fire.

By the time we investigated it was burnt out wreckage. Just like how Wookey Hole had something happen to it and we had to clear the cave bit by bit.

... or the Team that went out with Roxie one day and then just vanished. I didn't even get to say goodbye to her, she was assigned by a Dog Handler to the team. I know I should feel worse about Brent Knoll or Wookey Hole, but she was my dog. And that's why I just have fun with puppies these days, not getting attached to another dog for the invetiable fuckup when the Gorge has to hold against the ghouls again.

OOC: I did never get to say goodbye to my Dog. So, WWZ!Me doesn't get to say goodbye either.

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Things just randomly set on fire sometimes. It's a known issue. If you don't take paranoid anti-fire precautions you get fires. Same thing with salvage teams. Sometimes they'll go to a place and fall into the dungeon dimensions. At most you find a boat. Sometimes not even that. Hazard of the business. That's why you got to be so careful. Stay in sight of at least one team member, stay in contact, report everything, don't go into any place you don't know how to get out of.

Edit: To be less mysterious for the non-salvage people, from team survivors, the biggest single killer is getting into a building that only has one exit, or for which you haven't checked all exits are useable, having insufficient look outs because you want to move all the swag, then finding "oh no, the ghouls!" and getting trapped into a building and leaving only inside/as a ghoul.

Of course sometimes it's just completely inexplicable. You can often find out where something went down because there's a building covered in shell casings where someone spent all their savings. Sometimes though, teams just evaporate into thin air. The last few years of the war when we were guild senior boat we got called in on a lot of missing and there are some that still bother me. There was one where it was just like the team had vanished from the world. We knew they hadn't sailed away because their boat was tied up, and had a bunch of swag loaded. There were no ghouls hanging around noshing or anything either. They just weren't there anymore. No sign at all of what had happened to them. This was in Saint Ives. One day I'm going to go back with a bunch of friends and do a proper investigation and see if I can figure it out.

My crew never managed to get a dog. They were one of the things the flotilla was very short on, especially after Wight. We really wanted a dog, because they can detect signs of ghouls that a human can't. I'm so sorry about what happened to yours. It sucks when a pet died. My cat died like a year into everything and it honestly hit me harder than some of the people I knew dying.

Poor thing. He just stopped eating and died. We couldn't even find a vet for him.

 

[HeWhoAdds]

This is such a 00s chapter, holy shit. The obsession with cubicles seems almost quaint today, and the contempt for the service sector that drips out of every word is just... so characteristic of that era. You can feel the subtext of moral fault the writer infuses in his description of the pre-war economy; the zombie apocalypse ends up being almost redemptive in the way it forces lawyers and "people with a theatre degree" (that quintessential useless degree that could only ever exist in a degenerate age that has lost track of reality, pay no mind to how long humans have practiced performance arts) to Get A Real Job and California to stop farming citrus or raising cattle. The fetishization of agricultural and industrial labour and of immigrants as inherently hard workers who haven't 'lost touch' and need to teach HR people how to work a shovel is like the cherry on top.

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"Theater degrees are useless" says man writing fiction book.

 

[RoboRenee]

The view of government in this book actually feels very, like, old-world monarchist now that I'm thinking about it. Brooks/the interviewer doesn't seem to believe governments can form ex nihilo during the outbreak. That's why the Redeker Plan is so vital to his perspective. The viewpoint is that government, laws, rights come down from above, not up from the people. A gift to the King from God generously provided to the people by his grace and benevolence. So long as the government survives it can eventually return to the people that which they cannot possibly provide for themselves- civilization, order, peace - and thus it is only right for the government to withdraw those gifts for its own survival.

Meanwhile in reality of course people abandoned by a government still team up, make rules, work together, and build their own government. Because a government is just pack writ large, cooperation of 'the people' and not order bestowed by 'the important people'.