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Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
- Thread starter veteranMortal
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funny you should mention that, I work in a lab that studies the damn things. I'm not a scientist mind, but I fix their computers and listen to them talk around the water cooler so to speak. This is one of the many things that makes no godamn sense. Napalm, and heck a lot of substances tend to have trouble sticking to the dead, something about the top layer of flesh sloughing off, but they should absolutely be catching fire more than they do. It's not the gait, they nailed plastic slats to one to make it walk funny and it still didn't burn right. Past that point it got a bit to technical for to follow, but it's yet another reason even the scientist studying them are starting to talk about shit like "unknown quantum energy events" or "biological dark mater interaction" or other fancy ways to say "it's fucking magic what do you want me to say?" without risking your funding.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I've got a differently cynical take:
Because now he's confident that if he does survive, he's more likely to actually get to say he owns that vineyard and get to drink fine wine made from it again some day, as opposed to it not being his vineyard anymore?
Also, as a US-centric group of tattered vassal states...
If you expel much of the world's surviving population from the UN, you effectively destroy the UN's long-term prospects and credibility as "the voice of the world order."
Maybe you can keep it plausible that it isn't an American sock puppet, and maybe you can't, in that situation. But you've destroyed the pretext of unity. There's as much or more of a world outside your "United Nations" as there is inside it. It is not and can never be a truly global hegemon again.
...You are not wrong.
It's that Neocon Brain stuff really showing through.
I think it's because everything got hollowed out except the more warlike parts of the military-security complex. All the megacorporate interests were dead, the international commerce was dead. All that was left were old boomers who hold a grudge against Vietnam for winning a war. And who no longer remembered any reason to make policy decisions except to look 'hard.'
I dimly remember things that were not that, but they also, as I dimly remember, didn't boast nearly this much about how "non-ideological" they were.
When your plan is something that just works and is normal like "build a fuckin' train," you don't need to posture and make big bad noises about how "sensible and objective" you are. You just... are sensible and objective.
It's like the stereotypical observation that really successful examples of classically attractive, physically fit, charismatic, conventionally 'manly' men generally don't spend as much time thinking about how "alpha" they are as the crazed weirdos desperate for This One Neet Trick, and I'm keeping that spelling error dammit.
[hums L'Internationale speculatively]
One wonders if part of the reason for it being such a bloodbath is that a lot of the guys doing it may not exactly be, uh, hinged or fully in tune with a plethora of good reasons to live...
In America, the "politically correct long-haired weirdo" who exists to be a strawman spouting bullshit, and to be specifically contrasted with the "sensible normal men of the Silent Majority..."
Well, that is a trope that goes back at least as far as the '60s counterculture and the breakdown of conformity in mainstream WASP American culture. Previously, WASPs had just built their fictional stereotypes to emphasize the foreign-ness of the antagonistic or villainous character. But the hippie and the feminist and the civil rights protestor were not, could not credibly be presented to be, foreign; by geography and by inheritance they were often just as American as Teddy Roosevelt.
So a new stereotype had to be crafted, one that emphasized not their foreignness but their difference, that attributed to them mindlessness, disembodied beliefs that they would prate about regardless of context, regardless of sanity, purely as a function of how "elite" and "over-educated" they were or whatever.
It's very much self-perpetuating, with each generation of vaguely or not-so-vaguely fash types perpetuating the trope so that the next generation can continue to make use of a slightly modified version of the same trope and still push the 'right' buttons implanted in their audience by seeing the trope play out in the fiction they consumed as children.
The modern reactionaries are just the latest heirs to the tradition.
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- Location
- The observable universe
OOC: Just caught up to this, very excellent
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- Earth
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- He/Him
I misunderstood where you were saying the discontinuity lies; my mistake. However, your post only responds to point 1, ignoring point 2. Point 2 is actually kinda important! I'm arguing that veteranMortal only makes changes when the original is stupid.
The things which are true in WWZ are true in veteranMortal's retelling by default, unless you count subjective judgement like "the US becoming a de facto military dictatorship was a good thing". The way zombies work in WWZ is functionally identical to how they work in the ZSG. Ergo, we can assume that zombies in veteranMortal's retelling work like the ones in the ZSG, unless we are explicitly told otherwise or the point in question is stupid. And "zombies still decompose a little" isn't stupid.
Max Brooks is Mel Brooks's son?
Well, yeah. If a decision reduces suffering, you don't need to justify it with hard-men nonsense. Any bleeding-heart liberal can justify it with actual sense.
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- the Republic
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- He/They
Yeah, he's one of the most blatant cases of nepotism and also the non-heredity of talent in human history.
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I do think, if nothing else, it's impressive that someone with dyslexia managed to make a best-selling book. Ideally, I'd rather it not be the stuff in this book, but I know how hard it is to have a learning disability. I also think comparing anyone to Mel Brooks is going to make them look inadequate by comparison.
I didn't ignore your point two. I disagreed with it. I think that there are enough differences that the specifics of how the zombies function cannot be assumed to be the same. That's been my point from the beginning, so I'm honestly baffled at how you could say that I'm ignoring it?
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
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- Canada
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- He/Him
So... you're assuming differences in mechanical function beyond the scope of the ones that have actually been described based on... what, vibes? Because 'it's been different in specific regards (mostly correcting stuff that frankly makes no sense in- or out-of-universe) therefore we should continue assuming it will continue to diverge based solely on that precedent rather than any evidence in favour' is hardly a compelling argument. At no point has @veteranMortal's IC narration indicated that the zombies don't rot, WWZ as-written indicates they rot, and the ZSG says they rot (slowly) - the simplest indication therefore is that they do rot and more broadly that we can assume that the zombies in WWZ function the same as ZSG in remaining characteristics until and unless veteranMortal indicates that they don't in whatever other specific regard.
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The rotting thing also doesn't really work in universe given the stated description though. At least, not the one from the zombie survival guide. If it's outright magic or something sure, but the guide is very much on the 'everything has a reasonable explanation'. So, yes, I wouldn't be surprised that the mechanics of that are different. Which is why I've been saying that relying on a book that is wrong about a lot of things when it gets into the details probably shouldn't be trusted regarding the details.
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
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- Canada
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- He/Him
There are a great many things that shouldn't work in-universe but that even in this 'corrected' version empirically do. That the zombies can sense uninfected humans via some sixth sense unrelated to any physical faculties is one example, and the reader only argues that the book's pseudo-scientific explanations don't make sense for that - evil magic is just as valid a reason. That the actual reasoning is questionable is not in doubt, but the reading here has consistently been that the empirical facts/events/etc are largely true, but the reasons and depictions are often wrong/lies/exaggerations and propaganda and so on and so forth.
'Zombies rot slower than they should' is likely correct.
'Zombies rot slowly because most of the organisms involved in the decomposition process find them too toxic to break down because Solanum' might even be accepted as empirical evidence.
However, the reviewer has been clear that the 'scientific' theories for where Solanum/zombies came from might as well be blind guesses and 'an evil wizard/aliens/cthulhu monsters did it' might as well be just as valid.
The beginning of the end, and close to two of my favorite segments in the entire book both of which tended to make me cry as a kid.
Though maybe they're oart of the same section? Difficult to remember the framing of it after so long
Though maybe they're oart of the same section? Difficult to remember the framing of it after so long
OOC:
Well this continues to be an absolute treat of a project. It's fascinating how the author manages to both give insightful analysis of the text, extrapolate a coherent world building setup from what we're given and combine both angles with each post.
Well this continues to be an absolute treat of a project. It's fascinating how the author manages to both give insightful analysis of the text, extrapolate a coherent world building setup from what we're given and combine both angles with each post.
StarSingerBlue
Zenryoku Zenkai !
- Location
- The City of Lights
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I heard that one of the first Japanese gay softcore porn films satirised his life and the Shield Society.
Honestly, this entire story has been awesome. I've read World War Z before, but it was when I was in middle school so a lot of the stuff passed over my head, like the context surrouding Shield Society or the fashy subtext (or the general crappitude of the worldbuilding), and this take on it brings a new (and better than the original) spin on the subject matter.
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Opaline Dreams
Virenina's handler
- Location
- Tei Ura
- Pronouns
- Any
Baltimore was a fucking nightmare, but at least we had a harbor.
The harbor was also a fucking nightmare.
Like, to this day, I barely remember anything about how I got from my apartment to the Inner Harbor. Trying to look back on it only ever gets me the memory-equivalent of an abstract painting, just this great big black-and-red blur. The one thing I really have a clear memory of is the smell. Fires in the city, ghoulstink - I don't think anyone here needs me to describe it any further than that.
Actually - two clear memories. I had to leave my cat behind. Somehow, after everything I did to survive, that's the one thing I still can't forgive myself for.
Maybe because other people have the capacity to understand. All Oscar knows is that I just up and left him one day. To this day, I can't look at an orange cat without just breaking down crying.
I know I never could've taken him with me - for fuck's sake, even if I'd somehow managed to get him on board the USS Constellation with me he'd probably have been eaten once our supplies ran out - but...god. I feel like everyone who survived has this one thing that sticks with them - one thing that should be minor in the face of everything else they had to do to survive, but that sticks in their brain like a poisoned splinter anyway - and this is mine.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent, and thanks for the work you're doing taking apart this fucking book. You couldn't pay me to return to America at this point, but it's where my family probably is if any of them are still alive, and like...I don't know, something about seeing the version of reality the author's pushing versus what I know it's probably really like for my hypothetical surviving family members, I don't know, it just makes my blood boil. Thank you for putting words to everything I felt was so wrong about it.
OOC: this thread is amazing. I stayed up until like 1AM two nights in a row burning through it. Both the main entries and the commentary have been incredible, thank you so much for a great read!
The harbor was also a fucking nightmare.
Like, to this day, I barely remember anything about how I got from my apartment to the Inner Harbor. Trying to look back on it only ever gets me the memory-equivalent of an abstract painting, just this great big black-and-red blur. The one thing I really have a clear memory of is the smell. Fires in the city, ghoulstink - I don't think anyone here needs me to describe it any further than that.
Actually - two clear memories. I had to leave my cat behind. Somehow, after everything I did to survive, that's the one thing I still can't forgive myself for.
Maybe because other people have the capacity to understand. All Oscar knows is that I just up and left him one day. To this day, I can't look at an orange cat without just breaking down crying.
I know I never could've taken him with me - for fuck's sake, even if I'd somehow managed to get him on board the USS Constellation with me he'd probably have been eaten once our supplies ran out - but...god. I feel like everyone who survived has this one thing that sticks with them - one thing that should be minor in the face of everything else they had to do to survive, but that sticks in their brain like a poisoned splinter anyway - and this is mine.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent, and thanks for the work you're doing taking apart this fucking book. You couldn't pay me to return to America at this point, but it's where my family probably is if any of them are still alive, and like...I don't know, something about seeing the version of reality the author's pushing versus what I know it's probably really like for my hypothetical surviving family members, I don't know, it just makes my blood boil. Thank you for putting words to everything I felt was so wrong about it.
OOC: this thread is amazing. I stayed up until like 1AM two nights in a row burning through it. Both the main entries and the commentary have been incredible, thank you so much for a great read!
- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
Underappreciated hazard of the Great Offensive: trying to take a shit after eating 5000 calories of Army food.
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- Back in the 90s (In a very famous TV show)
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- She/Her/Ve/Ver
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Just checking that everything's OK. The author's well being comes first, and am also excited to see more of this amazing fic when or if it's available.
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Been dealing with some moderate to severe anxiety which has impacted my ability to write, uh, anything? I'll update as and when I can, sorry.
- Location
- London, UK
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Perfectly understandable, look after yourself and we'll see when your muse is feeling up to it. Best wishes.
Total War, Part 1
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- United Kingdom
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Total War, Part 1
Ridiculous thing. Designed in the post-war, which like… Ghouls aren't… really an issue any more? Not in Europe, anyway. And you can't use a dirigible against a conventional opponent, because they'll turn it into confetti. It's a vanity piece.
It probably helps keep tensions low though - Murmansk can look over at the NATO forces commanded by their Generals in their idiot balloon and know that they aren't going to be causing any serious trouble on the border. Aren't Cold Wars fun?
There was not a serious faction of American politicians or generals - though by this point, the two were becoming almost synonymous - who opposed reconquest. Ideologically speaking it was untenable, and the army was becoming increasingly fractious - my girl had joined up by now, and to hear her tell it, there was a thread of wounded pride through the whole military, with an underlying sense that if the general staff wouldn't let them go back across the Rockies, they'd have to force their hand.
There were people with concerns that they didn't have enough bang for their buck to actually succeed but no one was stupid enough to say that explicitly.
The consistency of their attempts to frame their military junta as these reserved, thoughtfully apolitical men who have been maligned as brash blowhards is almost pathetic.
If you put a bullet in the back of your civilian government's head, you don't get to call other people - people who, whatever their sins, did not do that - egocentric. You couped the government.
I mostly want to talk about the footnote here, honestly. The footnote reads "[1] - It has been confirmed at least twenty-five million of this number include reanimated refugees from Latin America who were killed attempting to reach the Canadian north."
Which is just… startlingly racist?
Like, breaking this down - how could you possibly know this? You can't exactly go asking the ghoul, most ghouls weren't walking around with ID on them and when you shoot something in the face, ability to easily identify who it used to be becomes difficult.
You get this figure by making sweeping and racist assumptions regarding any and all Hispanic ghouls you kill during your reconquest, and you repeat it when you're not being subtle about stoking nationalist fervour regarding the dangerous hordes of refugees pouring across the border.
It's pathetic and evil.
It's a classic of the American propaganda machine to overinflate the danger posed by ghouls. The reason they were so difficult to fight wasn't because the individual ghoul is some terrifying god of war, unburdened by logistical or material concerns - as military threats go, slouching, mindless melee combatants are not terribly high up there.
They were so difficult to fight because by default we lost our industrial centres, our population hubs, our ease of coordination. Ten soldiers with rifles can kill as many ghouls as they have bullets, but by this point in the war, it wouldn't be inconceivable for them to not have the bullets, or not have the guns, or not have enough food to keep the strength to lift the guns.
Specifically I do have to object to one of these - it is not substantially more difficult for a functional military to turn a civilian into a soldier than it is for that same civilian to be turned into a ghoul. Both sides of this war could only have as many 'soldiers' as there were civilians.
There's an obvious and glaring hole in this argument, which he doesn't mention because it was one of the nasty little stunts at the core of American doctrine in this war, and was why they did send the "old men and little boys" by the end.
If you can get the ratio correct, it doesn't matter if the ghouls can reanimate your dead soldiers.
When a thousand American soldiers got engulfed by a hundred thousand ghouls boiling out of Salt Lake City and they put down fifteen thousand ghouls before they died themselves, that gave an effective casualty rate of 1:14 in favour of the living - fifteen thousand ghouls die, one thousand new ghouls lurch out of there. Given their remaining population, the Americans could, in theory, trade at this rate and come out the other end as the bloodstained victors of their reconquest. Doctrinally speaking this was more or less what the Americans wanted to have be their "low water mark" - when they lost soldiers, they wanted to lose at this ratio or better.
They lost a lot of soldiers under this sort of doctrine, but they advanced pretty lightning quick by not sweating casualties.
The idea that a lack of communication and cooperation is an advantage is laughable on its face, honestly.
It is part and parcel of their entire argument - that the ghouls are so individually terrifying that they had no choice but to do what they did.
It's a bad joke. Ghouls are individually pathetic - there's a reason why evolutionarily speaking you don't get many predators following the "slow, dumb and clumsy" strategy. They're dangerous en masse, but we only have to deal with them en masse because the people now very seriously explaining that the perfect killing machine is a person that can't run, use tools or reason? Fucked it.
I will politely remind you of all the crap we've waded through so far about how the Americans revolutionised their industry, turned everything over to food and weapons, had their lawyers and architects breaking rocks and building bridges, set up work gangs, public humiliation and corporal punishment to keep everyone solely focused on surviving and preparing to "whack zack"
For people who pay lip service to the concept that "total war" rhetoric is propagandistic nonsense, the American Junta spend a lot of time talking about their total war.
That's also, by the by, why his explanation for why total war can't be done rests on three points, two of which are moral condemnations. To hear the General tell it, there are three - he says two, but means three - things stopping America waging total war.
One - the internal traitors and those too weak to do their duty, on either a moral or literal level.
You'll note "very old" and "very young" here - I may touch on why these are separated from just "the old" and "the young" later, but you can probably guess.
This is his second reason, and it isn't as condemnatory as the first and third - the physical limits of human endurance. The junta tried their very hardest to push these as far as they could, but drugs can only keep you going for so long.
This is a return to form - the collective will of the nation is limited, they're not willing to do the necessary.
The junta - and therefore the book their tame journalist wrote - is almost obsessed by the idea that really, deep down, below everything else, the only thing that really matters in a war is the will to fight.
This is a pervasive American take on the Vietnam War. Even amongst Americans who agree the war in Vietnam was bad, they have this idea that they didn't lose the war. Not really - they just decided to stop fighting it because the public gave up.
It is pathetic. America lost the Vietnam War. They killed millions of people in indiscriminate bombing campaigns and war crimes, failed to break the spirit of the Vietnamese people, and then fucked off just barely ahead of the collapse of their puppet government.
And the grotesque idea that they could've used nuclear weapons to win the war without this causing any sort of response from, say, the Soviet Union? Ridiculous. It's all part of their desire to pretend that they could've won, they were just… what? Too moral? Too honourable? Too squeamish?
And you did a dogshit job of it, truly.
Back to Todd Wainio now, and this time for battles he is actually present for.
I hate this prick so bad, but at least he was actually at the battle he talks about here.
"Take back the cities" is such a "fun" euphemism for the war with the Socialist Republic. The tank battles around the Lakes were pretty apocalyptic, as I understand it, and that was before they actually sent them into the cities.
The junta spent a lot of time and money on their propaganda emphasising the aesthetics of the Civil War with their armed forces, and not for the benefit of the ghouls - they knew that when they got into it at last with the Christian States, it'd be a brutal war.
The northern campaigns were hardly light or easy for the US Army, but the southern campaigns were hell on wheels. They interviewed Todd from the northern campaign because there were very few veterans of the southern campaign who survived from start to finish. Whole divisions got chewed up and spat out in meatgrinding battles in places called, like, "Big Sandy".
The BDU is appalling - the wind cuts through it like a knife, it does nothing to keep you warm on a cold night and it doesn't get any better in the heat - it traps sweat. My wife says she would've burnt hers, except it gives off noxious fumes if you do.
It isn't bulletproof, either; not even against a handgun, not only 3 sheets thick. Dubiously useful against ghouls and worthless against anything else, including the weather, which is an old problem to still be tripping up your military.
So fucking funny that they stopped using helmets. I do have a theory about it, though - and no one's ever going to confirm this was the junta's thought process, not now not ever - but it seems logical to me.
If you know a lot of your soldiers are going to die - and they knew a lot of their soldiers were going to die - and you know once they die and rise again, you need to put a bullet or axe through their skull… Why would you wrap that skull in armour? I mean sure, it's better for the soldier to have a helmet than not to, but this wouldn't be the first or most blatant time that they didn't give a shit about their soldiers' wellbeing, would it?
The lobo was probably the most frequently "lost in combat" piece of equipment of any in the whole damn war. I guess at the Battle of Hope people probably wanted to use it - novelty's a fine thing.
I finally held one the other week, as it happens - I had to really chase, but one of my girl's expat friends still has their lobo knocking around to use in the garden.
It has one of those handles - like just holding it is going to give you blisters - and it is, as described, profoundly ill-balanced.
Almost as bad as their guns.
Piece of shit. Wood furniture stopped being used for a reason - it swells in wet weather, its heavy, it takes so much fucking work to make compared to moulded polymer.
It sucks. It sucks so bad but it is a gun that the Americans could make - can make, even now. They saved the good guns - the guns from before their collapse - for their more elite units. Their wretched death squad scum who went into places like the Black Hills.
This is obvious nonsense. The Standard Infantry Rifle was designed more or less bespoke once they knew they were stuck behind the rockies, based on an audit of available resources, workforce and ammunition.
It was honestly - and this is through gritted teeth believe me - something of a success story. They could not have made a better gun than this piece of absolute shit, not if they wanted to arm their soldiers. It's too heavy to move fast enough in close quarters combat, has a kick that meant sustained fire became harder and harder to keep on target as it turns your shoulder into so much tenderised steak and the action as you reload it is reputed to eat fingertips, especially in adverse weather conditions.
That all being said, they could make it. If they'd tried to make a better gun, they might not have been able to give one to every soldier.
No, the problem was their doctrine, not their gun. Their gun was the best piece of shit they could put in the hands of the most soldiers.
This is basically untrue but in a truthful way. That probably doesn't make sense, I'll try to explain.
If you had a Standard Infantry Rifle that came out of one of the retooled rifle manufacturers in California, then sure. It was a pretty accurate gun, not prone to jamming and rugged enough that you can probably drop it and it'll still go "bang"
If you had a Standard Infantry Rifle that came out of, I don't know, a converted tractor factory? It shot in the direction you pointed it, more or less, only jammed if you didn't treat it right, and if you dropped it, that's on you for not treating your gun like a lady.
If you had a Standard Infantry Rifle that came out of a converted auto garage or a fucking, like, pipe factory or a foundry trying a new trick or a barn on one of the old farms that had some power tools knocking around, or one of the converted warehouses in LA stuffed to the gills with lawyers and stockbrokers in the process of being "retrained"? At best it shot approximately down range when you pulled the trigger, jammed every second or third clip and if you dropped it, you could look forward to an evening of learning how to complete a 3D jigsaw puzzle made of splinters, steel and pain. At worst, you had a slightly better melee weapon to the Lobo.
Todd got a good one - everyone at Hope got a good one - but the ratio of Good:Okay:Crap was probably about 1:5:2.
My wife's was one of the crap ones, but she was in one of the units making the approach through northern Montana, so she was able to pick up a better one at Chester.
Pick a barrel, get your eye in with it, and lose the others. Lose the spare furniture, too. Given how much the Americans piss and whine about how heavy all their gear was in the old army, it is absurd that they then unblinkingly forced every soldier in their army to carry effectively three different rifles for no reason.
You know someone's polishing a turd when they're praising a rifle for "has a bayonet" - every fucking rifle has a bayonet. I will grant, the bayonet on the Standard Infantry Rifle is a bayonet. It can be used to stab people, and it works, like every other bayonet works.
You ever heard a soldier talk about junior officers? Sir yes sir.
Dangerous and costly. A Cherry PIE round can blow your hand off if you fat finger it. Add to that the fact that they're pricy little buggers, and you can probably tell why it was only the Americans who ever bought in. Turns out when you're offering people a bullet full of white phosphorus, they tend to smile politely and refuse.
We just used hollow points. Nothing kills a ghoul like a hollow point through the head.
No one liked working battlefield sanitation, except a handful of head cases that no one liked. Digging trenches and dumping ghoul corpses into them, hoping you didn't get scratched by their fingernails or teeth and so on? Miserable, miserable job.
Makes you a psycho, fighting this war. Whole lot of time shooting things without weapons that won't surrender. Leaves people far too capable of shooting people without weapons and far too willing to ignore surrenders.
Everyone lowered their "old requirements" for this war - we'd all taken too many losses not to - but America more than anyone who wasn't some piece of shit warlord using seven year olds as shock troops.
Can confirm being attracted to women doesn't make you a worse soldier. Being Todd Wainio might make you a worse soldier, though.
Even when he was actually in the battles he claims to have been in, Todd can't stop himself from stealing valour - I'll touch on this more later, but to hear him tell it, he was in a squad with every urban legend in the US army.
But I love the justification the Americans use for the fact that even at the start of the campaign, they were throwing anyone and everyone into their conscript military. Everyone is capable of being a soldier, or they'd already be dead! That makes sense, right.
America's soldiers in their great march east ranged from kids as young as twelve to men and women as old as 70. Volkssturm shit. I don't have a joke or anything here - this is an evil, evil regime.
The first "First Battle of America's Fightback" took place outside of Liberty, Colorado. They were surrounded and a substantial fraction of the Denver horde was attracted to their location. They attempted a breakout and got strung out and consumed.
The second "First Battle of America's Fightback" took place in Liberty County, Montana. Their supply of ammunition proved insufficient as a chain-swarm from Calgary took them by surprise from their rear. Unit cohesion disintegrated, survivors withdrew into the nearest town - Chester, Montana - and after constructing a barricade which they held for a time, they were consumed.
The third "First Battle of America's Fightback" took place in Hope, New Mexico, presumably because they had run out of places called "Liberty".
See, that's the thing about the way the Americans fought this war - you can keep an embarrassing cock up pretty quiet, because when you let yourselves get encircled, you don't have any survivors to go back to your lines and explain how disastrous the battle was. So you can just "start the campaign" over and over again until you get it right. Running into the shattered remains of army units from your own military which shouldn't be there was a fairly upsetting prospect, as my wife tells it.
This is standard, more or less. You don't want to be killing a swarm and suddenly have another swarm crawling up your arse. Nothing else they do in this battle is familiar to me - American doctrine in the reconquest was pretty alien to ours.
This, for example, reeks of static thinking. You don't fight a swarm by setting up shop and thwacking it until it stops - you can't know how many ghouls you'll bring in, you can't know if you've got enough to stop them dead, or if you might have to cut and run.
This was what happened at Yonkers - they set out a position and then let the ghouls throw themselves at it, until they ran out of bullets or the ghouls ran out of ghoul. The difference between Yonkers and Hope - the one difference - is that they had enough bullets at Hope.
Dogshit film. Absolute dogshit. Most films about the American war are bad, but "Hope's Soldiers" is one of the worst. Not cause of his weird pedantry - putting the climactic battle at night and having the soldiers talk so there's some human interest is fine - but because it's hacky. The soldiers talk about their hopes and dreams, talk about how this'll let them look their kids in the eye when they ask what Daddy did in America's darkest hour, one of them passes around a picture of his gal-back-home and how all he wants is to win the war so he can move back to his Pop's house out east and raise a family. He, obviously, is then bit by a ghoul and has to say goodbye to his girl over the radio as the sun rises.
Paint by numbers unoriginal junk.
Really concerted effort to sell this as a reluctant push, a careful, considered move done only for the good of all humanity.
It's all a confidence trick - if you are convinced the only options were the reconquest or cowering in safe zones waiting to die, then you don't raise hell about the casualty rate, the child soldiers, the lacking equipment and the war crimes, because you've been told the alternative was worse. Give people the appearance of a choice and they won't notice that you didn't actually let them choose anything else.
Same stunt they pull with their "elections".
I'd like you to cast your mind back to Yonkers. Once the artillery ran out of ammunition, I mean. Two thin streaks of infantry faced the swarm and lost.
This isn't a "new battle doctrine" - this is having enough fucking ammunition. Nothing about Hope was different from how the infantry fought this battle before. This is nothing but sheer pigheaded stupidity.
Throwdowns with swarms like this weren't standard operating procedure - generally speaking you want to slice and dice, pull the swarm apart and then grind it down in detail - but when we didn't have a choice, like Anglesey, like the first approach to a city, we used drums. Great thumping bassy drums you felt in your core.
The royalists used bagpipes, I guess. The royalists didn't fight much, though.
That isn't what it means to take the piss out of something.
Getting psyched up is a pretty crucial part of fighting ghouls; if you break, it isn't just you that dies, it's everyone else with you. Ghouls don't stop, so if you've called them in on yourselves, you've got to put them down or run far and fast, which you can't do by deserting.
I couldn't tell you why they have the front rank kneel to shoot, honestly - the second rank isn't expected to fire over their heads, and it's going to make redeploying more difficult. And they'll need to redeploy, given their tactical doctrine.
Rigidity of thought. Once they were fighting under less planned conditions - their various clashes in this first push through the plains - they would stumble into swarms of Zack without expecting it, and without their markers, they'd hesitate a little too long, and then their shots would go high, they'd start to panic, start to get nervous…
Their doctrine is weird; it's an ideological refusal to be seen to give ground, and it got a lot of people killed.
I just want to check I'm not going crazy - it's weird that he talks about this ghoul like this, right? This strange sort of judgemental tone when describing this thing that used to be a girl that your fucking army abandoned, I mean.
This is why I think ghouls are blind. Their eyes are scratched to fuck, there's no chance they can see with them. Spooky fuckers.
What do you do, then, if they're coming faster than this? If every second, more than one ghoul per gunman crosses the marker?
The American response to such eventualities was "enter a losing battle of attrition as the ghouls inch forwards from marker to marker, getting less accurate as your troops begin to panic, and then abruptly break and run.
Not a robust strategy.
But you're probably thinking "more than one ghoul per gunman per second? That's a ludicrous rate, there's no way, unless there was some sort of bottleneck that could suddenly give way-"
And behind this unsteady wall of ghoul corpses, the concentration of ghouls is building up and up and up. A bottleneck that can suddenly give way.
At Hope, the ghouls never built up the critical mass to collapse the rampart, but that was by luck, not design - the First Battle of Denver is probably the most famous battle to end in a rampart collapse, but it's by no means the only one.
But still, even something like this - a ghoul is only so fast, so when the rampart collapses, you'd be able to retreat in good order, right?
Unless you deliberately form a square rather than pulling back when outflanked - I have to assume it was spillover from the main swarm, because the idea that they didn't check their flanks or rear is just baffling.
And to be clear - they chose this ground. There is nothing of strategic or tactical importance in this location, no reason for them to not retreat.
This is the most obvious point of divergence in doctrine between us and the Americans - most of the other differences are material; they didn't invest the time or effort in using artillery or air support, so their doctrine doesn't account for either, but that's a limitation of their equipment.
Their refusal to retreat is pure doctrine. When we fought swarms, we'd be leapfrogging a retreat between two units, making sure we never got outflanked, stalling the swarm whilst artillery blew them to pieces, left a trail of dead ghouls back and back and back until the swarm ran out of steam or we judged we were running out of space to retreat - in that case we'd disengage, use either outriders on quad bikes or a light aircraft to draw the swarm back where it came from, ready to have another crack at it once resupplied and rested.
If I had to judge, I'd say that when your army cut and ran and left most of your population to be devoured by ghouls, you consequently find yourself with an army pretty unwilling to make "retreating from the ghouls" a major part of their tactical make-up.
The fact that they had their soldiers doing fifteen hours of combat with nothing but a handful of 5 minute breaks, whilst surrounded?
Absurdity to the point of being laughable, honestly. This isn't even a super broad "American" fuck up - this fuck up was specific to whichever dipshit was in direct command of the Battle of Hope. In other battles, when they baited the ghouls into encircling them, they established small enough cordons that they could hold a perimeter with a third of their troops, work on a shift system.
Lucky. The chain-swarm petered out and the ghouls outside their rampart weren't enough to push it over, so they just crawled over in dribbles and dabbles. Luck.
Fighting from 1pm to 4am is bizarre, mind - they set the terms of engagement? Why on Earth start the battle so late in the day? They could've set up shop at first light, spent all day blasting under the sunlight.
He's exaggerating their rampart size, obviously, but I can't quite move past how absurd I think it is that their strategy for fighting ghouls involves becoming - by design - encircled by the swarm. I'm sorry for consistently returning to it, I just can't believe it, not quite.
Hardly surprising that their casualty rate was so high on the offensive, is it?
They lost soldiers, doing a ten mile march after fifteen hours of combat. Absolutely insane machismo play, having them march so far so quickly after the first offensive engagement they had successfully pulled off all war.
Concertainer is fucking idiotic, by the way. Bags of rubble made of kevlar. Why are they made of kevlar? Couldn't tell you, honestly. Backhanders to DeStrRes, maybe.
The American military took 20% casualties in their push to the Eastern Seaboard - one in five people who put on the uniform died in it. Three million US Army soldiers perished in this campaign.
For a comparison, the global average casualty rate on the offensive against the ghouls was 5%.
America fucked it.
Calling it here for now, rather than launching into the next interview - that one's about a dog handler.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE].
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Donate to a South/Central American group of your choice [HERE] - it's a masterlist.
AN: God, it's been a minute! Finally felt able to write these last few days and suddenly got all of this out since, like, Tuesday? Hope it still interests people! Hopefully shouldn't be quite this long a wait for the next one. His tactics suck ass.
Article: ABOARD THE MAURO ALTIERI, THREE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE VAALAJARVI, FINLAND
[I stand next to General D'Ambrosia in the CIC, the Combat Information Center, of Europe's answer to the massive U.S. D-29 command and control dirigible. The crew work silently at their glowing monitors. Occasionally, one of them speaks into a headset, a quick, whispered acknowledgment in French, German, Spanish, or Italian. The general leans over the video chart table, watching the entire operation from the closest thing to a God'seye view.]
Ridiculous thing. Designed in the post-war, which like… Ghouls aren't… really an issue any more? Not in Europe, anyway. And you can't use a dirigible against a conventional opponent, because they'll turn it into confetti. It's a vanity piece.
It probably helps keep tensions low though - Murmansk can look over at the NATO forces commanded by their Generals in their idiot balloon and know that they aren't going to be causing any serious trouble on the border. Aren't Cold Wars fun?
Article: "Attack"—when I first heard that word, my gut reaction was "oh shit." Does that surprise you?
[Before I can answer . . .]
Sure it does. You probably expected "the brass" to be just champing at the bit, all that blood and guts, "hold 'em by the nose while we kick 'em in the ass" crap.
There was not a serious faction of American politicians or generals - though by this point, the two were becoming almost synonymous - who opposed reconquest. Ideologically speaking it was untenable, and the army was becoming increasingly fractious - my girl had joined up by now, and to hear her tell it, there was a thread of wounded pride through the whole military, with an underlying sense that if the general staff wouldn't let them go back across the Rockies, they'd have to force their hand.
There were people with concerns that they didn't have enough bang for their buck to actually succeed but no one was stupid enough to say that explicitly.
Article: I don't know who created the stereotype of the hardcharging, dim-witted, high school football coach of a general officer. Maybe it was Hollywood, or the civilian press, or maybe we did it to ourselves by allowing those insipid, egocentric clowns—the MacArthurs and Halseys and Curtis E. LeMays—to define our image to the rest of the country.
The consistency of their attempts to frame their military junta as these reserved, thoughtfully apolitical men who have been maligned as brash blowhards is almost pathetic.
If you put a bullet in the back of your civilian government's head, you don't get to call other people - people who, whatever their sins, did not do that - egocentric. You couped the government.
Article: [He turns to another screen on the far wall, nodding to an operator, and the image dissolves into a wartime map of the continental United States.]
Two hundred million zombies[1]. Who can even visualize that type of number, let alone combat it?
I mostly want to talk about the footnote here, honestly. The footnote reads "[1] - It has been confirmed at least twenty-five million of this number include reanimated refugees from Latin America who were killed attempting to reach the Canadian north."
Which is just… startlingly racist?
Like, breaking this down - how could you possibly know this? You can't exactly go asking the ghoul, most ghouls weren't walking around with ID on them and when you shoot something in the face, ability to easily identify who it used to be becomes difficult.
You get this figure by making sweeping and racist assumptions regarding any and all Hispanic ghouls you kill during your reconquest, and you repeat it when you're not being subtle about stoking nationalist fervour regarding the dangerous hordes of refugees pouring across the border.
It's pathetic and evil.
Article: All armies, be they mechanized or mountain guerilla, have to abide by three basic restrictions: they have to be bred, fed, and led. Bred: you need warm bodies, or else you don't have an army; fed: once you've got that army, they've got to be supplied; and led: no matter how decentralized that fighting force is, there has to be someone among them with the authority to say "follow me." Bred, fed, and led; and none of these restrictions applied to the living dead.
It's a classic of the American propaganda machine to overinflate the danger posed by ghouls. The reason they were so difficult to fight wasn't because the individual ghoul is some terrifying god of war, unburdened by logistical or material concerns - as military threats go, slouching, mindless melee combatants are not terribly high up there.
They were so difficult to fight because by default we lost our industrial centres, our population hubs, our ease of coordination. Ten soldiers with rifles can kill as many ghouls as they have bullets, but by this point in the war, it wouldn't be inconceivable for them to not have the bullets, or not have the guns, or not have enough food to keep the strength to lift the guns.
Specifically I do have to object to one of these - it is not substantially more difficult for a functional military to turn a civilian into a soldier than it is for that same civilian to be turned into a ghoul. Both sides of this war could only have as many 'soldiers' as there were civilians.
Article: Did you ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Remarque paints a vivid picture of Germany becoming "empty," meaning that toward the end of the war, they were simply running out of soldiers. You can fudge the numbers, send the old men and little boys, but eventually you're going to hit the ceiling . . . unless every time you killed an enemy, he came back to life on your side. That's how Zack operated, swelling his ranks by thinning ours!
There's an obvious and glaring hole in this argument, which he doesn't mention because it was one of the nasty little stunts at the core of American doctrine in this war, and was why they did send the "old men and little boys" by the end.
If you can get the ratio correct, it doesn't matter if the ghouls can reanimate your dead soldiers.
When a thousand American soldiers got engulfed by a hundred thousand ghouls boiling out of Salt Lake City and they put down fifteen thousand ghouls before they died themselves, that gave an effective casualty rate of 1:14 in favour of the living - fifteen thousand ghouls die, one thousand new ghouls lurch out of there. Given their remaining population, the Americans could, in theory, trade at this rate and come out the other end as the bloodstained victors of their reconquest. Doctrinally speaking this was more or less what the Americans wanted to have be their "low water mark" - when they lost soldiers, they wanted to lose at this ratio or better.
They lost a lot of soldiers under this sort of doctrine, but they advanced pretty lightning quick by not sweating casualties.
Article: It's ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain, because, as a group, they have no collective brain to speak of. There was no leadership, no chain of command, no communication or cooperation on any level. There was no president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to surgically strike. Each zombie is its own, self-contained, automated unit, and this last advantage is what truly encapsulates the entire conflict.
The idea that a lack of communication and cooperation is an advantage is laughable on its face, honestly.
It is part and parcel of their entire argument - that the ghouls are so individually terrifying that they had no choice but to do what they did.
It's a bad joke. Ghouls are individually pathetic - there's a reason why evolutionarily speaking you don't get many predators following the "slow, dumb and clumsy" strategy. They're dangerous en masse, but we only have to deal with them en masse because the people now very seriously explaining that the perfect killing machine is a person that can't run, use tools or reason? Fucked it.
Article: Every generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about how his people have declared "total war" against an enemy, meaning that every man, woman, and child within his nation was committing every second of their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels.
I will politely remind you of all the crap we've waded through so far about how the Americans revolutionised their industry, turned everything over to food and weapons, had their lawyers and architects breaking rocks and building bridges, set up work gangs, public humiliation and corporal punishment to keep everyone solely focused on surviving and preparing to "whack zack"
For people who pay lip service to the concept that "total war" rhetoric is propagandistic nonsense, the American Junta spend a lot of time talking about their total war.
That's also, by the by, why his explanation for why total war can't be done rests on three points, two of which are moral condemnations. To hear the General tell it, there are three - he says two, but means three - things stopping America waging total war.
Article: First of all, no country or group is ever 100 percent committed to war; it's just not physically possible. You can have a high percentage, so many people working so hard for so long, but all of the people, all of the time? What about the malingerers, or the conscientious objectors? What about the sick, the injured, the very old, the very young?
One - the internal traitors and those too weak to do their duty, on either a moral or literal level.
You'll note "very old" and "very young" here - I may touch on why these are separated from just "the old" and "the young" later, but you can probably guess.
Article: What about when you're sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump? Is that a "dump for victory"? That's the first reason total war is impossible for humans.
This is his second reason, and it isn't as condemnatory as the first and third - the physical limits of human endurance. The junta tried their very hardest to push these as far as they could, but drugs can only keep you going for so long.
Article: The second is that all nations have their limits. There might be individuals within that group who are willing to sacrifice their lives; it might even be a relatively high number for the population, but that population as a whole will eventually reach its maximum emotional and physiological breaking point.
This is a return to form - the collective will of the nation is limited, they're not willing to do the necessary.
The junta - and therefore the book their tame journalist wrote - is almost obsessed by the idea that really, deep down, below everything else, the only thing that really matters in a war is the will to fight.
Article: The Japanese reached theirs with a couple of American atomic bombs. The Vietnamese might have reached theirs if we'd dropped a couple more, [2] but, thank all holy Christ, our will broke before it came to that.
This is a pervasive American take on the Vietnam War. Even amongst Americans who agree the war in Vietnam was bad, they have this idea that they didn't lose the war. Not really - they just decided to stop fighting it because the public gave up.
It is pathetic. America lost the Vietnam War. They killed millions of people in indiscriminate bombing campaigns and war crimes, failed to break the spirit of the Vietnamese people, and then fucked off just barely ahead of the collapse of their puppet government.
And the grotesque idea that they could've used nuclear weapons to win the war without this causing any sort of response from, say, the Soviet Union? Ridiculous. It's all part of their desire to pretend that they could've won, they were just… what? Too moral? Too honourable? Too squeamish?
Article: For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to consuming all life on Earth. That's the kind of enemy that was waiting for us beyond the Rockies. That's the kind of war we had to fight.
And you did a dogshit job of it, truly.
Back to Todd Wainio now, and this time for battles he is actually present for.
Article: DENVER, COLORADO, USA
[We have just finished dinner at the Wainios. Allison, Todd's wife, is upstairs helping their son, Addison, with his homework. Todd and I are downstairs in the kitchen, doing the dishes.]
I hate this prick so bad, but at least he was actually at the battle he talks about here.
Article: It was kinda like stepping back in time, the new army, I mean. It couldn't have been any more different from the one I'd fought, and almost died with, at Yonkers. We weren't mechanized anymore—no tanks, no arty, no tread jobs[1] at all, not even the Bradleys. Those were still in reserve, being modified for when we'd have to take back the cities.
"Take back the cities" is such a "fun" euphemism for the war with the Socialist Republic. The tank battles around the Lakes were pretty apocalyptic, as I understand it, and that was before they actually sent them into the cities.
Article: We hoofed it, all the way, marching in column like you see in Civil War paintings. There was a lot of references to "the Blue" versus "the Gray," mainly because of Zack's skin color and the shade of our new BDUs.
The junta spent a lot of time and money on their propaganda emphasising the aesthetics of the Civil War with their armed forces, and not for the benefit of the ghouls - they knew that when they got into it at last with the Christian States, it'd be a brutal war.
The northern campaigns were hardly light or easy for the US Army, but the southern campaigns were hell on wheels. They interviewed Todd from the northern campaign because there were very few veterans of the southern campaign who survived from start to finish. Whole divisions got chewed up and spat out in meatgrinding battles in places called, like, "Big Sandy".
Article: They didn't bother with camo schemes anymore; in any case, what was the point? And, I guess, navy blue was the cheapest dye they had back then. The BDU itself looked more like a SWAT team's coverall. It was light and comfortable and interwoven with Kevlar, I think it was Kevlar,[3] bite-proof threads. It had the option of gloves and a hood that would cover your whole face. Later, in urban hand-to-hand, that option saved a lot of lives.
The BDU is appalling - the wind cuts through it like a knife, it does nothing to keep you warm on a cold night and it doesn't get any better in the heat - it traps sweat. My wife says she would've burnt hers, except it gives off noxious fumes if you do.
It isn't bulletproof, either; not even against a handgun, not only 3 sheets thick. Dubiously useful against ghouls and worthless against anything else, including the weather, which is an old problem to still be tripping up your military.
So fucking funny that they stopped using helmets. I do have a theory about it, though - and no one's ever going to confirm this was the junta's thought process, not now not ever - but it seems logical to me.
If you know a lot of your soldiers are going to die - and they knew a lot of their soldiers were going to die - and you know once they die and rise again, you need to put a bullet or axe through their skull… Why would you wrap that skull in armour? I mean sure, it's better for the soldier to have a helmet than not to, but this wouldn't be the first or most blatant time that they didn't give a shit about their soldiers' wellbeing, would it?
Article: Everything had kind of a retro feel about it. Our Lobos looked like something out of, I don't know, Lord of the Rings? Standard orders were to use it only when necessary, but, trust me, we made it necessary a lot. It just felt good, you know, swingin' that solid hunk a' steel. It made it personal, empowering. You could feel the skull split. A real rush, like you were taking back your life, you know? Not that I minded pulling the trigger.
The lobo was probably the most frequently "lost in combat" piece of equipment of any in the whole damn war. I guess at the Battle of Hope people probably wanted to use it - novelty's a fine thing.
I finally held one the other week, as it happens - I had to really chase, but one of my girl's expat friends still has their lobo knocking around to use in the garden.
It has one of those handles - like just holding it is going to give you blisters - and it is, as described, profoundly ill-balanced.
Almost as bad as their guns.
Article: Our primary weapon was the SIR, standard infantry rifle. The wood furniture made it look like a World War II gun; I guess composite materials were too hard to mass-produce. I'm not sure where the SIR supposedly came from. I've heard it was a modcop of the AK. I've also heard that it was a stripped-down version of the XM 8, which the army was already planning as its next-gen assault weapon.
Piece of shit. Wood furniture stopped being used for a reason - it swells in wet weather, its heavy, it takes so much fucking work to make compared to moulded polymer.
It sucks. It sucks so bad but it is a gun that the Americans could make - can make, even now. They saved the good guns - the guns from before their collapse - for their more elite units. Their wretched death squad scum who went into places like the Black Hills.
Article: I've even heard that it was invented, tested, and first produced during the siege of the Hero City, and the plans were transmitted to Honolulu. Honestly, I don't know, and I so don't care.
This is obvious nonsense. The Standard Infantry Rifle was designed more or less bespoke once they knew they were stuck behind the rockies, based on an audit of available resources, workforce and ammunition.
It was honestly - and this is through gritted teeth believe me - something of a success story. They could not have made a better gun than this piece of absolute shit, not if they wanted to arm their soldiers. It's too heavy to move fast enough in close quarters combat, has a kick that meant sustained fire became harder and harder to keep on target as it turns your shoulder into so much tenderised steak and the action as you reload it is reputed to eat fingertips, especially in adverse weather conditions.
That all being said, they could make it. If they'd tried to make a better gun, they might not have been able to give one to every soldier.
No, the problem was their doctrine, not their gun. Their gun was the best piece of shit they could put in the hands of the most soldiers.
Article: It might have kicked hard, and it only fired on semi, but it was super accurate and it never, ever jammed! You could drag it through the mud, leave it in the sand, you could drop it in saltwater and let it sit there for days.
This is basically untrue but in a truthful way. That probably doesn't make sense, I'll try to explain.
If you had a Standard Infantry Rifle that came out of one of the retooled rifle manufacturers in California, then sure. It was a pretty accurate gun, not prone to jamming and rugged enough that you can probably drop it and it'll still go "bang"
If you had a Standard Infantry Rifle that came out of, I don't know, a converted tractor factory? It shot in the direction you pointed it, more or less, only jammed if you didn't treat it right, and if you dropped it, that's on you for not treating your gun like a lady.
If you had a Standard Infantry Rifle that came out of a converted auto garage or a fucking, like, pipe factory or a foundry trying a new trick or a barn on one of the old farms that had some power tools knocking around, or one of the converted warehouses in LA stuffed to the gills with lawyers and stockbrokers in the process of being "retrained"? At best it shot approximately down range when you pulled the trigger, jammed every second or third clip and if you dropped it, you could look forward to an evening of learning how to complete a 3D jigsaw puzzle made of splinters, steel and pain. At worst, you had a slightly better melee weapon to the Lobo.
Todd got a good one - everyone at Hope got a good one - but the ratio of Good:Okay:Crap was probably about 1:5:2.
My wife's was one of the crap ones, but she was in one of the units making the approach through northern Montana, so she was able to pick up a better one at Chester.
Article: The only bells and whistles it had was a conversion kit of extra parts, furniture, and additional barrels of different lengths. You could go long-range sniper, midrange rifle, or close-combat carbine, all in the same hour, and without reaching farther than your ruck.
Pick a barrel, get your eye in with it, and lose the others. Lose the spare furniture, too. Given how much the Americans piss and whine about how heavy all their gear was in the old army, it is absurd that they then unblinkingly forced every soldier in their army to carry effectively three different rifles for no reason.
Article: It also had a spike, this little flipout job, about eight inches long, that you could use in a pinch if your Lobo wasn't handy. We used to joke "careful, you'll poke somebody's eye out," which, of course, we did plenty.
You know someone's polishing a turd when they're praising a rifle for "has a bayonet" - every fucking rifle has a bayonet. I will grant, the bayonet on the Standard Infantry Rifle is a bayonet. It can be used to stab people, and it works, like every other bayonet works.
Article: The SIR made a pretty good close combat weapon, even without the spike, and when you add all the other things that made it so awesome, you can see why we always referred to it, respectfully, as "Sir."
You ever heard a soldier talk about junior officers? Sir yes sir.
Article: Our staple ammo was the NATO 5.56 "Cherry PIE." PIE stands for pyrotechnically initiated explosive. Outstanding design. It would shatter on entry into Zack's skull and fragments would fry its brain. No risk of spreading infected gray matter, and no need for wasteful bonfires.
Dangerous and costly. A Cherry PIE round can blow your hand off if you fat finger it. Add to that the fact that they're pricy little buggers, and you can probably tell why it was only the Americans who ever bought in. Turns out when you're offering people a bullet full of white phosphorus, they tend to smile politely and refuse.
We just used hollow points. Nothing kills a ghoul like a hollow point through the head.
Article: On BS[4] duty, you didn't even have to decap before you buried them. Just dig the trench and roll the whole body in.
No one liked working battlefield sanitation, except a handful of head cases that no one liked. Digging trenches and dumping ghoul corpses into them, hoping you didn't get scratched by their fingernails or teeth and so on? Miserable, miserable job.
Article: Recruitment had changed, and being a grunt meant something very different now. You still had the old requirements—physical stamina, mental competence, the motivation and discipline to master difficult challenges in extreme conditions—but all that was mouse farts if you couldn't hack long-term Z-shock.
Makes you a psycho, fighting this war. Whole lot of time shooting things without weapons that won't surrender. Leaves people far too capable of shooting people without weapons and far too willing to ignore surrenders.
Everyone lowered their "old requirements" for this war - we'd all taken too many losses not to - but America more than anyone who wasn't some piece of shit warlord using seven year olds as shock troops.
Article: It didn't have anything to do with being brave or anything like that. I once read this British SAS survival guide that talked all about the "warrior" personality, how your family's supposed to be emotionally and financially stable, and how you're not even supposed to be attracted to girls when you're real young. [Grunts.] Survival guides . . . [Jerks his hand in a masturbatory movement.]
Can confirm being attracted to women doesn't make you a worse soldier. Being Todd Wainio might make you a worse soldier, though.
Article: But the new faces, they could have been from anywhere: your neighbor, your aunt, that geeky substitute teacher, or that fat, lazy slob at the DMV. From former insurance salesmen to a guy who I'm damn sure was Michael Stipe, although I never got him to admit it. I guess it all made sense; anyone who couldn't roll wouldn't have made it this far in the first place.
Even when he was actually in the battles he claims to have been in, Todd can't stop himself from stealing valour - I'll touch on this more later, but to hear him tell it, he was in a squad with every urban legend in the US army.
But I love the justification the Americans use for the fact that even at the start of the campaign, they were throwing anyone and everyone into their conscript military. Everyone is capable of being a soldier, or they'd already be dead! That makes sense, right.
Article: My battle buddy, Sister Montoya, fifty-two years old, she'd been a nun, still was I guess. Five three and a buck even, she'd protected her whole Sunday school class for nine days with nothing but a six-foot iron candlestick.
America's soldiers in their great march east ranged from kids as young as twelve to men and women as old as 70. Volkssturm shit. I don't have a joke or anything here - this is an evil, evil regime.
Article: Hope. I'm not kidding, the town was actually named Hope.
They say the brass chose it because of the terrain, clear and open with the desert in front and the mountains in back. Perfect, they said, for an opening engagement, and that the name had nothing to do with it. Right.
The first "First Battle of America's Fightback" took place outside of Liberty, Colorado. They were surrounded and a substantial fraction of the Denver horde was attracted to their location. They attempted a breakout and got strung out and consumed.
The second "First Battle of America's Fightback" took place in Liberty County, Montana. Their supply of ammunition proved insufficient as a chain-swarm from Calgary took them by surprise from their rear. Unit cohesion disintegrated, survivors withdrew into the nearest town - Chester, Montana - and after constructing a barricade which they held for a time, they were consumed.
The third "First Battle of America's Fightback" took place in Hope, New Mexico, presumably because they had run out of places called "Liberty".
See, that's the thing about the way the Americans fought this war - you can keep an embarrassing cock up pretty quiet, because when you let yourselves get encircled, you don't have any survivors to go back to your lines and explain how disastrous the battle was. So you can just "start the campaign" over and over again until you get it right. Running into the shattered remains of army units from your own military which shouldn't be there was a fairly upsetting prospect, as my wife tells it.
Article: We'd encountered a couple dozen Gs en route. Sniffer dogs would find them, and handlers with silenced weapons would drop them. We didn't want to attract too many till we were set. We wanted this to be on our terms.
This is standard, more or less. You don't want to be killing a swarm and suddenly have another swarm crawling up your arse. Nothing else they do in this battle is familiar to me - American doctrine in the reconquest was pretty alien to ours.
Article: We started planting our "garden": shelter stakes with orange Day-Glo tape in rows every ten meters. They were our range markers, showing us exactly where to zero our sights.
This, for example, reeks of static thinking. You don't fight a swarm by setting up shop and thwacking it until it stops - you can't know how many ghouls you'll bring in, you can't know if you've got enough to stop them dead, or if you might have to cut and run.
This was what happened at Yonkers - they set out a position and then let the ghouls throw themselves at it, until they ran out of bullets or the ghouls ran out of ghoul. The difference between Yonkers and Hope - the one difference - is that they had enough bullets at Hope.
Article: Did you see the movie, the one Elliot made about us? That scene with the campfire and the grunts all jawing in this witty dialogue, the stories and the dreams for the future, and even that guy with the harmonica. Dude, it was so not like that.
Dogshit film. Absolute dogshit. Most films about the American war are bad, but "Hope's Soldiers" is one of the worst. Not cause of his weird pedantry - putting the climactic battle at night and having the soldiers talk so there's some human interest is fine - but because it's hacky. The soldiers talk about their hopes and dreams, talk about how this'll let them look their kids in the eye when they ask what Daddy did in America's darkest hour, one of them passes around a picture of his gal-back-home and how all he wants is to win the war so he can move back to his Pop's house out east and raise a family. He, obviously, is then bit by a ghoul and has to say goodbye to his girl over the radio as the sun rises.
Paint by numbers unoriginal junk.
Article: You knew what everyone was thinking though, "What the hell are we doing here?" This was Zack's house now, and as far as we were concerned, he could have it. We'd all had plenty of pep talks about "The Future of the Human Spirit." We'd seen the president's speech God knows how many times, but the prez wasn't out here on Zack's front lawn. We had a good thing going behind the Rockies. What the hell were we doing out here?
Really concerted effort to sell this as a reluctant push, a careful, considered move done only for the good of all humanity.
It's all a confidence trick - if you are convinced the only options were the reconquest or cowering in safe zones waiting to die, then you don't raise hell about the casualty rate, the child soldiers, the lacking equipment and the war crimes, because you've been told the alternative was worse. Give people the appearance of a choice and they won't notice that you didn't actually let them choose anything else.
Same stunt they pull with their "elections".
Article: Around 1300 hours, the radios started squawking, it was the K-handlers whose dogs had made contact. We locked and loaded and took our place on the firing line.
That was the centerpiece of our whole new battle doctrine, back into the past like everything else. We massed in a straight line, two ranks: one active, one reserve.
I'd like you to cast your mind back to Yonkers. Once the artillery ran out of ammunition, I mean. Two thin streaks of infantry faced the swarm and lost.
This isn't a "new battle doctrine" - this is having enough fucking ammunition. Nothing about Hope was different from how the infantry fought this battle before. This is nothing but sheer pigheaded stupidity.
Article: The dogs were recalled, racing behind our lines. We switched over to our Primary Enticement Mechanism. Every army had one by now. The Brits would use bagpipes, the Chinese used bugles, the Sou'fricans used to smack their rifles with their assegais[5] and belt out these Zulu war chants.
Throwdowns with swarms like this weren't standard operating procedure - generally speaking you want to slice and dice, pull the swarm apart and then grind it down in detail - but when we didn't have a choice, like Anglesey, like the first approach to a city, we used drums. Great thumping bassy drums you felt in your core.
The royalists used bagpipes, I guess. The royalists didn't fight much, though.
Article: The PEM wasn't really for Zack's benefit. It was to psych us up, take away some of Zack's mojo, you know, "take the piss out," as the Brits say. Right about the time Dickinson was belting "As you plunge into a certain death" I was pumped, SIR charged and ready, eyes fixed on this growing, closing horde. I was, like, "C'mon, Zack, let's fuckin' do this!"
That isn't what it means to take the piss out of something.
Getting psyched up is a pretty crucial part of fighting ghouls; if you break, it isn't just you that dies, it's everyone else with you. Ghouls don't stop, so if you've called them in on yourselves, you've got to put them down or run far and fast, which you can't do by deserting.
Article: Just before they reached the front range marker, the music began to fade. The squad leaders shouted, "Front rank, ready!" and the first line knelt. Then came the order to "take aim!" and then, as we all held our breath, as the music clicked off, we heard "FIRE!"
I couldn't tell you why they have the front rank kneel to shoot, honestly - the second rank isn't expected to fire over their heads, and it's going to make redeploying more difficult. And they'll need to redeploy, given their tactical doctrine.
Article: The front rank just rippled, cracking like a SAW on full auto and dropping every G that crossed the first markers. We had strict orders, only the ones crossing the line. Wait for the others. We'd trained this way for months. By now it was pure instinct.
Rigidity of thought. Once they were fighting under less planned conditions - their various clashes in this first push through the plains - they would stumble into swarms of Zack without expecting it, and without their markers, they'd hesitate a little too long, and then their shots would go high, they'd start to panic, start to get nervous…
Their doctrine is weird; it's an ideological refusal to be seen to give ground, and it got a lot of people killed.
Article: We switched positions, I flipped off my safety, and sighted my first target. She was a noob,[6] couldn't have been dead more than a year or so. Her dirty blond hair hung in patches from her tight, leathery skin. Her swollen belly puffed through a faded black T-shirt that read G IS FOR GANGSTA.
I just want to check I'm not going crazy - it's weird that he talks about this ghoul like this, right? This strange sort of judgemental tone when describing this thing that used to be a girl that your fucking army abandoned, I mean.
Article: I centered my sight between her shrunken, milky blue eyes . . . you know it's not really the eyes that make them look all cloudy, it's actually tiny dust scratches on the surface, thousands of them, because Zack doesn't make any tears.
This is why I think ghouls are blind. Their eyes are scratched to fuck, there's no chance they can see with them. Spooky fuckers.
Article: Doctrine calls for one shot every full second. Slow, steady, mechanicallike.
[He begins snapping his fingers.]
On the range we practiced with metronomes, all the time the instructors saying "they ain't in no hurry, why are you?" It was a way of keeping calm, pacing yourself. We had to be as slow and robotic as them. "Out G the G," they used to say.
What do you do, then, if they're coming faster than this? If every second, more than one ghoul per gunman crosses the marker?
The American response to such eventualities was "enter a losing battle of attrition as the ghouls inch forwards from marker to marker, getting less accurate as your troops begin to panic, and then abruptly break and run.
Not a robust strategy.
But you're probably thinking "more than one ghoul per gunman per second? That's a ludicrous rate, there's no way, unless there was some sort of bottleneck that could suddenly give way-"
Article: They started piling up, forming this artificial palisade at the first range marker, this ridge of corpses that got higher and higher each minute. We were actually building an undead fortification, creating a situation where all we had to do was pop every head that popped over the top.
And behind this unsteady wall of ghoul corpses, the concentration of ghouls is building up and up and up. A bottleneck that can suddenly give way.
At Hope, the ghouls never built up the critical mass to collapse the rampart, but that was by luck, not design - the First Battle of Denver is probably the most famous battle to end in a rampart collapse, but it's by no means the only one.
But still, even something like this - a ghoul is only so fast, so when the rampart collapses, you'd be able to retreat in good order, right?
Article: We started getting contacts from all sides, either coming around the wall or else being drawn in from our flanks and even rear. Again, the brass was waiting for this and ordered us to form an RS.
A Reinforced Square.
Or a "Raj-Singh," I guess after the guy who reinvented it. We formed a tight square, still two ranks, with our vehicles and whatnot in the center.
Unless you deliberately form a square rather than pulling back when outflanked - I have to assume it was spillover from the main swarm, because the idea that they didn't check their flanks or rear is just baffling.
And to be clear - they chose this ground. There is nothing of strategic or tactical importance in this location, no reason for them to not retreat.
This is the most obvious point of divergence in doctrine between us and the Americans - most of the other differences are material; they didn't invest the time or effort in using artillery or air support, so their doctrine doesn't account for either, but that's a limitation of their equipment.
Their refusal to retreat is pure doctrine. When we fought swarms, we'd be leapfrogging a retreat between two units, making sure we never got outflanked, stalling the swarm whilst artillery blew them to pieces, left a trail of dead ghouls back and back and back until the swarm ran out of steam or we judged we were running out of space to retreat - in that case we'd disengage, use either outriders on quad bikes or a light aircraft to draw the swarm back where it came from, ready to have another crack at it once resupplied and rested.
If I had to judge, I'd say that when your army cut and ran and left most of your population to be devoured by ghouls, you consequently find yourself with an army pretty unwilling to make "retreating from the ghouls" a major part of their tactical make-up.
Article: No one would ever volunteer for a fiver, but they had these KO[9] teams, combat shrinks who were observing everyone's performance. They'd been with us since our early days on the range, knew us each by name and face, and knew, don't ask me how, when the stress of battle was starting to degrade our performance. We didn't know, I certainly didn't. There were a couple times I'd miss a shot or maybe take a half second instead of a full. Then suddenly I'd get this tap on my shoulder and I knew I was out of it for five. It really worked. Before I knew it, I was back on the line, bladder empty, stomach quiet, a few less kinks and muscle cramps. It made a world of difference, and anyone who thinks we could have lasted without it should try hitting a moving bull's-eye every second for fifteen hours.
The fact that they had their soldiers doing fifteen hours of combat with nothing but a handful of 5 minute breaks, whilst surrounded?
Absurdity to the point of being laughable, honestly. This isn't even a super broad "American" fuck up - this fuck up was specific to whichever dipshit was in direct command of the Battle of Hope. In other battles, when they baited the ghouls into encircling them, they established small enough cordons that they could hold a perimeter with a third of their troops, work on a shift system.
Article: How did you know the battle was over?
When we stopped shooting? [Laughs.] No, that's actually a good question. Around, I don't know, 0400, it started to taper off. Heads weren't poking out as much. The moan was dying down. The officers didn't tell us that the attack was almost over, but you could see them looking through their scopes, talking on their radios. You could see the relief in their faces. I think the last shot was fired just before dawn. After that, we just waited for first light.
Lucky. The chain-swarm petered out and the ghouls outside their rampart weren't enough to push it over, so they just crawled over in dribbles and dabbles. Luck.
Fighting from 1pm to 4am is bizarre, mind - they set the terms of engagement? Why on Earth start the battle so late in the day? They could've set up shop at first light, spent all day blasting under the sunlight.
Article: It was kinda eerie, the sun rising over this mountainous ring of corpses. We were totally walled in, all sides were piled at least twenty feet high and over a hundred feet deep. I'm not sure how many we killed that day, stats always vary depending on who you get it from.
He's exaggerating their rampart size, obviously, but I can't quite move past how absurd I think it is that their strategy for fighting ghouls involves becoming - by design - encircled by the swarm. I'm sorry for consistently returning to it, I just can't believe it, not quite.
Hardly surprising that their casualty rate was so high on the offensive, is it?
Article: At least we didn't have to stick around for BS duty. They had another unit waiting in reserve to clean up. I guess the brass figured we'd done enough for one day. We marched ten miles to the east, set up a bivouac with watchtowers and concertainer[10] walls. I was so damn beat. I don't remember the chem shower, turning in my gear to be disinfected, turning in my weapon for inspection: not one jam, not the whole unit. I don't even remember slipping into my bag.
They lost soldiers, doing a ten mile march after fifteen hours of combat. Absolutely insane machismo play, having them march so far so quickly after the first offensive engagement they had successfully pulled off all war.
Concertainer is fucking idiotic, by the way. Bags of rubble made of kevlar. Why are they made of kevlar? Couldn't tell you, honestly. Backhanders to DeStrRes, maybe.
Article: They let us sleep as late as we wanted the next day. That was pretty sweet. Eventually the voices woke me up; everyone jawing, laughing, telling stories. It was a different vibe, one-eighty from two days ago. I couldn't really put a finger on what I was feeling, maybe it was what the president said about "reclaiming our future." I just knew I felt good, better than I had the entire war. I knew it was gonna be a real, long-ass road. I knew our campaign across America was just beginning, but, hey, as the prez said later that first night, it was finally the beginning of the end.
The American military took 20% casualties in their push to the Eastern Seaboard - one in five people who put on the uniform died in it. Three million US Army soldiers perished in this campaign.
For a comparison, the global average casualty rate on the offensive against the ghouls was 5%.
America fucked it.
Calling it here for now, rather than launching into the next interview - that one's about a dog handler.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE].
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Donate to a South/Central American group of your choice [HERE] - it's a masterlist.
AN: God, it's been a minute! Finally felt able to write these last few days and suddenly got all of this out since, like, Tuesday? Hope it still interests people! Hopefully shouldn't be quite this long a wait for the next one. His tactics suck ass.
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The funniest thing about the Standard Infantry Rifle is how standard it isn't. I got to see a consignment of them at one point. Do you like the ones that are just the guts of a G-36 (AKA the XM8)? The one with the AR parts? The ones with the Long Stroke gas piston system? Even accepting the incredible QC issues a lot of them have they're a strange strange gun.
I hear the function rates on the royal police issue ones is pretty dreadful. Not helped by the fact they get bottom of the line for quality ammo.
Edit: I'll note if you do find yourself in possession of one of the ones with the AR parts, you can sell the ones that haven't been fucked up to most arms dealers who will ship them to the middle east or other area where they still use AR/M16 style rifles.
I hear the function rates on the royal police issue ones is pretty dreadful. Not helped by the fact they get bottom of the line for quality ammo.
Edit: I'll note if you do find yourself in possession of one of the ones with the AR parts, you can sell the ones that haven't been fucked up to most arms dealers who will ship them to the middle east or other area where they still use AR/M16 style rifles.
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This bit was something I was fairly hyped up while reading waaay back when but coming back just reads incredibly stupid, even given Brooks' light infantry brainworms. Like you'd probably want your snake eating deer blood drinking light infantry's big battle to prove their worth to be something like a series of close combat in an urban or mountainous enviroment when you can talk a lot of shit how man can do what gadgets can't. Reading through this my thought was "damn, bitch, you too poor to have a M2 working?"
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Honestly insane. The USA could barely stomach casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan at their peaks, Taking such insane casualities is so foreign to the US psyche as to be genuinely untenable.
Watching footage of combat is eastern Ukraine now, it's amazing that this USA could take the cities at all especially as they've been described.
God this chapter is a joke lmfao. Lemme just slob over a highly antiquated gun cause its better than these plasticky junkers we have now! /s Im surprised he didn't bring up how the M1 Garand or M14 were superior rifles to the M16 or whatever.
Blargh
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At Los Alamos, one guy had a SIR. When we pooled our guns, we had to rotate it around so one person wouldn't be stuck with it. Our guns were shit and that SIR was the worst of them.
Then again, we did manage to get Atomic Annie briefly working for two shots, from the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History.
Was it practical? No. Was it safe? No. Should people mass-produce the M65 atomic cannon? Of course not, it was stupid in the 50s. Was it even a proper nuclear shell? No, it was basically a fizzle, a step removed from a dirty bomb. It took over a year to make the two shells.
But fuck, when Zack gives you paranoia and dead relatives, it feels so damn good to see a mushroom cloud incinerate the fuckers.
Then Roy Elliot lied about what happened and made it sound like we dropped a real nuke in our hyper-nationalist crusade to "Save America".
We didn't. We just fuckin' hated Zack, and if I could do it again I would have tried to get a third shot so we could hit the Alpha Team encampment too. Also not practical, but Alphonse is worse than Zack.
Fuck Roy, fuck the US government, fuck the mythologized "Los Alamos Defense", and fuck the Alpha Teams that gunned half of us down for crimes like "knowing too much" and "anti-American sentiment".
Zack eats you. Alphonse does a hell of a lot worse.
Alphonse is worse than Zack.
Then again, we did manage to get Atomic Annie briefly working for two shots, from the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History.
Was it practical? No. Was it safe? No. Should people mass-produce the M65 atomic cannon? Of course not, it was stupid in the 50s. Was it even a proper nuclear shell? No, it was basically a fizzle, a step removed from a dirty bomb. It took over a year to make the two shells.
But fuck, when Zack gives you paranoia and dead relatives, it feels so damn good to see a mushroom cloud incinerate the fuckers.
Then Roy Elliot lied about what happened and made it sound like we dropped a real nuke in our hyper-nationalist crusade to "Save America".
We didn't. We just fuckin' hated Zack, and if I could do it again I would have tried to get a third shot so we could hit the Alpha Team encampment too. Also not practical, but Alphonse is worse than Zack.
Fuck Roy, fuck the US government, fuck the mythologized "Los Alamos Defense", and fuck the Alpha Teams that gunned half of us down for crimes like "knowing too much" and "anti-American sentiment".
Zack eats you. Alphonse does a hell of a lot worse.
Alphonse is worse than Zack.
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