Reactionpost. All OOC, because I don't think I have an IC persona in this thread.
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.
It is, though in all fairness, it's still true that even coup generals
aren't necessarily brash, dimwitted blowhards. Life would be a lot easier if every fascist was dull-witted and aggressive to the point of stupidity.
The unfortunate problem is that sometimes you get these otherwise functional individuals who decide that strength should rule and that they exemplify strength... And you get such monsters from a lot of personality types.
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.
I don't disagree.
In theory you probably
could get a reasonably accurate estimate (say, to the nearest few million) if you could figure out the actual scope of the refugee flows. Say, do "before and after" censuses in various areas of Latin America, work out what percentage of the population survived, was zombified locally, or ran for it, do statistical analysis... It could be done.
But it's a lot easier to just pick a number that is large enough that you can say "those dirty foreigners made our zombie-clearance problem meaningfully harder" without being so large as to be totally incredible, and then just assert truth.
And my impression is that this timeline's postwar US government doesn't really have its shit together, or enough of a foundation in scholarship, to do things the hard way.
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.
On the one hand, in all fairness, any nation doing the same thing would
have to accept casualties at what is
in total a significant rate just to make any headway. Sooner or later, some poor fucker is careless, or unlucky, and gets bit. Or exposed to slow-burn zombie fragments getting into them. Or something.
On the other hand, if you design your tactics around a certain
expected casualty exchange ratio, say "that's good enough," and then just do everything that you can do at that ratio or better, you will probably end the war with around about that casualty ratio.
And it's plausible that the junta in this timeline, which was facing an increasingly unruly population that they
knew contained factions willing to rebel against their shaky legitimacy, would just say "fuckit" and decide to bleed its population dry, killing off a lot of people of an age to rebel, precisely to avoid such an eventuality, at least until the next generation got old enough to fight for itself.
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.
Speaking a bit more OOC than usual, it's an interesting example of the brainworms you get from the "reformer" military doctrine. Intangible factors mattering more than tangible ones, and simplifying a killing system by "cutting out" elements always makes it better.
Fancy complicated systems are bad, simple systems are good, therefore lobotomizing a person and making them clumsier but harder to physically disable makes them a better soldier.
In extreme cases of "reformer" brainworms, you can even see this kind of deeply anti-intellectual attitude
simultaneously with praise of "agile" tactics and initiative, but Max Brooks didn't go that far down the rabbit hole because he wasn't quite as bonkers as William Lind.
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.
Yeah, and this is also a good OOC criticism of the book. It really, really,
really leans into the idea that the will to fight matters much more than objective material factors, and it's nearly impossible to spend much time down in that dirt without picking up, again, fascist brainworms.
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?
Yeah.
The modern United States, c. 2023, seems like it can begin to come to terms with the idea "we lost" (outside its fascist movement), but admitting that in a c. 2007 book... Well, Max Brooks had enough brainworms that he was never going to let a 'good' character in his book, one the narrative wants you to accept as being generally correct, insightful, and well-intentioned, acknowledge that.
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?
Now, I do personally feel, OOC, like having the soldiers' clothes be actively shitty and weather-susceptible is pushing it a bit, because these guys didn't actively want their own army to fail.
What
would make a lot of sense is highly variable standards of quality, much as you later describe being a problem with the Standard Infantry Rifle. Some clothing was made from the standard fabrics to good standards of stitching in factories that had actual experience making clothes, and would stop zombie bites and keep you warm. Some clothing was made from... well, whatever fabric was available, in sweatshops full of repurposed service workers, but the supervisors were doing their best, and the clothes were, eh, not too bad. Some clothing was made in sweatshops where the supervisors were actively on the take and the whole thing was someone's nepotism project, and the resulting clothes were utter shit.
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.
Speaking OOC, I feel like this whole thing comes from wood furnishing fetishization, mostly based on (here we go again) Vietnam-era denigration of the M-16 rifle, a polymer weapon that replaced wood weapons and had just enough initial teething problems that it got a lifetime reputation as a "Mattel gun."
Nowadays, all the gun nuts love their AR-15s to death, plastic or otherwise, but that's what an extra 15-20 years of historic time buys you: it gets you that much farther out from under the shadow of Vietnam.
Still speaking OOC, I'd be surprised if a nation that can't muster the means to mold plastic (including recycled plastic)
can muster the labor to shape that much wood precisely. Plastic isn't that hard to work, and one of the big reasons it outcompeted so many other things is precisely because it is EASY to shape.
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.
Yeah, that's Max Brooks being dumb. Like, seriously, units have armorers for a reason. If you want to carry two spare rifle barrels and some ancillaries for every rifle in your company, that is several hundred pounds of metal.
Load that shit in a truck, because there is no fucking way the individual soldiers will want to lug it around on their backs, or realistically need to.
Don't have a truck to spare for that shit? Then don't do that
stupid shit.
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.
See, that's another example. In Max Brooks' mental universe, Cool Shit just sort of... exists... and any implications or downsides of it that he didn't think of within five seconds just cease to exist. There's no object permanence. At one time, rifle stocks made of hard plastic are "too hard to manufacture," but at another time, the US rump state can afford to manufacture millions and millions and millions of pyrotechnic rifle bullets and transport them safely without mechanized equipment.
Can confirm being attracted to women doesn't make you a worse soldier. Being Todd Wainio might make you a worse soldier, though.
*snrk snrk snrk*
Though it's interesting that this little dig at the 'warrior mentality' is even included, given the overall tone of the book towards "will to fight."
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.
OOC, an interesting way of poking fun at how Max Brooks basically makes Todd Wainio his sole 'vehicle' for portraying the grunt's-eye view of the American campaign, but then wants to fill it with a ton of interesting little anecdotes, to the point where them all happening to the same person strains credulity more than a little.
Though if he were recounting everything that happened to everyone in his battalion (a unit small enough that he could reasonably know everyone in it, or nearly so), then it would start to be a little less silly.
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.
Yeah, because a 52-year-old lady is going to have a lot of trouble keeping up with the pace of a cross-continental military campaign. Especially one that relies heavily on soldiers marching long distances with heavy loads on their backs.
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.
Again OOC to be clear, this is very much something you're creating for this timeline, not a critique of the original, but it's of a piece with the way you've painted the junta, and the way you've painted the junta is itself fairly consistent with what the junta would have to
be to do what it did.
So that's not a condemnation.
The one thing I'll say is that static thinking isn't necessarily that bad IF you have trucks on standby to bug out your soldiers with, and aerial reconnaissance. You can
see a really big, dangerous zombie swarm coming, you can
count bullets. Even given a generally shoestring technical base, nothing too advanced in great quantities... All you really need is some Piper Cub level aircraft capable of circling and keeping an eye out on everything within several kilometers. As long as your logistics aren't fucked and you have the command and control capabilities of a decent 20th century army, you could absolutely set up a static position, blast away, and if you get hit by Too Damn Many, you just bug out under cover of a rear guard fighting from technicals or something the zombies can't keep up with.
It'd work.
So if there were multiple failed "first battles of the 'fightback,' " it's
entirely on the junta fucking up desperately due to brainworms.
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.
Again, to be clear, still OOC, yes, and this is Max Brooks' peak brainworm moment.
Infantry cannot defend themselves at Yonkers because they are irresolute soldiers from an irresolute country, who rely on technological gizmos and puny ridiculous FEEBLE WOMANLY ideas like "a bomb the size of a garbage can splattering my enemies into goo."
Infantry can absolutely defend themselves at Hope because they are determined HEROES from a resolute country, who rely on crude MANLY HOOAH EFFECTIVE tools with HOOAH EFFECTIVE MANLY aesthetics, such as spike bayonets.
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.
*snrk*
Well then, I truly regret that you didn't take the opportunity to have the narrator speculate on who told Todd Wainio what that phrase meant, and why they said so at the time.
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.
Does shooting from a kneeling position tend to be a bit more accurate? I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
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.
Yeah, I do think that's a realistic criticism. Again, firmly OOC, Max Brooks' problem is like that of a lot of people who don't learn much about the military before talking and speculating about the military. He imagines a set-piece action of The Plan Working, goes "wouldn't it be cool to watch this plan work," and then constructs a doctrine that is entirely about implementing this plan, on the assumption that it will Just Work.
Any considerations that might cause the whole plan to fall apart because of the enemy not cooperating in the creation of the originally envisioned dream engagement are just... not there. They have no object permanence that would allow them to rudely interrupt the dream engagement. Even if they were mentioned earlier in the same text, they conveniently cease to exist now that they would interfere with The Plan Working.
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.
Being able to see rough patterns of light and darkness might be consistent with scratched-up eyes, but being able to see in detail and at long distances, as humans do, yeah, not so much I'd 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-"
It'd be
pretty rare that this could actually happen.
Still OOC, but...
A military doctrine that works well
unless some very specific thing goes wrong, and it has to be that thing in particular, not just any old "not according to plan" moment, is a good plan. It's a good plan for the same reason that a doctrine that works badly unless multiple things outside your control all go
right is a bad plan. Because if it works
lots and lots and fails in one particular place at one particular time, you probably still win the war.
Theoretically, a doctrine that never fails is better, but the frequency of the failures matters a lot.
By way of analogy, the Germans had a relative handful of superheavy tanks, which rarely got into action in the 1944-45 fighting in Western Europe during World War Two. They had greater numbers of what we might loosely call medium armor (StuGs, Panzer III and IVs, that kind of thing), but still not that many.
The Americans had lots and lots of Shermans, which were in turn a pretty good medium tank, fully competitive with the German medium tanks and outclassed by the heavies in large part because of the weight difference.
The reason the American method worked well here wasn't "because the Americans could dogpile a Tiger tank with 10 Shermans and lose eight of them and still win." It was because 95% or 98% or whatever percent of the time that a fight actually took place,
no Tigers were there, and very often, a Sherman was. If your tanks show up most of the time, and the enemy's do not, you win most of your battles. Even if some minority of your battles are a "fair fight" (undesirable) because enemy medium armor is present, and if a tiny minority of them are disastrous blowouts because one of the few enemy heavy armor units actually showed up for a change... you still win everywhere else along the line, and pretty fast, your enemy's heavy armor will be in full retreat because both flanks were turned because the unsupported infantry holding those positions collapsed.
A doctrine that never fails and has an answer for every misfortune is best, but a doctrine that works
most of the time and only fails when the enemy specifically conspires to kick you in the gonads in an unusual fashion is... probably not that bad, actually.
Just saying.
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?
Again, OOC, I will observe that in practice, a "rampart collapse" isn't likely to actually overwhelm a battle line of riflemen.
A sizeable ridge of zombies, many but not all of which are actually 100% out of action (because physically damaged and flailing zombies are in the pile too) is really shitty footing. And zombies are clumsy. The enemy is shambling over a terrain
obstacle, as all the ridge of zombies is still there, just now spread out over the ground a bit more. Zombies are still capable of tripping and falling on their faces.
If the line has dense frontage, they are probably putting enough bullets downrange that there will be a new heap of zombies piling up slightly closer to the riflemen's front line in short order.
What is then problematic is the idea of a large formation like this one (presumably this is a division-sized formation or something) forming a hollow defensive square.
That part is trickier, because some of the soldiers actually have rather a long way to walk, and must travel distances comparable to the accurate range of their rifles. Which means they're going to spend a significant time
not shooting, which means you have pulled a lot of guns off the front. And a slackening of fire, combined with a rampart collapse, becomes a more plausible way for a formation to be overwhelmed.
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.
Something like this is a somewhat more elaborate version of what I had in mind. It relies heavily on zombies being stupid,
and that's a good thing because that's one of their greatest weaknesses, so not presenting them with a simple situation where "just lurch forwards in a straight line" could plausibly succeed is a good thing.
My version makes more sense if (like the junta Americans) you don't actually have much in the way of artillery and heavy equipment, only a little, BUT you have a lot of physical space and just retreating to a position twenty miles away faster than the zombies can follow is always feasible. Out on the American Great Plains it absolutely is, but that starts to falter a bit in the denser parts of the continent.
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?
A strategy that does indeed rely upon this would indeed have that obvious crippling problem, yes.
But assuming a remotely reasonable size for the army at Hope, it really does beg a lot of questions how this many zombies were anywhere near the place, if it's in the middle of fucking nowhere.
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.
OOC: Given limited plastic-processing capability (see above) no way is that kevlar, yeah. Though it wouldn't be out of line for the book to say "oh yeah, we made our sandbags out of kevlar so they'd be tough" when in reality most of them were just made out of whatever seemed reasonably durable and could be mass-produced or mass-appropriated.