Total War, Part 2
Sorry this one's a little late - my girl's been called in to work a lot given the situation in South Africa, so that's left me picking up the slack more at home, you know how it goes.
AINSWORTH, NEBRASKA, USA
[Darnell Hackworth is a shy, soft-spoken man. He and his wife run a retirement farm for the four-legged veterans of the army's K-9 Corps. Ten years ago farms like these could be found in almost every state in the union. Now, this is the only one left.]
I do have to begrudgingly give the Americans some credit here - they used dogs more and more effectively than anyone else. We never really went beyond using them at checkpoints and to scout for hidden ghouls, but the Americans used them for a lot more than that.
Of course, this isn't unalloyed praise - there's a lot of arguments about how useful a lot of what the Americans had their dogs do was, and some discussion about how humane the extent of their program was.
They never get enough credit, I think. There is that story Dax, nice little children's book, but it's pretty simplistic, and it's only about one Dalmatian that helped an orphan kid find his way to safety. "Dax" wasn't even in the military, and helping lost children was a tiny fraction of dogs' overall contribution to the fight.
There's a film about our dog handlers in the London clearance. Isle of Dogs.
It was made after the war, but it's largely a pretty honest look at those last black weeks, when we were starting to understand the devil's deal our leadership had made. It's bleak, very symbolic. The dog dies.
Most countries were just copying the Israeli method of sending people past dogs in cages. You always had to keep them in cages, otherwise they might attack the person, or each other, or even their handler. There was a lot of that, early in the war, dogs just going ballistic. It didn't matter if they were police or military. It's that instinct, that involuntary, almost genetic terror. Fight or flight, and those dogs were bred to fight. A lot of handlers lost hands, arms, a lot of throats got torn out. Can't blame the dogs for it.
I remember on my way to Bristol I fell in with this family; sweet kids, tired looking young couple, and they had their family dog, Sammy, though god knows how they'd kept her fed this long, a big golden retriever like that. They let me tag along because she loved me, and she'd always been a good judge of character - it helped, I think, that I was another pair of arms to carry the toddler if she got too tired.
Anyway, we were walking one day when this man comes running down a slip road, waving his arms, shouting their names.
He had been their neighbour before the war, but he'd followed the government evacuation to the Exe. Before anyone can react, Sammy is on him, bearing him to the ground and growling, this deep threatening rumble in her chest, and suddenly everyone's demeanour changes.
The dog just keeps growling, he's asking what's going on and I'm being told to take their kids further down the road so they "don't have to see this"
You could train a pre-War dog to respond to infected well, it was just hard.
It all came down to training. You had to start young; even the most disciplined, prewar veterans were hardwired berserkers. The pups born after the crisis came out of the womb literally smelling the dead. It was in the air, not enough for us to detect, but just a few molecules, an introduction on a subconscious level.
This… what? This isn't why puppies are easier to train than fully grown dogs. You do not need to invent some biological reason why it is easier to train a puppy than a full dog. That's an answered question already. Puppies are easier to train, they have always been easier to train.
I wasn't aware the Americans engaged in, like, doggy phrenology about how the different puppies responded to ghouls, but I guess it doesn't
shock me.
Did they have the intelligence, and the discipline, to make soldiers? It was hard going, and we had a 60 percent washout rate. It wasn't uncommon for a recruit to be badly injured, perhaps even killed. A lot of people nowadays call that inhumane, though they don't seem to have the same sympathy for the handlers. Yeah, we had to do it, too, right alongside the dogs, right from day one of Basic, through ten more weeks of AIT.
So first of all, the obvious "gotcha" here - the dogs weren't volunteers, they didn't choose to go through this, so on and so forth.
But more to the point; people very much do criticise the American training regimen during the war. Some cursory research finds three groups in America advocating for proper enquiries into what happened in places like Mitchell and Willow Creek - you can drop them donations [HERE], [HERE] and [HERE] if you'd like. They aren't really getting much traction, but they do exist.
How else could you have sent them on so many different missions? There were Lures, the kind that the Battle of Hope made famous. Pretty simple stuff; your partner hunts for Zack, then leads him into our firing line. Ks on early missions used to be fast, run in, bark, then jam it for the kill zone. Later, they got more comfortable. They learned to stay just a few feet ahead, backing away slowly, making sure they herded the maximum amount of targets. In that way, they actually called the shots.
This is mostly only something the Americans needed because of their static mindset. For most engagements we would scout the area beforehand, tag the swarms, then advance until contact and then if the swarm was larger than expected, either break contact entirely or give ground until the swarm had been whittled down to a more manageable size.
When we worked with dogs, it was mostly just in urban environments, to find the ghouls that had fluked their way into being an ambush.
There were also Decoys. Let's say you were setting up a firing line but you didn't want Zack to show up too early. Your partner would circle around the infested zone and only start barking on the far side. That worked with a lot of engagements, and it opened the door for the "Lemming" tactic.
We never bothered to do this - this wasn't how we engaged swarms. As and when we wanted to disengage, we would send someone on a quad bike to make a racket behind them. Dogs are going to struggle with the nuances, because they can't be in constant radio contact with command.
It's a matter of finding balance - doing it our way gave more flexibility, but you risked someone's life more than if you just trained a dog to do it. Since we had to divert swarms away less frequently than they did, it was worth the cost in flexibility for them to train more disposable assets, but not for us.
During the Denver push, there was a tall building where a couple hundred refugees had accidentally been locked in with the infection and were now completely reanimated. Before our guys could storm the entrance, one of the Ks had his own idea to run up to the roof of a building across the street and start barking to draw Zack up onto the higher floors. It worked like a dream. The Gs made it up to the roof, saw their prey, made for him, and went spilling over the side.
This is moronic. A couple of hundred ghouls in a sealed environment with only one exit is a pretty easy engagement for a platoon of soldiers - you set out a perimeter, which might need dogs for scouting, then you breach whatever is keeping them corked up in there, and then you maintain a disciplined rate of fire on the bottleneck they are coming out of.
On the other hand, a writhing mat of crippled ghouls which has fallen from a high building, now out in the street without any ability to bottleneck them is going to take longer to clear and probably more manpower to contain. They aren't "as dangerous" after the fall, but they were essentially
never dangerous, so…
But the primary and most common mission of any K team was scouting, both SC and LRP. SC is Sweep and Clear, just attached to a regular unit, like conventional warfare. That's where training really paid off. Not only could they sniff Zack out miles before us, but the sounds they made always told you exactly what to expect. You could tell everything you needed to know by the pitch of the growl, and the frequency of the bark.
This is what we had dogs for. They made a world of difference in urban warfare, and the lack of them in the London Tunnels was an undeniable contributing factor in why clearing them was so hideously costly.
The high water level and the stink down there was too much for them - they couldn't smell the ghouls nearly as well, and they hated being down there. Everyone hated being down there, but the dogs wouldn't stop
crying down there, and they got snappy when people tried to take them down. It stopped being worth it.
LRP was Long Range Patrol, when your partner would scout far beyond your lines, sometimes even traveling for days, to recon an infested area. They wore a special harness with a video uplink and GPS tracker that gave you real-time intel on the exact number and position of your targets. You could overlay Zack's position on a preexisting map, coordinating what your partner saw with his position on the GPS.
This is bizarre, to me. When we wanted long distance scouting of this sort, we used people on bicycles, usually.
The most important assets for a scout to have are adaptability and initiative - the ghouls aren't
that dangerous to a mobile pair of well-armed soldiers with a clear line of retreat, so being able to adapt on the fly to really scout out and investigate the area is a pretty vital skill.
Using dogs for this is absurd.
I just had to stand there, thumb up my ass, watching my partner's POV as she crept through some forest, or marsh, or town. Towns and cities, that was the hardest. That was my team's specialty. Hound Town. You ever heard of that?
This is beginning to touch on the oddity of the Long Range Patrol metric a little better. There's more detail later, but ultimately the idea behind using dogs is that the losses you suffer from a bad mission aren't as bad - and set aside for a moment the fact that human scouting has a lower casualty rate
anyway - but as he talks about later, the handlers for dogs in the war weren't useful assets once their dog died.
The K-9 Urban Warfare School?
That's it, a real town: Mitchell, Oregon. Sealed off, abandoned, and still filled with active Gs. Hound Town. It actually should have been called Terrytown, because most of the breeds at Mitchell were small terriers. Little cairns and Norwiches and JRs, good for rubble and narrow choke points.
Most of the dogs I saw us use - which wasn't many, don't get me wrong; we only got deployed with dogs for urban engagements - were the archetypical sniffer dogs. Bloodhounds, beagles, German Shepherds…
Different use cases between the situations; they asked a lot more of their dogs.
I worked with a dachle. They were, by far, the ultimate urban war fighters. Tough, smart, and, especially the minis, completely at home in confined spaces. In fact, that's what they were originally bred for; "badger dog," that's what dachshund means in German. That's why they had that hot dog look, so they could hunt in low, narrow badger burrows. You see how that kind of breeding already made them suited to the ducts and crawl spaces of an urban battleground. The ability to go through a pipe, an airshaft, in between walls, whatever, without losing their cool, was a major survival asset.
The ultimate urban war fighters. Sure, okay.
What really was the point of this, I have to wonder? Like, what did they gain from sending these little dogs to scurry around the ruins of Denver or wherever? What does that get you?
It's a doctrine I don't really "get" I must confess. They can't kill a ghoul, and in such close quarters just their presence will shift the location of the ghouls in these confined spaces enough to more or less neutralise any intelligence that you couldn't get from a Bloodhound outside the building entirely.
Like, if someone could explain that, I'd be pretty interested - this is a genuine dissonance between doctrines, I think, rather than the Americans just doing something dumb and pointless like they often did.
[We are interrupted. As if on cue, a dog limps over to Darnell's side. She is old. Her muzzle is white, the fur on her ears and tail is worn to leather.]
[To the dog.] Hey, little miss.
[Darnell gingerly lifts her to his lap. She is small, no more than eight or nine pounds. Although she bears some resemblance to a smooth-haired, miniature dachshund, her back is shorter than the standard breed.]
Alright so like, no disrespect to this guy - he's clearly just doing whatever he can to buy cheap sympathy donations for his dogs, since America has by and large stopped giving a shit about them, and I can respect the graft - but I am fully willing to rip the piss out of our crack journalist for being utterly credulous about that time where they were talking about the dogs and this guy's most heroic and pathetic dog just
happens to arrive "as if on cue".
Truly his ability to avoid being bamboozled by his interviewee is staggering.
Pure bloods were a total washout. Too neurotic, too many health problems, everything you'd expect from breeding an animal for just its aesthetic qualities. The new generation [he gestures to the mutt on his lap] was always a mix, whatever would increase both physical constitution and mental stability.
Generally speaking pedigree dogs are desired by trainers because their traits are more predictable. This isn't universal, but he just doesn't mention it at all.
I could be off base here - I'm more of a cat person than a dog person, so this is outside of my wheelhouse, but this is my understanding of this situation.
She had two escorts. Pongo, who was a pit-rot mix, and Perdy…I don't really know what Perdy was, part shepherd, part stegosaurus. I wouldn't have let her anywhere near them if I hadn't gone through basic with their handlers. They turned out to be first-rate escorts. Fourteen times they chased off feral packs, twice they really got into it. I watched Perdy go after this two-hundred-pound mastiff, grab its skull in her jaws, you could actually hear the crack over the harness's surveillance mic.
Jesus.
But I mean, yeah. Packs of feral dogs were no joke -
are no joke in large swathes of the UK even now, if what I've heard is accurate. We were officially meant to tag them in some way and leave them for our animal control people to bring in, but generally speaking it was safer to fire above their heads to make them run, and if they didn't… You've got to do what you've got to do, sometimes.
But isn't Z flesh toxic?
Oh yeah…no, no, no, they never bit. That would have been fatal. You'd see a lot of dead Ks in the beginning of the war, just lying there, no wounds, and you knew they'd bitten infected flesh. That's one of the reasons training was so important. They had to know how to defend themselves. Zack's got a lot of physical advantages, but balance isn't one of them. The bigger Ks could always hit between the shoulder blades or the small of the back, just knock them on their faces. The minis had the option of tripping, getting underfoot, or launching themselves at the knee-pit. Maze always preferred that, dropped 'em right on their backs!
Alright so this is a topic I know a slightly surprising amount about - on the ship down to Cuba I shared a cabin with one of the vets from Longleat, and she told me the treatment for wolves and dogs is pretty similar.
Ghoul-flesh makes dogs incredibly sick, but it isn't
instantly fatal. Most of the time, the dog retches it up before it can even swallow it fully; these dogs will pretty universally survive it, with maybe 1 in 50 dying in these circumstances. If that isn't the case, a rapid enough response can apply an emetic to make the dog empty its stomach and - ideally - all the toxin with it, which saves maybe half the dogs caught in time. If the toxin had passed into the bowels, odds of survival drop further, and even treatment with a purgative only gives about a 5% chance of surviving. Without treatment, the dog will die.
If they were too far, a Lure or an LRP . . . too far for rescue and too close to Zack . . . we petitioned for Mercy Charges, little explosive packs strapped to the harness so we could detonate them if it looked like there wasn't any chance of rescue. We never got them. "A waste of valuable resources." Cocksuckers. Putting a wounded soldier out of his misery was a waste but turning them into Fragmuts, now, that they'd consider!
One of the consequences of using dogs for things like this is that they can't kill themselves in these situations, so instead you're left arguing for remote controlled suicide bombs, operable across miles of urban sprawl and through potentially metres of concrete.
No shit they refused this plan - you'd end up blowing up every third dog when the uplink blinked out.
That's the same reason they didn't ever make a lot of progress on the "fragmutts" concept, though I find it interesting that they mention it at all - the claim advanced occasionally in this book that explosions don't work on ghouls waxes and wanes based on how much attention the journalist is paying to all the plates he's trying to keep spinning.
They'll never say it, but I think what stopped them was the threat of another Eckhart incident. That really woke 'em up. You know about that, right? Sergeant Eckhart, God bless her. She was a senior handler, operated up with AGN.[3] I never met her. Her partner was pulling a Lure mission outside Little Rock, fell in a ditch, broke his leg. The swarm was only a few steps away. Eckhart grabbed a rifle, tried to go out after him. Some officer got in her face, started spouting regs and half-assed justifications. She emptied half a clip in his mouth. MPs tackled her ass, held her on the ground. She could hear everything as the dead surrounded her partner.
Sergeant Eckhart shouldn't have been in the military; her psyche evaluation was concerning enough that she should've been quietly shuffled into a training post, at the very least, but America was drafting
everyone by the time they were fighting in places like Arkansas, so to the frontline she went.
AGN - Army Group North, and isn't the American Junta's strange, unpleasant pre-occupation with the Wehrmacht
fun - being in
Arkansas should be ringing some alarm bells to anyone with, like, a map?
The fight against the Christian States was turning into a bloody stalemate in West Texas, and the American high command thought the best way to solve that was to bisect the Christian States by first reaching and then driving through the Mississippi, cutting Texas off from their other population centres in Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina.
Which I mean hell, it worked the first time.
Army Group South was caught in Texas like a bear in a trap, though, so they diverted most of Army Group North to march - yes, march - from their winter quarters in the Dakotas and Nebraska down through Kansas.
Full disclosure, the Junta sucks shit, but I'm an unapologetic fangirl of this particular campaign of theirs. See, the Christian States are aware that AGN is making a beeline for Oklahoma and northern Texas, so they start to prepare their defences there, transferring units from other fronts. And the US forces - under General Hartburn - pivot, barely skimming the outskirts of Tulsa to punch through Arkansas and towards the Mississippi.
The Christian States realised pretty quickly what was happening, but there wasn't a whole lot they could do - a thick band of ghouls prevented them from cutting off Army Group North's advance. The only thing standing between General Hartburn and breaking the Memphis ghoul cordon and then seize the length of the Mississippi… was ghoul-infested Little Rock.
It is a fucking travesty that the American Junta, like, tries to downplay this? They talk about the difficulties Army Group South had dealing with "fundies" in Texas, and explain that with the North iced over, they used Army Group North to clean up some of the southern ghouls and relieve the Blue Zones around there, but they, like, determinedly pretend this wasn't a war against a peer opponent.
It sucks, because it was a brilliant campaign.
Anyway, back to his interview - sorry for the diversion.
For the first time the army saw us as teams, that a dog wasn't just a piece of machinery you could replace when "broken." They started looking at statistics of handlers who offed themselves after losing a partner. You know we had the highest rate of suicide among any branch of the service. More than Special Forces, more than Graves Registration, even more than those sick fucks at China Lake.[4] At Hound Town I met handlers from thirteen other countries. They all said the same thing. It didn't matter where you were from, what your culture or background, the feelings were still the same. Who could suffer that kind of loss and come out in one piece? Anyone who could wouldn't have made a handler in the first place. That's what made us our own breed, that ability to bond so strongly with something that's not even our own species. The very thing that made so many of my friends take the bullet's way out was what made us one of the most successful outfits in the whole fucking U.S. military.
I've heard it said that there was deliberation to this - that handlers were directly encouraged to form codependency with their dogs, because it gave them lower rates of burnout whilst the dog was alive - but I think it is easy to attribute the Junta too much, like, agency and competence?
The codependency just
happened, and they didn't even take advantage of it very well.
Oh, and before anyone asks - I don't know what the fuck they did at China Lake. I only know what was common knowledge in the US Army before my wife deserted. I could speculate, but so can anyone else! It remains sealed by the US government, but whatever it was, even the freak shit scientists they had working there
would not stop killing themselves over it. So make of it what you will.
Graves Registration was a pretty horrible job -
is a pretty horrible job, I should say. They aren't done, and probably never will be.
The army saw it in me that day on a stretch of deserted road somewhere in the Colorado Rockies. I'd been on foot since escaping my apartment in Atlanta, three months of running, hiding, scavenging. I had rickets, fever, I was down to ninety-six pounds. I found these two guys under a tree. They were making a fire. Behind them was this little mutt. His paws and snout were bound with shoelaces. Dried blood was caked on his face. He was just lying there, glassy-eyed, whimpering softly.
It is extremely weird how openly this book talks about how
abjectly low the American barrier for entry into the military was? Like, they keep drawing attention to it. His qualifications for being recruited were "incredibly sickly and thin, with bonus homicidal rage when dogs are harmed" and they just… punted him directly into the Dog Handler programme. Absolutely wild policy decisions all around, but I guess given how much of their population they ended up needing under-arms…
Anyway, I'm pretty sure he lies about this dog, but I prefer to pretend I believe him when he says it went to a farm with a nice family and caught rats for them, so I will do so.
I used to hate dogs.
Really?
Despised them; dirty, smelly, slobbering germ bags that humped your leg and made the carpet smell like piss. God, I hated them. I was that guy who'd come over to your house and refuse to pet the dog. I was the guy at work who always made fun of people with dog pictures on their desk. You know that guy who'd always threaten to call Animal Control when your pooch barked at night?
I know it seems like a pretty passé sentiment, but everyone changed their positions on, like, everything? Over the course of the war.
I had to get over a lot of phobias; I used to be terrified of rodents, the dark, confined spaces. And I used to enjoy being in the water; swimming, bathing, just floating there.
I can only shower now, I get terrible shivers if I'm in standing water even if it's only up to, like, my
knees.
I lived a block away from a pet store. I used to drive by it every day on my way to work, confounded by how these sentimental, socially incompetent losers could shell out so much money on oversized, barking hamsters. During the Panic, the dead started to collect around that pet shop. I don't know where the owner was. He'd pulled down the gates but left the animals inside. I could hear them from my bedroom window. All day, all night. Just puppies, you know, a couple of weeks old. Scared little babies screaming for their mommies, for anyone, to please come and save them.
This is harrowing. I know objectively there were - there are - worse things which happened in the Panic, Worse things are happening now - but the visual of dozens of puppies, locked in cages, starving, terrified and alone…
I'm not much of a dog person, but it hurts my heart.
I won't quote anything out of the last couple of paragraphs; the puppies die one by one, screaming for help as he listens, helpless. It is awful.
Next time we touch the Holy Russian Empire again, which is always a fucking
joy to behold.
Anyway, y'all know the drill:
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: Okay, so it has been a while, and I'm sorry. On the plus side, I did get to write about a restored Confederacy getting once again split in half down the Mississippi by a Union Army, so that was thoroughly enjoyable to write. I hope this is as good to read.
Let me know what you think, and if you'd like, I'd be flattered if anyone gave a nomination in the Users' Choice Awards? This is eligible for best new work and best ongoing fic - obviously there's absolutely no pressure to vote for me, or to vote at all.
. Although, once I become an established member of this thread then I'll addres one issue (or just an ironic thing). Spoiler: it'll be about Ukrainian interview.
