Total War, Part 4
ABOARD USS HOLO KAI, OFF THE COAST OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS
[Deep Glider 7 looks more like a twin fuselage aircraft than a minisub. I lie on my stomach in the starboard hull, looking out through a thick, transparent nose cone. My pilot, Master Chief Petty Officer Michael Choi, waves at me from the port hull. Choi is one of the "old-timers," possibly the most experienced diver in the U.S. Navy's Deep Submergence Combat Corps (DSCC). His gray temples and weathered crow's-feet clash violently with his almost adolescent enthusiasm. As the mother ship lowers us into the choppy Pacific, I detect a trace of "surfer dude" bleeding through Choi's otherwise neutral accent.]
Sucking air through my teeth reading about going into a Deep Glider, honestly. It wasn't this one - they didn't go super deep around Hawaii - it was the one in the North Atlantic, but still. You couldn't pay me.
These are some of the veterans who make a solid argument for having had the proverbial "worst war" - they're wrong, obviously, but they make the arguments.
Is it hypocritical of me to claim they had an easier war when I wouldn't trade places with them? Probably.
My war never ended. If anything, you could say it's still escalating. Every month we expand our operations and improve our material and human assets. They say there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing up on beaches, or getting snagged in fishermen's nets. You can't work an offshore oil rig or repair a transatlantic cable without running into a swarm.
The dark secret here is that it's futile. Like, we all know that, don't we? We are never going to kill every ghoul in the sea, not easily and not quickly. Mitigation, that's the name of the game. Guards on beaches, fences where we can't have guards, exclusion netting around deep sea repairs, and eventually, eventually, we'll have the problem sufficiently tamped down that we don't need to worry about it.
American deep sea dives to "track the swarms" are about as pointless as the Brazilian extermination dives. The purest ideological coping mechanism. A refusal to acknowledge that past a certain point, the ghouls are just something we have to live with.
You're not going to ask me about scuba gear or titanium shark suits, are you, because that crap's got nothing to do with my war? Spear guns and bang sticks and zombie river nets…I can't help you with any of that. If you want civilians, talk to civilians.
But the military did use those methods.
Only for brown water ops, and almost exclusively by army pukes.
What the fuck is a bangstick?
But anyway - brown water operations were the bulk of marine operations, and by a wide fucking margin the more important part - you cannot clear a city if the waterways are vomiting out ghouls, and cleaned out canal networks and lakes was a vital part of our infrastructural network.
Canals are worse, by the way, than rivers. In a river, you can work one way - ghouls in the water aren't capable of moving upstream, so you can just point upriver, in full confidence that you don't need to watch your back. Extremely useful when we were clearing out Oxford - the Isis would've been impossible to deal with if the dive teams had to worry about ghouls from every town and city from Reading to London. There's no current in a canal, so you're working in both directions.
The
worst is subterranean waterways, like the labyrinth under London.
From what I have heard, in America the waterway clearances were a nightmare, but most of that heavy lifting was done around the Great Lakes by the Socialist Republic, obviously, or the Mississippi by the CSA, so it gets pretty short shrift in a polemic like this.
His type of marine work - deep bluewater diving in hardsuits - was an absolute minority. It just wasn't terribly useful during the war. There's not that many places where you needed suits like that.
So it's like a personal submarine?
"Submersible." A submarine can stay down for years, maintaining its own power, making its own air. A submersible can only make short duration dives, like World War II subs or what we're in now.
[The water begins to darken, deepening to a purplish ink.]
That isn't how you define a Submersible versus a Submarine. WWII submarines were submarines, obviously - a submarine is something that can go out under its own power, a submersible needs to be towed out to deep water and supported by a surface vessel.
It doesn't really "matter" per se - the dude doesn't know his definitions, but who cares? - but its illustrative, I guess, of how, like, professionally incurious the Americans are? Their propaganda has always had this bent of like… scorn? Towards the professional classes, with this idea of like, more or less destroying the Professional-Managerial Class and the skilled labour class. America is a country of cops, soldiers, labourers and owners, with pretty sharp divisions between those categories, which means soldiers don't ask questions or care about, like, what a thing is, beyond how it works?
The very nature of an ADS, the fact that it's really just a suit of armor, makes it ideal for blue and black water combat. I'm not knocking soft suits, you know, shark or other mesh rigs. They've got ten times the maneuverability, the speed, the agility, but they're strictly shallow water at best, and if for some reason a couple of those f**kers get ahold of you…I've seen mesh divers with broken arms, broken ribs, three with broken necks. Drowning…if your air line was punctured or the regulator's ripped out of your mouth. Even in a hard helmet on a mesh-lined dry suit, all they'd have to do is hold you down, let your air run out. I've seen too many guys go out that way, or else try to race for the surface and let an embolism finish what Zack started.
So, this is… true? But the amount of times people go to depths where the bends or whatever is a problem is, like, vanishingly rare. You only need to go that deep for cables or rig work, which just wasn't a common issue in the war? Harbours are only, like, a dozen metres deep at most, and you just… didn't need to go very far out to sea, typically? The fact that ADS - that's "Atmospheric Diving Suit" FWIW - are more or less impervious to ghouls is way more relevant than their ability to maintain surface pressure but like… there were only a handful of them? People didn't use mesh suits preferentially to ADS, they did it because ADS were
rare. We had
four.
There was no risk of physical danger. Both your body and your life support are encased in a cast-aluminum or high-strength composite shell. Most models' joints are steel or titanium. No matter which way Zack turned your arms, even if he managed to get a solid grip, which is hard considering how smooth and round everything is, it was physically impossible to break off a limb. If for some reason you need to jet up to the surface, just jettison your ballast or your thruster pack, if you had one…all suits are positively buoyant. They pop right up like a cork. The only risk might be if Zack were clinging to you during the ascent. A couple times I've had buddies surface with uninvited passengers hanging on for dear life…or undeath.
This was actually more of a pain in the arse than you'd think, I've heard. See, these suits aren't rated to be hosed down with gunfire, so getting the ghouls off the suit safely was… not trivial? You had to use, like, bargepoles and shit. I never shared a theatre with the hardsuits, personally, but like… this sounds appalling.
Also, most ADS are wrought aluminium or cast magnesium. See again; incurious.
Balloon ascents almost never happened in combat. Most ADS models have forty-eight hours emergency life support. No matter how many Gs dog-piled you, no matter if a hunk of debris came crumbling down or your leg got snagged in an underwater cable, you could sit tight, snug and safe, and just wait for the cavalry. No one ever dives alone, and I think the longest any ADS diver has ever had to cool his heels was six hours. There were times, more than I can count on my fingers, where one of us would get snagged, report it, then follow up by saying that there was no immediate danger, and that the rest of the team should assist only after accomplishing their mission.
I… don't think this is smart. Just because there's no "immediate" danger doesn't mean, like, more debris won't fall and crack your canopy, or your armour might give way at a joint, or…
Like, most of these suits were old
before the war, and barely maintained; our suits were apparently maintained by a retired Engineer who volunteered at a fucking dive museum before the war?
But it's all macho bullshit.
"Oh, I don't need rescuing, I'll just wait for hours in the pitch black in a suit that I have no control over, oh-"
Idiocy.
You say ADS models. Was there more than one type?
We had a bunch: civilian, military, old, new…well…relatively new. We couldn't build any wartime models, so we had to work with what was already available. Some of the older ones dated back to the seventies, the JIMs and SAMs. I'm really glad I never had to operate any of those. They only had universal joints and portholes instead of a face bowl, at least on the early JIMs. I knew one guy, from the British Special Boat Service. He had these mondo blood blisters all along his inner thighs from where the JIM's leg joints pinched his skin. Kick-ass divers, the SBS, but I'd never swap jobs with them.
We got the SBS. The SAS spent the war up with the Royalists, but largely the SBS stuck with us. Would've been too far to travel to Scotland from the South Coast, I suppose?
As far as I know, none of those mad boys survived the post-war rapprochement. Hunted down like dogs.
We had three basic U.S. Navy models: the Hardsuit 1200, the 2000, and the Mark 1 Exosuit. That was my baby, the exo. You wanna talk about sci-fi, this thing looked like it was made to fight giant space termites. It was much slimmer than either of the two hardsuits, and light enough that you could even swim. That was the major advantage over the hardsuit, actually over all other ADS systems. To be able to operate above your enemy, even without a power sled or thruster packs, that more than made up for the fact that you couldn't scratch your itches. The hardsuits were big enough to allow your arms to be pulled into the central cavity to allow you to operate secondary equipment.
It was my understanding that you
can't swim in any of these, but if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. American hardsuit diving is, like, so far from my experience you can't even
see my experiences from there.
Thruster packs are pretty normal though, I think? How the hell are you moving down on the seafloor without a thruster pack? That's not an even, unblemished surface.
What kind of weapons did you use?
At first we had the M-9, kind of a cheap, modified, knockoff of the Russian APS. I say "modified" because no ADS had anything close to resembling hands. You either had four-pronged claws or simple, industrial pincers. Both worked as hand-to-hand weapons—just grab a G's head and squeeze—but they made it impossible to fire a gun. The M-9 was fixed to your forearm and could be fired electrically. It had a laser pointer for accuracy and air-encased cartridges that fired these four-inch-long steel rods.
The APS was a piece of work. Works underwater, which is the least, but try to use the fucking thing above ground, and you'll find it can't hit a barn at 50 paces and breaks within minutes, and any you could pick up in the west would already be most of the way worn out. There were never very many, but as I understand it, our frogmen swore by the things, whilst anyone who was in and out of the water a lot - spelunking under cities, for example - rightfully hated the useless piece of junk.
The major problem was that they were basically designed for shallow water operations. At the depth we needed, they imploded like eggshells. About a year in we got a much more efficient model, the M-11, actually invented by the same guy who invented both the hardsuit and exo. I hope that crazy Canuck got an assload of medals for what he's done for us. The only problem with it was that DeStRes thought production was too expensive.
If you're already sending people down in ADS, you might as well shell out for their guns, surely? Though I confess, I don't know how much it cost to make a gas-powered gun work at depth.
What changed their minds?
Troll. We were in the North Sea, repairing that Norwegian natural gas platform, and suddenly there they were…We'd expected some kind of attack—the noise and light of the construction site always attracted at least a handful of them. We didn't know a swarm was nearby.
The Norwegians were not per se "happy" about their North Sea rigs being taken over by the Americans, but the US navy retained enough of a presence globally, even at their wartime nadir, that they didn't really have any sort of choice. The Americans, meanwhile, had to seize the Norwegian North Sea rigs so they could keep their navy chugging, being as there were no longer any well-supplied friendly Atlantic ports for them, at this point.
And this is that Troll, yes.
It's probably true that scrapping with ghouls in a carapace at the bottom of the ocean is awful, but I don't think anyone was under the misapprehension that it wouldn't be?
Kids today…fuckin' A, I sound like my pops, but it's true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this "ZeVDeK"—Zero Visibility Detection Kit—with color-imaging sonar and low-light optics. The picture is relayed through a heads-up display right on your face bowl like a fighter plane. Throw in a pair of stereo hydrophones and you've got a real sensory advantage over Zack. That was not the case when I first went exo. We couldn't see, we couldn't hear—we couldn't even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.
It is genuinely very funny that there's an interviewee here that openly talks about how hardcover between him and the ghouls is enough to trivialise them to the point that "I can't tell if I am being attacked" is his going concern, and the cult of the rifleman in America remains so strong that this doesn't even twig to the journalist as being problematic to their argument that soldiers should be going around with no tanks or even body armour to speak of.
Like, did they not proofread their work?
Speaking of unintentionally revelatory quotes in this interview, though-
The civilian oil workers, they wouldn't go back to work, even under threat of reprisals, until we, their escorts, were better armed. They'd lost enough of their people already, ambushed out of the darkness.
American Military reprisals against civilians contractors or employees on "war-essential sites" who refused to work or attempted to organise are a controversial topic, in that the Junta maintains they were individual actions of bad actors within the state, but also that they were fine, and will not be prosecuted, because the national interest was served, just using "Methods Unbecoming" - making protests illegal and then executing anyone who objected or protested, mandatory work orders…
Norway continues to more or less annually lodge formal diplomatic complaints with the US over the treatment of their rig workers in general, and the Troll dive teams in specific; provably retributive deployments leading to heightened risks to teams which raised labour and welfare issues with their American superiors. America continues to more or less annually ignore these complaints.
Our first mission was to protect the rig divers, keep the oil flowing. Later we expanded to beachhead sanitation and harbor clearing.
What is beachhead sanitation?
Basically, helping the jarheads get ashore. What we learned during Bermuda, our first amphibious landing, was that the beachhead was coming under constant attack by Gs walking out of the surf.
Bermuda was disastrous for the Junta. They wanted a test run for a landing on a ghoul-infested coastline, and - this is conjecture - to establish a friendly port in the Atlantic; none of their mainland Atlantic ports were safe from potential assault from the CSA or Socialist Republic.
But the ghoul hordes on Bermuda were on them almost immediately, the sea was rough enough to outright sink some of their landing vessels and, as mentioned, ghouls walked out of the surf to crush them. The landing force was lost with all hands, and Bermuda remained grey and shuffling until Cuba cleared the islands, which the Americans and the Royalists didn't
super appreciate.
We had to establish a perimeter, a semicircular net around the proposed landing area that was deep enough for ships to pass over, but high enough to keep out Zack.
That's where we came in. Two weeks before the landings took place, a ship would anchor several miles offshore and start banging away with their active sonar. That was to draw Zack away from the beach.
He talks about this sort of beachhead clearance, and it's pretty familiar - we had frogmen doing very similar work whenever we had to cross a river we hadn't cleared upstream or a lake or whatever.
I'll tell you what
fucking sucks though - doing a naval assault against a human enemy, now. We can't exactly sit off the coast and draw away any ghouls under the waves, right? They'll notice.
Probably the best opposed landings you'll see are the recent ones in Central America, where you can see the Mexicans are using depth charges to accelerate the process of drawing the ghouls away from the coast, approximately a minute in advance of the launch of their landing crafts - even then, I wouldn't want do it without the level of complete military supremacy they're able to enforce over the Honduran coast. God only knows what it'll look like as and when some of the other flash points go hot.
And harbor clearing?
That was not a cakewalk. That was in the final stages of the war, when it wasn't just about opening a beachhead, but reopening harbors for deepwater shipping. That was a massive, combined operation: mesh divers, ADS units, even civilian volunteers with nothing but a scuba rig and a spear gun.
Harbour clearances take so much longer than you think, I swear to god. I didn't realise how long it took until we reached Liverpool and we all assumed that meant we'd be able to use it as a supply hub and the brass had to explain it'd be another
year before the port could be used at all.
Most ocean ports have been cleared out by now, but ports that are less useful for global trade and less used are still being managed; I think most Baltic ports are rated "operational" but not "clear" - you can't swim in the waters of Tallinn, for example.
I know grunts like to bitch about fighting to clear a city, but imagine a city underwater, a city of sunken ships and cars and planes and every kind of debris imaginable. During the evacuation, when a lot of container ships were trying to make as much room as they could, a lot of them dumped their cargo overboard. Couches, toaster ovens, mountains and mountains of clothes.
Casualty rates don't lie. Harbour clearances may be unnerving - I have no doubt they are, in fact - but they aren't equivalent to city clearance, cmon.
I don't think I could do his job - the sensory deprivation alone sounds like hell, nevermind the claustrophobia and relative blindness, and he communicates a lot of the feelings of it in this section, its very evocative - but he's talking absolute shit when he tries to compare it to urban clearance. Maybe it felt similar, but the risk was objectively far smaller.
The actual sunken ships, I will grant, sound genuinely traumatic to deal with - he talks about this one ship he had to clear, and, I mean…
I was cutting through a bulkhead above the Cable's engine room when suddenly the deck just collapsed under me. Before I could swim, before I could think…there were hundreds of them in the engine room. I was engulfed, drowning in legs and arms and hunks of meat. If I ever had a recurring nightmare, and I'm not saying I do, because I don't, but if I did, I'd be right back in there, only this time I'm completely naked…I mean I would be.
I have recurring nightmares of a labyrinth of crumbling Victorian sewers and tunnel systems. Running to look for someone, turning every corner to find another twist, another turn, sucking mud slowing me down, staggering through the dark and the damp, knowing I won't reach them in time, running anyway. Waking up right before I reach her.
Nightmare war.
[I am surprised at how quickly we reach the bottom. It looks like a desert wasteland, glowing white against the permanent darkness. I see the stumps of wire coral, broken and trampled by the living dead.]
There they are.
[I look up to see the swarm, roughly sixty of them, walking out of the desert night.
It is genuinely depressing how much biodiversity was lost to the Ghouls. Not even, like, what you'd expect; lots of people think about, like, deer or foxes or what have you, but the stuff that really lost out? Coral, various delicate plants, a lot of stationary animals, like mussels and other filter feeders. Stuff that can't run away. It sucks.
[He moves down the swarm, tagging each one with a nonlethal shot.]
Kills me not to kill them. I mean, I know the whole point is to study their movements, set up an early warning network. I know that if we had the resources to clear them all we would. Still . . .
This is neat, from a scientific perspective; tracking the migratory patterns of the undersea ghouls. Did you know they follow storms? Cause they do. Whole packs of ghouls staggering after some Cat 5 Hurricane. It's… a little problematic. Some poor island will be rebuilding from a natural disaster and suddenly be up to their eyeballs in salt-crusted, water-saturated ghouls.
Almost no real military value I can see, though; there's enough of the fuckers down there that you can just assume they'll come out of the surf anywhere and everywhere you work coastal.
How do they do it? How are they still around? Nothing in the world corrodes like saltwater. These Gs should have gone way before the ones on land. Their clothes sure did, anything organic like cloth or leather.
American insistence on there being a scientific explanation for the horrors that withstand pressure high enough to crumple a submarine like a tin can is crazy.
They live because they hate us.
it? I'm sure someone real high up has all the answers and I'm sure the only reason they don't tell me is . . .
[He is suddenly distracted by a flashing light on his instrument panel.]
Hey, hey, hey. Check this out.
[I look down at my own panel. The readouts are incomprehensible.]
We got a hot one, pretty healthy rad count. Must be from the Indian Ocean, Iranian or Paki, or maybe that ChiCom attack boat that went down off Manihi. How about that?
Absolutely guarantee he was about to say some prime conspiratorial shit before being distracted. You haven't seen crazy conspiracists until you've seen the veterans of the apocalypse who are still out there fighting ghouls. Everyone still in that game is in it with some crank shit to prove.
As to the rest, I'm not a radiation-truther about the ghouls - I don't think they're, like, created by radiation, but it is
weird how long they stay clicking on a Geiger counter even, like, in deep seawater?
You're lucky. This is one of the last manned recon dives. Next month it's all ROV, 100 percent Remotely Operated Vehicles.
There's been a lot of controversy over the use of ROVs for combat.
Never happen. The Sturge's[2] got way too much star power. She'd never let Congress go 'droid on us.
Got him onto his hobby horse. They were gearing up for a jab at Congress on this issue; they were probably going to do some senators for unpatriotic ideals or defeatism or something, keep them on their toes.
But like, obviously remote operated vehicles are fine for this; moving the person electronically operating a suit from being inside the suit to being at the end of a tether, safely ensconced in a ship? Costs almost nothing to the fighting ability, but dramatically reduces the risk.
Is there any validity to their argument?
What, you mean if robots are more efficient fighters than ADS divers? Hell no. All that talk about "limiting human casualties" is bullshit. We never lost a man in combat, not one! That guy they keep talking about, Chernov, he was killed after the war, on land, when he got wasted and passed out on a tram line. Fuckin' politicians.
"In combat" doing the heavy lifting here. Chernov got a lot of press because he had been a vocal advocate, but they lost a number of men to rockfalls, adverse terrain like his own ship collapse and a few to spontaneous suit failure; a lot of this shit is decades old, and if it fails to stand up to the pressure it's rated for, then the guy in it is dead before he knows anything is wrong.
The accident with Deep Glider 4 was probably the death knell of this program. A whole crew and a civilian ridealong getting turned into a fucking soup at the bottom of the Atlantic made all the claims about being totally safe down there and not needing the ROVs look, frankly, idiotic? The 'Sturgeon General' is fighting for her own career now, never mind the rest of the service.
That's why I'm still here, same with the Sturge, and almost all the other vets who took the plunge during the war. Most of us are still involved because we have to be, because they still haven't yet come up with a collection of chips and bits to replace us. Believe me, once they do, I'll not only never look at an exosuit again, I'll quit the navy and pull a full-on Alpha November Alpha.
I hope he finds some modicum of the peace he wants here, honestly.
Like, maybe this is cancellable on my part - he is a fairly blasé soldier of an increasingly fascist military junta - but I do appreciate his, like, basic sincerity and honesty? He'll talk openly about their military doing reprisals against civilians, he's practically boiling with desire to talk about his conspiracy theories, and like… he's pretty much exclusively been killing ghouls? There's not a lot of actual human blood on his hands in all likelihood.
Interesting man.
Anyway, that's all for this update - it's Andre Renard next, and he deserves his own update. We've spoken a little, actually, but more on that when I dissect his interview.
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE]; as the HRE gets increasingly rolled up, they're opening up more and more of the awful, awful camps out there. It's really, really bad.
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Donate to a South American group of your choice [HERE] - it's a masterlist.
Donate to the Namibian Relief Fund [HERE] - the war is devastating for the people trapped there.
AN: I've noticed the better interviews are sometimes harder work for me, because like, I think in the text of the work… he did all this stuff? This guy was a combat diver for the US navy. It went roughly how he describes it, and there's not a whole lot to add to that? But I've done what I can to make this interesting. Seasoned it through with a little more of my own story.
