- Location
- The Underdark
Sure. Again, as mentioned in the first post, I have absolutely no space to run an RPG like this, so it would all be theoretical, but sure.
Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
- Thread starter veteranMortal
- Start date
Coyote Niff
the most transbian obligate scavenger on the 'net!
- Location
- Misery!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
OOC: finally managed to snag an account; now to hurriedly astroturf-in lore for my ZSI's probable life path-because lord know my folks wouldn't stand for Eagle Junta Land. As such, a pair of questions: does YouTube or an equivalent exist, and has anyone touched the pacific US past Hawaii in their IC? I've got a really fun idea underway but don't want to step on any toes!
Coyote Niff
the most transbian obligate scavenger on the 'net!
- Location
- Misery!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
OOC: here goes nothing.
IC:
See, this is a pretty common take I and a lot of other "ex-Eagles" hear on the internet from folks who think the Junta runs purely on fash nonsense, especially Europeans and ESPECIALLY the kind who love boot polish or tank treads, which thankfully OP seems to not be.
Out here in the UAI, we take a pretty different view of things; we see enough of these "threat tracking dives" to know what they're actually doing-and it's some classic Kissinger realpolitik bullshit with a side order of NSA spook garbage. DANI* figures, or at least states publicly if you know how to read diplomatic spy-speak, that our nasty Big Brother to the east decided to take a page from the Soviet ELINT trawler trick, plus the old Peublo-type spy boats, and now they're playing the same game the PRC did with "salami slicing" bits of the South China Sea before the war: ignoring any territorial claims that aren't theirs and using the entire ghoul tracking program as a carte blanche to surveil and intercept anything they please inside the Pacific Continent envelope. If you want my rookie opinion, the only reason they haven't started seizing islands with a bunch of tweaked-up Lobo-swinging USMC in Higgins boats is because they physically can't-almost all their manpower's tied up in overseas Zack sweeps for PR and to keep the UN together.
And before you get all snooty and call me a "Guamaniac" who's out to lunch and waiting for the Junta to come over the hill and kill us all, the only altering chemical stuff I indulge in is dark beer once a week and 2mg of the blue gender stuff a day. Just trust me on this: about a year ago, five or six of these so-called dive support vessels started posting up just inside visual range of IAS Santos** or Saipan, heck, even Wake, way out there on the butt end of UAI territory, always with the same story: they'd caught satellite detection of a possible underwater swarm, maybe headed for Honolulu or San Fran, and could they please go down and look?
First, they'd put a few gliders in the surf, clean as you please, all on spec with the UN regs for anti-Zack diving, even radioing in to CGSG*** to tell us where their guys were going to be. Then, soon as that was done, the whole little group would change formation, point landwards, and start banging away at everything Islands-flagged in range with big old 'Nam-era air search and maritime surveillance radar, plus old WWII-grade huff-duff radio intercept gear they probably pulled out of Pearl and got working in one of their "re-education" machine shops full of "dissident" Hollywood screenwriters. Wouldn't have been surprised if they were using those sonar sets @InquisitionAI mentioned as well- probably too busy finding our inter-island comms cables to tap to try using their sonar to paste the ghouls.
The secret-squirrel-squids on those DSCC boats probably assume that since they didn't have anything that could jam or trace any SIGNIT or EWAR shit since the DetStRes rip-downs and boneyard purges that nobody else does either, but that's what you get when you mothball the world's two biggest Air Forces and leave thousands of good Americans to get swallowed alive in their Midwest and South Coast bases; complete air power ignorance. The whole time, we had one of our JSTARs (yes, we've managed to keep them going!) circling their whole fleet at 40,000 feet, hoovering up every single radio transmission and satellite cell signal; all the way up to the big Ekky**** style radome on the ship in the center of the formation, and we jammed every single bit of it to hell and back. Long story short, they'll be getting a bunch of garbled nonsense back home in Fort Meade or Foggy Bottom or even what's left of the NGA, but don't expect it to stay that way for long. These spy fleets of theirs won't stay stupid if the New Clique keeps on being as navy-focused as they seem to be right now. Invest in a VPN if you can, or do what I do-keep your electronic stuff in a Faraday cage and only turn any of it on to post on here or somewhere else online that you know is secure-I've got a miniature one for the phone I'm posting off of in my nightstand, right next to my M9 and a go bag.
After what got us out here, I'm not ever going to be unprepared again.
OOC: I've had this idea banging around ever since the Sinclair and Eliopolis chapters laid out how the Air Force got gutted, and I figured now was the time to lay it out, although I'd have preferred to do so back in the Great Panic section. Basically, this ZSI runs on the concept that maybe a composite Wing or so of USAF jet air got to Honolulu and just...kept going, SLDF style. Not likely that the Junta gives a shit about Pacific America, so I figured that'd be the perfect place for them to settle down and get to work keeping the torches burning. Welcome to the Republic of the United American Islands! Sand, social democracy, strategic air power, and the last remnants of American combat aviation sleeping on the tarmacs of Andersen AFB, dreaming of going home again.
References:
*Department of Aerospace and Naval Intelligence.
**Island Air Station Santos, formerly of the US Navy.
***Coast Guard Station Guam.
****ECHELON, Cold War era long-range SIGNIT program.
IC:
See, this is a pretty common take I and a lot of other "ex-Eagles" hear on the internet from folks who think the Junta runs purely on fash nonsense, especially Europeans and ESPECIALLY the kind who love boot polish or tank treads, which thankfully OP seems to not be.
Out here in the UAI, we take a pretty different view of things; we see enough of these "threat tracking dives" to know what they're actually doing-and it's some classic Kissinger realpolitik bullshit with a side order of NSA spook garbage. DANI* figures, or at least states publicly if you know how to read diplomatic spy-speak, that our nasty Big Brother to the east decided to take a page from the Soviet ELINT trawler trick, plus the old Peublo-type spy boats, and now they're playing the same game the PRC did with "salami slicing" bits of the South China Sea before the war: ignoring any territorial claims that aren't theirs and using the entire ghoul tracking program as a carte blanche to surveil and intercept anything they please inside the Pacific Continent envelope. If you want my rookie opinion, the only reason they haven't started seizing islands with a bunch of tweaked-up Lobo-swinging USMC in Higgins boats is because they physically can't-almost all their manpower's tied up in overseas Zack sweeps for PR and to keep the UN together.
And before you get all snooty and call me a "Guamaniac" who's out to lunch and waiting for the Junta to come over the hill and kill us all, the only altering chemical stuff I indulge in is dark beer once a week and 2mg of the blue gender stuff a day. Just trust me on this: about a year ago, five or six of these so-called dive support vessels started posting up just inside visual range of IAS Santos** or Saipan, heck, even Wake, way out there on the butt end of UAI territory, always with the same story: they'd caught satellite detection of a possible underwater swarm, maybe headed for Honolulu or San Fran, and could they please go down and look?
First, they'd put a few gliders in the surf, clean as you please, all on spec with the UN regs for anti-Zack diving, even radioing in to CGSG*** to tell us where their guys were going to be. Then, soon as that was done, the whole little group would change formation, point landwards, and start banging away at everything Islands-flagged in range with big old 'Nam-era air search and maritime surveillance radar, plus old WWII-grade huff-duff radio intercept gear they probably pulled out of Pearl and got working in one of their "re-education" machine shops full of "dissident" Hollywood screenwriters. Wouldn't have been surprised if they were using those sonar sets @InquisitionAI mentioned as well- probably too busy finding our inter-island comms cables to tap to try using their sonar to paste the ghouls.
The secret-squirrel-squids on those DSCC boats probably assume that since they didn't have anything that could jam or trace any SIGNIT or EWAR shit since the DetStRes rip-downs and boneyard purges that nobody else does either, but that's what you get when you mothball the world's two biggest Air Forces and leave thousands of good Americans to get swallowed alive in their Midwest and South Coast bases; complete air power ignorance. The whole time, we had one of our JSTARs (yes, we've managed to keep them going!) circling their whole fleet at 40,000 feet, hoovering up every single radio transmission and satellite cell signal; all the way up to the big Ekky**** style radome on the ship in the center of the formation, and we jammed every single bit of it to hell and back. Long story short, they'll be getting a bunch of garbled nonsense back home in Fort Meade or Foggy Bottom or even what's left of the NGA, but don't expect it to stay that way for long. These spy fleets of theirs won't stay stupid if the New Clique keeps on being as navy-focused as they seem to be right now. Invest in a VPN if you can, or do what I do-keep your electronic stuff in a Faraday cage and only turn any of it on to post on here or somewhere else online that you know is secure-I've got a miniature one for the phone I'm posting off of in my nightstand, right next to my M9 and a go bag.
After what got us out here, I'm not ever going to be unprepared again.
OOC: I've had this idea banging around ever since the Sinclair and Eliopolis chapters laid out how the Air Force got gutted, and I figured now was the time to lay it out, although I'd have preferred to do so back in the Great Panic section. Basically, this ZSI runs on the concept that maybe a composite Wing or so of USAF jet air got to Honolulu and just...kept going, SLDF style. Not likely that the Junta gives a shit about Pacific America, so I figured that'd be the perfect place for them to settle down and get to work keeping the torches burning. Welcome to the Republic of the United American Islands! Sand, social democracy, strategic air power, and the last remnants of American combat aviation sleeping on the tarmacs of Andersen AFB, dreaming of going home again.
References:
*Department of Aerospace and Naval Intelligence.
**Island Air Station Santos, formerly of the US Navy.
***Coast Guard Station Guam.
****ECHELON, Cold War era long-range SIGNIT program.
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I think the vociferous condemnation of the book as a piece of propaganda is interesting, though it probably paints a markedly more monstrous world that was intended in the novel by deconstructing it and making the necessary inferences for that framing device. Some of the depictions of famine in winter were genuinely unsettling. Framing device aside, having never read the source material, I have to say that it really is a fascinating window into Max Brooks' implicit biases. I think that he may be trying to do something clever with various viewpoints with some of them being on the surface one thing and reading between the lines obviously the other. But even with that being the case I think the other subtext is literally just projection onto the page of how the author views the world because it's consistent across multiple, supposedly disparate viewpoints.
In short, there's some real cringe assumptions baked in here. Some is genuinely laughable, like the idea that America just tapped out of Vietnam rather than outright losing the war, which is ridiculous. The man was supposedly in the Modern War Institute in West Point. Surely he knows better. Other than that though there are surprisingly yikes angles on the rest of the world and how society works. I'd expect this kind of content from someone born in the early 50s to a Midwestern family, not someone born in 1972.
In short, there's some real cringe assumptions baked in here. Some is genuinely laughable, like the idea that America just tapped out of Vietnam rather than outright losing the war, which is ridiculous. The man was supposedly in the Modern War Institute in West Point. Surely he knows better. Other than that though there are surprisingly yikes angles on the rest of the world and how society works. I'd expect this kind of content from someone born in the early 50s to a Midwestern family, not someone born in 1972.
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- Earth
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- He/Him
I get what you're saying, but someone whose education came from an institution run by the Army is not more likely than most to have been taught an unbiased version of the Vietnam War. Especially since this is a matter of framing the facts more than the facts themselves.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah. There are a lot of officers in the Army, including a lot of the ones who'd have been instructors in the '90s, who definitely would not have hesitated to say "we chose to leave Vietnam due to lack of political will or lack of an exit strategy or anything else except losing."
And, hell, this position is not entirely without merit. Before US troops decided to leave, the war was stalemated. Now, us continuing to feed bodies into a grinder to keep Vietnam partitioned indefinitely was obviously unsustainable. But claiming that "we decided to leave because this wasn't worth the attrition" is different from "we lost" is... at least sort of supportable?
And, hell, this position is not entirely without merit. Before US troops decided to leave, the war was stalemated. Now, us continuing to feed bodies into a grinder to keep Vietnam partitioned indefinitely was obviously unsustainable. But claiming that "we decided to leave because this wasn't worth the attrition" is different from "we lost" is... at least sort of supportable?
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- California Conservation Corps
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- She/Her
To be fair its kinda hard to win a war when you don't have a clear "win" condition other than maybe unconditional surrender.
It's sort of like walking into a casino expecting to bankrupt the place. It doesn't matter how good of a player you are or how lucky you end up, the goal is so unrealistic you'll be forced out before you can obtain it.
Sure you could have walked out with over a hundred times what you started with, but since that wouldn't meet your goal of "all the money" you kept playing... and lost it all.
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- He/Him
I feel like that's a flawed analogy. The mechanics of a casino can plausibly allow a (very lucky) person to win a hundred times what they started with.
I doubt there was any reasonable way for the USA to "win" so hard in the Vietnam War. The only winning move is not to play, and Lyndon B. Johnson decided to ante up anyways.
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- They/Their
That's... not what they were talking about though?
They were saying that, even if *everything went perfectly*, and someone could walk out having actually made 100 times their original money, that the 'goal' they went in with (Take All The Money,) is still as impossible as it was when they walked in at the beginning, becayse the goal they set for themselves is bluntly *unachievable*.
Same as that 'perfect' victory for the US. No matter how much meat they shove into the Grinder, it'll never be enough to truly 'win' the war, no matter how extreme the measures they took, it ultimately didn't matter, because they simply couldn't achieve the things they set out to do.
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- Earth
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- He/Him
I can agree with someone's point and still disagree with the argument they used to support it. In this case, I disagree with the assumption that America could have accomplished something by entering the Vietnam War and just choosing a different goal.
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- Mid-Atlantic
The most plausible 'win condition,' as in one that would at least make sense, would have been to stabilize the situation so that Vietnam remained partitioned. But that would require South Vietnam to hold its own.
Now... I'm not sure it was literally inevitable that the US would be unable to put together a South Vietnamese state capable of defending itself with only US material aid and without major direct deployments of US military forces. But it's something the US certainly failed to accomplish in real life and I know of no immediately obvious way it could have been done. So "effectively impossible" wouldn't surprise me.
Now... I'm not sure it was literally inevitable that the US would be unable to put together a South Vietnamese state capable of defending itself with only US material aid and without major direct deployments of US military forces. But it's something the US certainly failed to accomplish in real life and I know of no immediately obvious way it could have been done. So "effectively impossible" wouldn't surprise me.
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OoC
Though I do have to say that the WWZ Video Game does a *moderately* better job at patching the Brain Worms and Hard-Man-ism.*
I especially liked the missions where you clearly see various state militaries evacuating civilians, it's nice to know that they aren't being Stupid Evil.
E:
* It also introduces a bunch of *new* issues, like the various Special Zombies getting increasingly more unrealistic as the game got older, (Look at the Bull in Riot Gear versus the Infector, versus the Booster Zombie,) and runs into the usual 'No one aside from the PCs are allowed to affect things' issues such games have, (especially since the Swarm Engine doesn't seem to be able to properly run the AI as genuinely useful, given what they've shown of Space Marine 2, though at least there the random AI is actually able to walk around.)
Probably becayse Max Brooks is actually a really good writer, but this book (and the Survival Guide, which isn't canon to the Lets Read because of the History bits,) tend to be a unique and interesting mix of Hard-Man-ism, Period Brainworms, and general Historical Revisionism, which is why WWZ is still talked about despite its flaws.
Though I do have to say that the WWZ Video Game does a *moderately* better job at patching the Brain Worms and Hard-Man-ism.*
I especially liked the missions where you clearly see various state militaries evacuating civilians, it's nice to know that they aren't being Stupid Evil.
E:
* It also introduces a bunch of *new* issues, like the various Special Zombies getting increasingly more unrealistic as the game got older, (Look at the Bull in Riot Gear versus the Infector, versus the Booster Zombie,) and runs into the usual 'No one aside from the PCs are allowed to affect things' issues such games have, (especially since the Swarm Engine doesn't seem to be able to properly run the AI as genuinely useful, given what they've shown of Space Marine 2, though at least there the random AI is actually able to walk around.)
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OOC: This let's read just asks the question whether the Redeker Plan and other desperate measures promulgated by WWZ were actually necessary in the first place. What happens when it turns out that not only are they unnecessary (despite what initially seem like some pretty decent justifications), they're actively harmful?
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Total War, Part 5
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Total War, Part 5
I've written to Andre, actually. About this interview, even! He apologised, which was a pleasant surprise, but I'll touch on this later.
The aside regarding his refusal to return to France - to be used as a nationalist talisman for a country in a tailspin of perennial unrest they're not really even able to suppress - is interesting, in that it acknowledges more of the abject vulnerability of one of America's allies more than typical.
But there again, France was never America's favourite ally, was it? The Junta is still, somehow, mad about the Iraq war.
Having no wall and no bars is a risk I wouldn't take, personally. There's not a lot of ghouls left in Quebec, but there's FLQ and adéquiste guerrillas scattered throughout rural Quebec and one bad night can turn a guerrilla encampment into a small ghoul horde.
For what it is worth - do not donate to Quebec Separatists. Do not do it. They are not your friends.
This is so true. There's no debate, you're all incorrect. Tunnel Rat fighting was the worst thing anyone ever had to do. Pretty universal. Any city with any sort of underground networks - metros, sewers, old maintenance tunnels, buried rivers… Those all needed to be cleared, and they were all the worst possible places to fight ghouls.
We filled some with concrete, but there just wasn't enough of it.
The people we had clearing skyscrapers in London didn't have much better of a time of it than we did, so I've heard. Working your way up through dark, crumbling buildings, floors starting to sag because the waterproofing failed a long time ago, broken windows turning whole storeys into howling windtunnels, cracking open the elevators to clear out any ghouls inside - hoping the damn thing doesn't choose that moment to plummet to ground level and take you with it - and then, without fail, you get to the top and find an impressive barricade on the stairs and a few dozen corpses behind it.
London was awful. Just… awful. City of the dead.
French Resistance denialism is a genuinely super odd conspiracy theory to have come out of the Years of Zed. It isn't just France - part of some peculiar mythmaking in the Anglosphere about why they must've been doing better was that they didn't have as many people who gave up, which - was justified by arguing that the continental Europeans had a "servile mindset" beginning in WWII, which meant they didn't resist the ghouls so well; it married in with weird existing nationalism about immigration, obviously.
To be clear, this is a pretty fringe reactionary belief already, and the ones who take it so far as to deny the existence of any internal opposition in Nazi-occupied territory are the insane fringe of that already-fringe belief, but from what I've heard, it is a belief with concerning penetration at, like, West Point. Hence why the interviewer references it as though it is a super common problem.
For the rest, I do sympathise. Our tunnels were mostly the old Victorian ones - the underground, obviously, but also the sewers, including the subterranean rivers of London, the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Effra, and that's not touching on shit like the old Post Office Railway, the myriad of government citadels down there, the pneumatic railway - we just poured concrete into that one until it stopped growling - and the miles upon miles of Victorian-era utility tunnels.
The water ring main, too. We had to guide engineers down that to see if it was still in order, and repair it where it wasn't.
Poor you, a quarter million.
A million, give or take, took shelter underground in London. It was a bigger city, and the historical legacy of sheltering from the Blitz in the Underground was actively used as propaganda by the city's gurning cretin of a mayor, so it isn't exactly surprising, but… fuck.
Once people started pouring in, there was no chance it wouldn't collapse. None. Whatsoever.
We had torches, I will grant that much. Everyone in every squad had a headtorch and a handheld - one of those big maglites that was halfway to a truncheon. I can't imagine doing this without my own light. I'd have shot myself, and I'm not being hyperbolic.
No, the dark wasn't our biggest concern. You learn not to mind it, like you learn not to mind the rats. London rats, I think, are probably their own species now. They don't fear humans, the little beasties just sit and watch us pass, wait for us to die - they can eat ghoulflesh, apparently, though not whilst its animate.
They're a neat early-warning system, too; if you see rats running, it means there's ghouls in the direction they're running from.
The smell was… if you weren't there, you can't understand. Hell under the earth. We lifted what we could from where we could find it - torches were standard issue, but air filtration you couldn't find for love nor money.
There was a boy in our crew, Geordie - he always insisted we called him Geordie "til I'm back there" - who sorted this out for us, God rest his soul.
He had this fucking… whispy little nothing of a moustache, and he kept his hair slicked back with wax, and with his sticky fingers, no one was surprised he was in with the Black Market, but no one held it against him, because the boy didn't have a whit of malice in him.
It was still early days, we were just outside London proper, clearing some spur of the tube, and just as we were all having breakfast, up comes Geordie, all smiles.
"It's my birthday tomorrow," he said, "And I've got a present for us all. You'll be thanking me, so I won't hear another word about your cigarettes."
This was the first anyone knew of him having traded away all the crew's cigarettes, naturally.
I don't know if he got cocky or distracted, or just didn't think he'd die the day before his 21st, but we only found out what name to put on his headstone when his mate turned up the next morning with a truck full of smocks and full-facial respirators, stolen from God only knows where, looking for "Wilbur"
No wonder the boy wanted us to call him Geordie. Wilbur.
I have no doubt he saved my life that day, getting us some decent kit. Poor fucking kid.
We did much the same. Lugging great rolls of copper wire down tunnels, someone screaming down the phone line whenever a pack of ghouls lurched out of the gloom, cast demonic by the red glare off our torches, listening to the crackling voice of someone in regimental HQ order us to rendezvous with another squad before we could move to respond with an SOS.
It was ordered chaos. I remember on the ship to Cuba there were a handful of our command staff, and I spoke to this one lieutenant about this. Banks of telephone lines stretching out of whatever warehouse they'd commandeered, always ringing, this wall of maps of tunnel networks, scrawled all over with the cave-ins and blasted-open doorways that survivors had left behind, and a constant rush to update where each squad was, whether they had strayed too far from their support, whether we could guarantee their lines of retreat…
High command fucked us, but our direct superiors tried their hardest.
People say its impossible, but I'll swear its true - we'd be working in the sewers (that was always the bread and butter, some 1000 miles of "main" sewers feeding countless thousands of miles of smaller sewers, mostly too small to traverse) and we'd hear someone screaming for help, clear as a bell, as though they were just around the bend, only you round the bend and there's no one there. And you talk to command and they tell you the only contact has been a squad in the Tube getting overrun, or a crew working the Post Office Rail getting ambushed. Sound shouldn't carry like that, everyone says it doesn't, but I'm not the only veteran who heard them down there.
By the end, we pretty much only moved to respond when command gave the green light. Safer that way, when you don't know what's real.
I remember, it was right near the end, we were in central central london by then - so it must've been about '26. So close. We were working Embankment when we heard them on the phone- strangely echo-y, the river played funny tricks - screaming and screaming. Waterloo, it had to be.
We'd lost so many by this point, discipline was getting fragile.
So we ran, stumbling through the dark, under the Thames, deep as the Tube goes, and we came out into Waterloo, this hulking tumour of a station, and we're knee-deep in ghouls as soon as we arrive.
We must've killed dozens of them, but we never found the team there. Turns out she'd gotten turned around, ended up leading her squad into some fucking ridiculous pre-war art installation below the station. Absolutely rammed with ghouls. Didn't stand a chance, and if we'd found them, we'd just have died too. A company from one of the Guards regiments doing surface-clearance had to deal with them, in the end. Those regiments brought guns on mission with them, after all.
This is true - we got into the habit of leaving our guns at camp, so no one would get tempted in a panic.
I had this billyclub. Rod of hardwood wrapped in steel. I used to be able to crack a skull like an egg with that thing.
God bless the Italians. These were excellent, once we finally got some, even if it was too late.
By then, they'd switched to lead pellets - no sparks - so even that risk was gone. Honestly, fire was never really our concern. It rained so consistently, so endlessly, that we were always more worried about the water - most of the gases in the air were "just" toxic, not flammable, anyway.
Chain mail. It was always damp, always rusty, but the ghouls couldn't bite through it. Leather was a false friend. Not nearly as hardy as you think.
He's right to point out - wearing the gas masks to fight for hours was torturous. You only have to watch someone puking up blood and bile after inhaling the foetid cocktail down there to learn to never remove the mask, though.
I was laid up for quite some time in Cuba with tunnel rot in various orifices, yeah. Wet, cold and dirty work, for years, with minimal treatment. I was tremendously lucky to get out of it "only" losing the pinkie toe on my left foot. Didn't even have substantial scarring anywhere else.
I will say, we never had the problem they had - almost all the tunnels we were working in were structurally sound enough that you didn't need to worry about unmapped submerged holes. Working in Victorian Cathedrals of shit had its miseries, but they were at least well-built.
What is there to say? The scuba divers died en masse over here, too, but there wasn't a government willing to give them a medal by the end of it.
It's shit.
I had to stand up and walk around a little, when I read this. Take a few deep calming breaths, then come back.
Anyway, twenty thousand of us died over a three year campaign, following two years in which we lost God only knows how many people scouting the city out, looking for the survivor enclaves we were positive must be in there, somewhere.
We went slow, ish, but not "one section at a time" - that doesn't even make sense for our spaghetti mess of underground infrastructure, any attempt to divide the city up was futile - and certainly not "safe".
And that quote - enough dead heroes for the end of time? That wasn't about rushing London. That was a quote used to explain why we were demobilising the Red Guards and accepting the authority of the "legitimate government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain."
We were told - after our most radical units were near-universally deployed to grind ourselves to nubs in London, so none of us could object - that too many heroes had died, that continuing the war would be "reckless adventurism".
I got kinda mad about this - I wrote him a letter!
He said I could include his apology and retraction, so…
[mes_condoléances.pdf]
There you go.
This isn't true. France is not hurting for "military glory" in their history. Only an American would think France was feeling as though it were full of surrender-monkeys, you know? They're still so mad about Iraq.
The nationalist chestbeating here was all about the government fleeing to Corsica and leaving the people to rot.
But the people didn't rot. They fought back, they scratched out a living, they survived. They reclaimed. So the government had to do something to show they were still Here For France.
And so they took their soldiers, the brave, stupid men who followed them like good dogs over to Corsica, and they spent them like fucking water on a vanity conquest of Paris, to show the people who never left France that the government was still willing to sacrifice for France.
It… worked, in that it prevented an immediate uprising, but France isn't in a good way, and unlike some countries, they don't really have any part of their military loyal to them. Even the sociopath right wingers in the French military are spitting furious at how the government treated her soldiers.
What's the point?
Some of us had last stands like this, of course we did - the fifteen hour stand on the River Fleet, the forlorn hope at Marylebone, the war in the war rooms, hell, the Battle of Waterloo, to name but a few - but what's the point?
The dead don't care, and the living might pretend they do, but everyone forgot this before the bodies were even cold, because it was politically inconvenient.
Do not die in a last stand against a ghoul horde. Do not die on a futile barricade. Live. Live to see the tyrants of the world cast into the dust, so you can spit on their faces and walk away lighter. Or if not that, live so they cannot lie about your death.
Dying defiantly sounds wonderful, because it sounds easy. It is radical to live.
That's all I have to say about Andre, and I don't want to move onto the next interview, because Todd fucking Wainio is at it again, and that would taint this interview by association.
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] - just because it's a war zone does not magically remove the civilians.
AN: Quite happy with this one. Let me know what you think! Also, I listened to this a bunch whilst writing this:
To get as close a vibe as I could to the atmosphere, if not the zombies, obviously.
Article: QUEBEC, CANADA
[The small farmhouse has no wall, no bars on the windows, and no lock on the door. When I ask the owner about his vulnerability he simply chuckles and resumes his lunch. Andre Renard, brother of the legendary war hero Emil Renard, has requested that I keep his exact location secret. "I don't care if the dead find me," he says without feeling, "but I care very little for the living." The former French national immigrated to this place after the official end of hostilities in western Europe. Despite numerous invitations from the French government, he has not returned.]
I've written to Andre, actually. About this interview, even! He apologised, which was a pleasant surprise, but I'll touch on this later.
The aside regarding his refusal to return to France - to be used as a nationalist talisman for a country in a tailspin of perennial unrest they're not really even able to suppress - is interesting, in that it acknowledges more of the abject vulnerability of one of America's allies more than typical.
But there again, France was never America's favourite ally, was it? The Junta is still, somehow, mad about the Iraq war.
Having no wall and no bars is a risk I wouldn't take, personally. There's not a lot of ghouls left in Quebec, but there's FLQ and adéquiste guerrillas scattered throughout rural Quebec and one bad night can turn a guerrilla encampment into a small ghoul horde.
For what it is worth - do not donate to Quebec Separatists. Do not do it. They are not your friends.
Article: Everyone else is a liar, everyone who claims that their campaign was "the hardest of the entire war." All those ignorant peacocks who beat their chests and brag about "mountain warfare" or "jungle warfare" or "urban warfare." Cities, oh how they love to brag about cities! "Nothing more terrifying than fighting in a city!" Oh really? Try underneath one.
This is so true. There's no debate, you're all incorrect. Tunnel Rat fighting was the worst thing anyone ever had to do. Pretty universal. Any city with any sort of underground networks - metros, sewers, old maintenance tunnels, buried rivers… Those all needed to be cleared, and they were all the worst possible places to fight ghouls.
We filled some with concrete, but there just wasn't enough of it.
Article: Do you know why the Paris skyline was devoid of skyscrapers, I mean the prewar, proper Paris skyline? Do you know why they stuck all those glass and steel monstrosities out in La Defense, so far from the city center? Yes, there's aesthetics, a sense of continuity and civic pride…not like that architectural mongrel called London. But the truth, the logical, practical, reason for keeping Paris free from American-style monoliths, is that the earth beneath their feet is simply too tunneled to support it.
The people we had clearing skyscrapers in London didn't have much better of a time of it than we did, so I've heard. Working your way up through dark, crumbling buildings, floors starting to sag because the waterproofing failed a long time ago, broken windows turning whole storeys into howling windtunnels, cracking open the elevators to clear out any ghouls inside - hoping the damn thing doesn't choose that moment to plummet to ground level and take you with it - and then, without fail, you get to the top and find an impressive barricade on the stairs and a few dozen corpses behind it.
London was awful. Just… awful. City of the dead.
Article: There are Roman tombs, quarries that supplied limestone for much of the city, even World War II bunkers used by the Resistance and yes, there was a Resistance! Then there is the modern Metro, the telephone lines, the gas mains, the water pipes…and through it all, you have the catacombs. Roughly six million bodies were buried there, taken from the prerevolution cemeteries, where corpses were just tossed in like rubbish. The catacombs contained entire walls of skulls and bones arranged in macabre patterns. It was even functional in places where interlocking bones held back mounds of loose remains behind them. The skulls always seemed to be laughing at me.
French Resistance denialism is a genuinely super odd conspiracy theory to have come out of the Years of Zed. It isn't just France - part of some peculiar mythmaking in the Anglosphere about why they must've been doing better was that they didn't have as many people who gave up, which - was justified by arguing that the continental Europeans had a "servile mindset" beginning in WWII, which meant they didn't resist the ghouls so well; it married in with weird existing nationalism about immigration, obviously.
To be clear, this is a pretty fringe reactionary belief already, and the ones who take it so far as to deny the existence of any internal opposition in Nazi-occupied territory are the insane fringe of that already-fringe belief, but from what I've heard, it is a belief with concerning penetration at, like, West Point. Hence why the interviewer references it as though it is a super common problem.
For the rest, I do sympathise. Our tunnels were mostly the old Victorian ones - the underground, obviously, but also the sewers, including the subterranean rivers of London, the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Effra, and that's not touching on shit like the old Post Office Railway, the myriad of government citadels down there, the pneumatic railway - we just poured concrete into that one until it stopped growling - and the miles upon miles of Victorian-era utility tunnels.
The water ring main, too. We had to guide engineers down that to see if it was still in order, and repair it where it wasn't.
Article: I don't think I can blame the civilians who tried to survive in that subterranean world. They didn't have the civilian survival manual back then, they didn't have Radio Free Earth. It was the Great Panic. Maybe a few souls who thought they knew those tunnels decided to make a go of it, a few more followed them, then a few more. The word spread, "it's safe underground." A quarter million in all, that's what the bone counters have determined, two hundred and fifty thousand refugees. Maybe if they had been organized, thought to bring food and tools, even had enough sense to seal the entrances behind them and make damn sure those coming in weren't infected…
Poor you, a quarter million.
A million, give or take, took shelter underground in London. It was a bigger city, and the historical legacy of sheltering from the Blitz in the Underground was actively used as propaganda by the city's gurning cretin of a mayor, so it isn't exactly surprising, but… fuck.
Once people started pouring in, there was no chance it wouldn't collapse. None. Whatsoever.
Article: How can anyone claim that their experience can compare to what we endured? The darkness and the stink…we had almost no night vision goggles, just one pair per platoon, and that's if you were lucky. Spare batteries were in short supply for our electric torches, too. Sometimes there was only one working unit for an entire squad, just for the point man, cutting the darkness with a red-coated beam.
We had torches, I will grant that much. Everyone in every squad had a headtorch and a handheld - one of those big maglites that was halfway to a truncheon. I can't imagine doing this without my own light. I'd have shot myself, and I'm not being hyperbolic.
No, the dark wasn't our biggest concern. You learn not to mind it, like you learn not to mind the rats. London rats, I think, are probably their own species now. They don't fear humans, the little beasties just sit and watch us pass, wait for us to die - they can eat ghoulflesh, apparently, though not whilst its animate.
They're a neat early-warning system, too; if you see rats running, it means there's ghouls in the direction they're running from.
Article: The air was toxic with sewage, chemicals, rotting flesh…the gas masks were a joke, most of the filters had long expired. We wore anything we could find, old military models, or firefighting hoods that covered your entire head, made you sweat like a pig, made you deaf as well as blind. You never knew where you were, staring through that misty visor, hearing the muffled voices of your squad mates, the crackle of your radioman.
The smell was… if you weren't there, you can't understand. Hell under the earth. We lifted what we could from where we could find it - torches were standard issue, but air filtration you couldn't find for love nor money.
There was a boy in our crew, Geordie - he always insisted we called him Geordie "til I'm back there" - who sorted this out for us, God rest his soul.
He had this fucking… whispy little nothing of a moustache, and he kept his hair slicked back with wax, and with his sticky fingers, no one was surprised he was in with the Black Market, but no one held it against him, because the boy didn't have a whit of malice in him.
It was still early days, we were just outside London proper, clearing some spur of the tube, and just as we were all having breakfast, up comes Geordie, all smiles.
"It's my birthday tomorrow," he said, "And I've got a present for us all. You'll be thanking me, so I won't hear another word about your cigarettes."
This was the first anyone knew of him having traded away all the crew's cigarettes, naturally.
I don't know if he got cocky or distracted, or just didn't think he'd die the day before his 21st, but we only found out what name to put on his headstone when his mate turned up the next morning with a truck full of smocks and full-facial respirators, stolen from God only knows where, looking for "Wilbur"
No wonder the boy wanted us to call him Geordie. Wilbur.
I have no doubt he saved my life that day, getting us some decent kit. Poor fucking kid.
Article: We used old telephone wire, copper, not fiber optic. We would just rip it off the conduits and keep massive rolls with us to extend our range. It was the only way to keep in contact, and, most of the time, the only way to keep from becoming lost.
We did much the same. Lugging great rolls of copper wire down tunnels, someone screaming down the phone line whenever a pack of ghouls lurched out of the gloom, cast demonic by the red glare off our torches, listening to the crackling voice of someone in regimental HQ order us to rendezvous with another squad before we could move to respond with an SOS.
It was ordered chaos. I remember on the ship to Cuba there were a handful of our command staff, and I spoke to this one lieutenant about this. Banks of telephone lines stretching out of whatever warehouse they'd commandeered, always ringing, this wall of maps of tunnel networks, scrawled all over with the cave-ins and blasted-open doorways that survivors had left behind, and a constant rush to update where each squad was, whether they had strayed too far from their support, whether we could guarantee their lines of retreat…
High command fucked us, but our direct superiors tried their hardest.
Article: When another squad was being attacked, you would hear their cries over the radio or echoing through the tunnels. The acoustics were evil; they taunted you. Screams and moans came from every direction. You never knew where they were coming from. At least with the radio, you could try, maybe, to get a fix on your comrades' position. If they weren't panicked, if they knew where they were, if you knew where you were…
People say its impossible, but I'll swear its true - we'd be working in the sewers (that was always the bread and butter, some 1000 miles of "main" sewers feeding countless thousands of miles of smaller sewers, mostly too small to traverse) and we'd hear someone screaming for help, clear as a bell, as though they were just around the bend, only you round the bend and there's no one there. And you talk to command and they tell you the only contact has been a squad in the Tube getting overrun, or a crew working the Post Office Rail getting ambushed. Sound shouldn't carry like that, everyone says it doesn't, but I'm not the only veteran who heard them down there.
By the end, we pretty much only moved to respond when command gave the green light. Safer that way, when you don't know what's real.
Article: The running: you dash through the passageways, bash your head on the ceiling, crawl on your hands and knees, praying to the Virgin with all your might for them to hold for just a little longer. You get to their position, find it is the wrong one, an empty chamber, and the screams for help are still a long way off.
I remember, it was right near the end, we were in central central london by then - so it must've been about '26. So close. We were working Embankment when we heard them on the phone- strangely echo-y, the river played funny tricks - screaming and screaming. Waterloo, it had to be.
We'd lost so many by this point, discipline was getting fragile.
So we ran, stumbling through the dark, under the Thames, deep as the Tube goes, and we came out into Waterloo, this hulking tumour of a station, and we're knee-deep in ghouls as soon as we arrive.
We must've killed dozens of them, but we never found the team there. Turns out she'd gotten turned around, ended up leading her squad into some fucking ridiculous pre-war art installation below the station. Absolutely rammed with ghouls. Didn't stand a chance, and if we'd found them, we'd just have died too. A company from one of the Guards regiments doing surface-clearance had to deal with them, in the end. Those regiments brought guns on mission with them, after all.
Article: [He leans across the table, pressing his face inches away from mine.]
No standard equipment; whatever one believed would suit him. There were no firearms, you understand. The air, the gas, it was too flammable. The fire from a gun…
[He makes the sound of an explosion.]
This is true - we got into the habit of leaving our guns at camp, so no one would get tempted in a panic.
I had this billyclub. Rod of hardwood wrapped in steel. I used to be able to crack a skull like an egg with that thing.
Article: We had the Beretta-Grechio, the Italian air carbine. It was a wartime model of a child's carbon dioxide pellet gun. You got maybe five shots, six or seven if it was pressed right up to their heads. Good weapon, but always not enough of them. And you had to be careful! If you missed, if the ball struck the stone, if the stone was dry, if you got a spark…entire tunnels would catch, explosions that buried men alive, or fireballs that melted their masks right to their faces. Hand to hand is always better. Here…
God bless the Italians. These were excellent, once we finally got some, even if it was too late.
By then, they'd switched to lead pellets - no sparks - so even that risk was gone. Honestly, fire was never really our concern. It rained so consistently, so endlessly, that we were always more worried about the water - most of the gases in the air were "just" toxic, not flammable, anyway.
Article: No room, no warning, suddenly they are upon you, perhaps right in front of your eyes, or grabbing from a side passage you didn't know was there. Everyone was armored in some way…chain mail or heavy leather…almost always it was too heavy, too suffocating, wet leather jackets and trousers, heavy metal chain-link shirts. You try to fight, you are already exhausted, men would tear off their masks, gasping for air, inhaling the stink. Many died before you could get them to the surface.
Chain mail. It was always damp, always rusty, but the ghouls couldn't bite through it. Leather was a false friend. Not nearly as hardy as you think.
He's right to point out - wearing the gas masks to fight for hours was torturous. You only have to watch someone puking up blood and bile after inhaling the foetid cocktail down there to learn to never remove the mask, though.
Article: It was always wet. There was rot between your fingers, your toes, in your crotch. The water was up to your ankles almost all the time, sometimes up to your knees or waist. You would be on point, walking, or crawling—sometimes we had to crawl in the stinking fluid up to our elbows. And suddenly the ground would just fall away. You would splash, headfirst, into one of those unmapped holes. You only had a few seconds to right yourself before your gas mask flooded. You kicked and thrashed, your comrades would grab you and haul fast.
I was laid up for quite some time in Cuba with tunnel rot in various orifices, yeah. Wet, cold and dirty work, for years, with minimal treatment. I was tremendously lucky to get out of it "only" losing the pinkie toe on my left foot. Didn't even have substantial scarring anywhere else.
I will say, we never had the problem they had - almost all the tunnels we were working in were structurally sound enough that you didn't need to worry about unmapped submerged holes. Working in Victorian Cathedrals of shit had its miseries, but they were at least well-built.
Article: Those were times when we called a full retreat to a defensive position and waited for the Cousteaus, the scuba divers trained to work and fight specifically in those flooded tunnels. With only a searchlight and a shark suit, if they were lucky to get one, and, at most, two hours of air. They were supposed to wear a safety line, but most of them refused to do so. The lines tended to get tangled and slow up the diver's progress. Those men, and women, had a one in twenty chance of survival, the lowest ratio of any branch of any army, I don't care what anyone says. 1 Is it any wonder they received an automatic Legion of Honor?
What is there to say? The scuba divers died en masse over here, too, but there wasn't a government willing to give them a medal by the end of it.
It's shit.
Article: And what was it all for? Fifteen thousand dead or missing. Not just the Cousteaus, all of us, the entire core. Fifteen thousand souls in just three months. Fifteen thousand at a time when the war was winding down all over the world. "Go! Go! Fight! Fight!" It didn't have to be that way. How long did it take the English to clear all of London? Five years, three years after the war was officially over? They went slow and safe, one section at a time, low speed, low intensity, low casualty rate. Slow and safe, like most major cities. Why us? That English general, what he said about "Enough dead heroes for the end of time…"
I had to stand up and walk around a little, when I read this. Take a few deep calming breaths, then come back.
Anyway, twenty thousand of us died over a three year campaign, following two years in which we lost God only knows how many people scouting the city out, looking for the survivor enclaves we were positive must be in there, somewhere.
We went slow, ish, but not "one section at a time" - that doesn't even make sense for our spaghetti mess of underground infrastructure, any attempt to divide the city up was futile - and certainly not "safe".
And that quote - enough dead heroes for the end of time? That wasn't about rushing London. That was a quote used to explain why we were demobilising the Red Guards and accepting the authority of the "legitimate government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain."
We were told - after our most radical units were near-universally deployed to grind ourselves to nubs in London, so none of us could object - that too many heroes had died, that continuing the war would be "reckless adventurism".
I got kinda mad about this - I wrote him a letter!
He said I could include his apology and retraction, so…
[mes_condoléances.pdf]
There you go.
Article: "Heroes," that's what we were, that's what our leaders wanted, that's what our people felt they needed. After all that has happened, not just in this war, but in so many wars before: Algeria, Indochina, the Nazis…you understand what I am saying…you see the sorrow and pity? We understood what the American president said about "reclaiming our confidence"; we understood it more than most. We needed heroes, new names and places to restore our pride.
This isn't true. France is not hurting for "military glory" in their history. Only an American would think France was feeling as though it were full of surrender-monkeys, you know? They're still so mad about Iraq.
The nationalist chestbeating here was all about the government fleeing to Corsica and leaving the people to rot.
But the people didn't rot. They fought back, they scratched out a living, they survived. They reclaimed. So the government had to do something to show they were still Here For France.
And so they took their soldiers, the brave, stupid men who followed them like good dogs over to Corsica, and they spent them like fucking water on a vanity conquest of Paris, to show the people who never left France that the government was still willing to sacrifice for France.
It… worked, in that it prevented an immediate uprising, but France isn't in a good way, and unlike some countries, they don't really have any part of their military loyal to them. Even the sociopath right wingers in the French military are spitting furious at how the government treated her soldiers.
Article: The Ossuary, Port-Mahon Quarry, the Hospital…that was our shining moment…the Hospital. The Nazis had built it to house mental patients, so the legend goes, letting them starve to death behind the concrete walls. During our war it had been an infirmary for the recently bitten. Later, as more began to reanimate and the survivors' humanity faded like their electric lamps, they began throwing the infected, and who knows who else, into that undead vault. An advance team broke through without realizing what was on the other side. They could have withdrawn, blown the tunnel, sealed them in again…One squad against three hundred zombies. One squad led by my baby brother. His voice was the last thing we heard before their radio went silent. His last words: "On ne passe pas!"
What's the point?
Some of us had last stands like this, of course we did - the fifteen hour stand on the River Fleet, the forlorn hope at Marylebone, the war in the war rooms, hell, the Battle of Waterloo, to name but a few - but what's the point?
The dead don't care, and the living might pretend they do, but everyone forgot this before the bodies were even cold, because it was politically inconvenient.
Do not die in a last stand against a ghoul horde. Do not die on a futile barricade. Live. Live to see the tyrants of the world cast into the dust, so you can spit on their faces and walk away lighter. Or if not that, live so they cannot lie about your death.
Dying defiantly sounds wonderful, because it sounds easy. It is radical to live.
That's all I have to say about Andre, and I don't want to move onto the next interview, because Todd fucking Wainio is at it again, and that would taint this interview by association.
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] - just because it's a war zone does not magically remove the civilians.
AN: Quite happy with this one. Let me know what you think! Also, I listened to this a bunch whilst writing this:
To get as close a vibe as I could to the atmosphere, if not the zombies, obviously.
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- Location
- An Underground Fortress
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ooh yeah, that's been my favourite cover of that song for a while.
(IC)
Thank Christ for those Red Guard commanders who made sure that adventurists weren't in a position to sabotage the development of Actually Existing Socialism in Britain by trying to move against the central government. The British people's innate characteristics mean that revolution would only lead to suffering; their national character is better suited for Fabianism, just as the national character of Americans is best suited for gradualist, patriotic, "Stars-and-Stripes" socialism, as I myself realized. It's time that countries like Cuba and the red-tinted autocrats (the national character of Russians, after all!) in the so-called RSFSR realize that so long as a single ghoul remains on Earth, revolution is impossible.
(/IC)
(OOC: they still have calipers after the zombie apocalypse right? Also, just to make it clear, these opinions are not my real ones)
Thank Christ for those Red Guard commanders who made sure that adventurists weren't in a position to sabotage the development of Actually Existing Socialism in Britain by trying to move against the central government. The British people's innate characteristics mean that revolution would only lead to suffering; their national character is better suited for Fabianism, just as the national character of Americans is best suited for gradualist, patriotic, "Stars-and-Stripes" socialism, as I myself realized. It's time that countries like Cuba and the red-tinted autocrats (the national character of Russians, after all!) in the so-called RSFSR realize that so long as a single ghoul remains on Earth, revolution is impossible.
(/IC)
(OOC: they still have calipers after the zombie apocalypse right? Also, just to make it clear, these opinions are not my real ones)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
honestly, this is another big change to fighting post war. As people reestablish some level of industry they're increasingly sending drones down into the tunnels to kill ghouls. It's not perfect, because it often ends up with a fair amount of subsidence, but it is a lot safer. I know the Spanish army is mass producing a whole ecosystem of what are basically RC cars, some of which act as repeaters to get signal down, and others of which carry munitions. Usually small fuel air explosives or fragmentation charges mounted on an adjustable broom to detonate at head height.
Obviously the tunnel fighting was used in most areas to try to clean out politically undesirable troops, but it really should have been delayed until proper equipment was implimented. Of course, it would have been difficult to produce that stuff in anything like sufficient numbers to really clear the tunnels, but it's unclear if most of the post war armies have sufficient manpower to call on to really do it the way the Red Guards or the various French groups did so bravely.
Post war, tunnel complexes are also usually of a rather smaller size too. Usually they're just some warren a survivor group or a cthluhu cult builds, and it's often better to just collapse the whole thing and bury everything.
Obviously the tunnel fighting was used in most areas to try to clean out politically undesirable troops, but it really should have been delayed until proper equipment was implimented. Of course, it would have been difficult to produce that stuff in anything like sufficient numbers to really clear the tunnels, but it's unclear if most of the post war armies have sufficient manpower to call on to really do it the way the Red Guards or the various French groups did so bravely.
Post war, tunnel complexes are also usually of a rather smaller size too. Usually they're just some warren a survivor group or a cthluhu cult builds, and it's often better to just collapse the whole thing and bury everything.
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- Earth
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- He/Him
IC
Chicago didn't have as bad of a tunnel situation as many of its peers (what with most of its trains being elevated), but I've heard my share of horror stories from people clearing out the city. I'm not sure whether they had dedicated tunnel-clearing missions or whether the city sweepers just dealt with tunnel problems as they came up, but either way...glad I stuck to rural areas. They've got their own problems, but they have fewer infected and more space.
Tangent, but I'm worried about education. Us Great Lakes survivors hadn't gone past arguments about curricula before the central government set up shop; they're putting together the laws and infrastructure and stuff, but I'm a bit concerned by their decisions. Making STEM basically just electives is the thing most people are talking about, but they've gutted liberal arts too. Literature classes, art/music/etc, and most relevantly to this discussion, history.
Pretty much the only discussion about history curricula I've seen from mainstream sources is poking fun at how they sort everything into either "Ancient History" or "American History". Yes, it's very funny that the feds think all history before Christopher Columbus is "ancient," but that's just a shadow of the actual problem. "American History" is the story of our glorious nation, "Ancient History" is the backstory of its first inhabitants, that's all they want to teach. Concerning.
My personal guess is that, once you experience enough of the same stimulus, you start to see/hear it everywhere. Underground tunnels homogenize sight (and sound, to an extent) more than e.g. forests or overgrown cornfields, so the cues for Something Going Wrong are more consistent, so the human brain teaches itself paranoia towards those stimuli faster and starts finding false positives. Like if Pavlov's dogs heard so many bells and so little else that they'd drool when someone dropped their keys.
Just a guess, though.
OOC
Chicago didn't have as bad of a tunnel situation as many of its peers (what with most of its trains being elevated), but I've heard my share of horror stories from people clearing out the city. I'm not sure whether they had dedicated tunnel-clearing missions or whether the city sweepers just dealt with tunnel problems as they came up, but either way...glad I stuck to rural areas. They've got their own problems, but they have fewer infected and more space.
It's also pretty common among rural kids, at least here in the New World. Well, not "denialism" exactly; it's just that their history education is spotty and "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" jokes are a significant proportion of what they know about France. The fact that a bunch of feds buy into French Resistance denialism doesn't help, but plain old ignorance is a significant problem.
Tangent, but I'm worried about education. Us Great Lakes survivors hadn't gone past arguments about curricula before the central government set up shop; they're putting together the laws and infrastructure and stuff, but I'm a bit concerned by their decisions. Making STEM basically just electives is the thing most people are talking about, but they've gutted liberal arts too. Literature classes, art/music/etc, and most relevantly to this discussion, history.
Pretty much the only discussion about history curricula I've seen from mainstream sources is poking fun at how they sort everything into either "Ancient History" or "American History". Yes, it's very funny that the feds think all history before Christopher Columbus is "ancient," but that's just a shadow of the actual problem. "American History" is the story of our glorious nation, "Ancient History" is the backstory of its first inhabitants, that's all they want to teach. Concerning.
I've heard a lot of people theorize why that happens to veterans in some places but not others. How much of it is hallucinations, how much is audio pareidolia, how much of it is unreported real events distorted by local conditions.
My personal guess is that, once you experience enough of the same stimulus, you start to see/hear it everywhere. Underground tunnels homogenize sight (and sound, to an extent) more than e.g. forests or overgrown cornfields, so the cues for Something Going Wrong are more consistent, so the human brain teaches itself paranoia towards those stimuli faster and starts finding false positives. Like if Pavlov's dogs heard so many bells and so little else that they'd drool when someone dropped their keys.
Just a guess, though.
OOC
I love this section. It's a really effective side story. You know this story ends with his death, right from "God rest his soul". But the narrator never quite says what happened to Geordie. She can't bring herself to. The way she talks around the elephant in the room is as meaningful, as affective as the things she actually says.
Another banger line. It makes some amount of sense that the tunnel crew wouldn't get guns—bad sight lines, worse gunshot echoes—but not directly mentioning that until here is so much more impactful than just pointing out the reasons they didn't have guns or extolling the virtue of whatever they did have.
Max Brooks doesn't say why they didn't use fiber optic, and I don't know the pros or cons, but it's hard not to read this like in the context of the other stuff he writes that implies "new technology bad, old technology good".
GhostStalker
Jeopardy! contestant
- Location
- NYC
He was a Fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, by which I assume means he either taught or did research there, he didn't attend.
And you can't even blame his upbringing for his societal takes shown in this book, being the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft and raised in liberal Hollywood. So yeah, I have no idea where he picked up all of that, besides noting that he does have a Bachelor's in History as well.
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Coyote Niff
the most transbian obligate scavenger on the 'net!
- Location
- Misery!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
OOC: Time to catch up on the "near miss" party...
IC: Nothing but respect for what's left of France. My family and I were deployed there for liaison work just a few years before the Panic-still have no idea if any of the AdA* folks we lived and worked with made it out-and obviously it's pretty damn hard to fly there and check without crossing over one of two VERY hostile airspace envelopes. Adéline, if you're seeing this, thanks for the copy of <<Dans Le Peau D'Une Fille>>. You were right about me and I didn't see it. Someday I'll actually sit down and read the thing. Maybe I'll get to tell you what I think.
God, I hope so.
Anyway, onto the meat of why M. Renard and the kindly Ms. Mortal's horror stories made me set my keyboard aside for a minute before leaving my thoughts: The UAI had a tunnel fight too. On Guam. That was where I almost died.
You'll probably say, well, Ea-gal, what do you mean tunnel fights? You're on the biggest island in the Marianas! It's all jungle and mountains and plateaus! Who had the time or drive to build a bunch of tunnels? The Imperial Japanese did. The IJA death-marched the whole civilian population to the south part of the island in '44 (and if any Tantenokai weeb motherfucker says it wasn't a death march I'll <REDACTED BY MODERATOR STAFF> them) then turned the whole rest of north Guam into a warren of bunkers, tunnels, and command posts, all the way up to Mount Barrigada.
And when the infection rolled in, when that USAMRIID** flight from Taipei went down in central Tumon with dozens of fresh ghouls in the cargo bay, people fucking panicked. The poor bastards in the C-17 had been trying for Won Pat Airport, so in a few days, thousands of people on Guam were either dead, ghouls, or trapped inside the perimeter fences at Andersen, Naval Base Guam, or any number of fortified villages, protected by the remains of the GNG***, Air Force SecFor, or Marines. Everyone else on the island who didn't make it to either Yigo or Santa Rita? The ones who couldn't hole up in a high-rise hotel or the Ordnance Annex, down where the fresh water was? All those hundreds of tourists and so-called "long-term visitors", because nobody in the Territorial government wanted to admit that all these flights from Hong Kong and Petersburg and Astana were refugees, even as the Panic set in?
They followed their audiobooks and travel maps and Parks Service memorial guides. They went to the tunnels, because they thought they'd be safe in the same bunkers that had let IJA holdouts live off the land until the 1970s.
And they died up there. Almost every single one. They starved or they got in fights or they got lost or they got bit. They got up and killed, and the people they killed got up and killed.
And after the 67th Wing landed at Andersen, after folks like my mom and dad cleared Yigo and linked up by radio with the villages that'd weathered the Panic?
We had to go clear those tunnels out. I was 15. God help me, I fucking volunteered. I put on a slightly-too-big ABU, a MICH helmet, a MOLLE belt with four M9 mags, and an ancient Ontario survival knife, which I still keep on my desk. Thank God and the USAF we had these red-lens head lamps and a crate of ancient AN/PVS-7s some AMC**** logistics officer decided to keep locked up in the Andersen armory instead of sending them to the scrap heap. One set of NOGs***** to a six-person squad, with the optics up front and the lamps in the rear. Before I left, my dad hugged me, handed me his pistol, and told me to bring it back to him when I was done. It's the first time I'd seen him cry since we'd made that midnight elephant walk out of South Dakota.
Ten hours later, I had my near miss.
Everyone else in my unit was older than me, obviously; a 19-year-old Guard Specialist from Saipan, a Guam Police sergeant in his 50s who'd nearly lost an arm pulling people out of reach of ghouls during the evac of the Legislature, two really, really quiet PJs who'd been at Takur Ghar in the last brushfire, and Maria, a corpsman who'd been born and raised in Yigo and had the horrible luck to be on duty when the first Zack bite cases came into the Naval Hospital. So how did I decide to impress these survivors?
I took point in the mouth of the devil; me and my dad's pistol and a set of night vision goggles manufactured fifteen years before I was born.
Our assigned tunnel sector was bigger on the inside than a lot of the other ones-we figured the Japanese had carved it out to be a field hospital, like they did all over the occupied Pacific during the war. At first, cleaning it up was simple-a few dozen ghouls, here and there, and all I did was spot them on the NOGs, duck out of the line of fire, and let somebody else take the shot or swing the blade. But what got to me-to all of us-was the bodies. There were so, so many bodies, piled up all through the rat's nest of tunnels, not ghoul'd, not killed before Zack could get to them-just chewed or torn into shreds of rotting meat before they could even try to reanimate. There must have been about 250 intact corpses in our tunnel, clad in dirty Hawaiian shirts and sundresses and business suits, clutching golf clubs or wiffle ball bats or those dinky five-shot "banker's special" snub-nose pistols—anything they could get that felt like a weapon. I remember one chamber, long and wide, was empty except for a naked arm, ripped off at the shoulder root, surrounded by blood-covered sleeping bags.
Needless to say, I was fucking screaming inside my own head the entire time, and what capped it off was the end of the sortie; we had to go back out the thin, dank slit-tunnel we'd come in through, and because it was so tight, we did it in reverse. The whole time, this five-minute crawl back to daylight, I'm stuck in Tail-End Charlie, and because I'd had to pass the goggles to Maria, up on point, I was totally in the dark. All I can hear is my heartbeat, and everyone else's boots on stone-step, scrape, step, scrape. Then the rhythm changed. Step, scrape, drag. Step, scrape, sigh.
Everybody else says ghouls don't breathe-that the moan is just rotten air being forced through lungs that serve no other purpose.
Everybody else is full of shit, because the hot, stinking, moaning air of a dead man on my neck was the last thing I felt before this massive weight flops on top of me, writhing and clacking its rotten teeth like a snapping turtle flipped upside-down. The only thing I saw in the muzzle flash of mag-dumping my Beretta into the mass that was crushing me was the top of a Panama hat blowing out against the tunnel ceiling, straw bits mixing with that horrible black goo. I couldn't see or hear or think right until twenty minutes after, when the truck was taking us back home to Andersen, when I looked down at my ABUs and realized I'd pissed myself.
Sometimes, I close my eyes, and I see the dead man who almost killed me. And I see his missing arm.
So yeah, kids. Don't tunnel fight.
OOC Notes:
*AdA: Armée De L'Aire, the French air forces.
**USAMRIID: United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
***GNG: Guam National Guard.
****AMC: US Air Force Air Mobility Command, in charge of all American military air logistics.
*****NOGs: Night Optical Goggles.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
For applications where you may need to do a fair amount of splicing and patching, copper has some advantages. For applications where getting the equipment to actually generate and listen to the laser pulses is iffy because of years of industrial collapse, likewise. And some of fiber optic cable's advantages are irrelevant in a situation where you don't care about being able to pour gigabytes of data down your cable and just want a mostly comprehensible audio signal to get from one end to the other.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
Honestly these last couple of chapters have been really solid, capturing the claustrophobic atmosphere and mostly letting it play out with less weird brainworms, though sadly not without any brainworms at all, its just in a larger way making this really evocative tunnel-fighting narrative kinda lays another blow to the framing of the redeker west coast redoubt as harsh but necessary and all that. Cause like, if the national governments had been on the crisis and focused up on quarantining flare-ups and mobilizing the public in general for the disaster response and put everything into fighting for cities like Paris and London and so on, or even just stuck to their guns abandoning them to the dead and eventually just bombing them flat and paving over them, then you'd have tens of thousands of the most hardcore soldiers still around to save lives and link up survivor communities. (Which is why the meta-narrative of the let's read just flipped it around into being pointless nationalist dick-waving about planting a flag and/or getting dangerous uncontrolled elements chewed up and exhausted in the meatgrinder)