Total War, Part 6
Todd fucking Wainio.
DENVER, COLORADO
[The weather is perfect for the neighborhood picnic in Victory Park. The fact that not one sighting has been recorded this spring gives everyone even more reason to celebrate. Todd Wainio stands in the outfield, waiting for a high fly ball that he claims "will never come." Perhaps he's right, as no one seems to mind me standing next to him.]
I know it's petty point scoring but… is he even playing? Maybe he's stealing baseball valour.
As far as "not one sighting" goes it's one of those statements with * after it, you know? But it isn't wrong, near as I can tell - in Colorado there were no sightings outside of the Rocky Exclusion Zone for a couple years there.
Obviously now it's a little different, since the riots started and the government pulled a bunch of troops off the exclusion perimeters, but at the time of the interview this is correct.
They called it "the road to New York" and it was a long, long road. We had three main Army Groups: North, Center, and South. The grand strategy was to advance as one across the Great Plains, across the Midwest, then break off at the Appalachians, the wings sweeping north and south, shoot for Maine and Florida, then grind across the coast and link up with AG Center as they slogged it over the mountains. It took three years.
Theoretically Army Group Centre was supposed to be the one chewing through Ghouls whilst AG North and AG South punched through the relatively light ghoul concentrations in places like New Mexico and the Dakotas and then shifted to get to grips with the CSA and the Socialist Republic.
This did not happen. AG North ran into trouble almost immediately - the Black Hills was just the first organised opposition, they spent the opening few months blasting away at weird freaks in the "American Redoubt" whilst taking attritional losses against the ghouls that were above replacement for them. Consequently - given the Black Hills then took another few months of brutal, brutal guerrilla combat, burning through armour they couldn't afford to lose this far west - when that first winter locked them down cold, they were still barely into the Dakotas and Nebraska, and meanwhile AG South was in West Texas, taking a pounding from the CSA.
The poor bastards in Centre, meanwhile, were bleeding their lifeblood out over Utah and Colorado, and weren't positioned to help anyone.
By the time AG North broke the back of the CSA and could withdraw back to their skeleton garrisons in the Dakotas, it was Spring and the ghouls were back with a vengeance.
Absolute horrorshow of a campaign, and that was before they had to fight the Socialist Republic
at all.
Why so slow?
Dude, take your pick: foot transport, terrain, weather, enemies, battle doctrine . . . Doctrine was to advance as two solid lines, one behind the other, stretching from Canada to Aztlan . . . No, Mexico, it wasn't Aztlan yet.
This was obviously not doctrine. No army on Earth could in genuine sincerity, try to clear a continent by lining soldiers up in a big long string and walking across.
He's talking literally about a very figurative process; there were two advancing fronts that the Americans used, and they swapped off as needed - genuinely it was a remarkably good system for what they expected from it. One front numerically dwarfed the other - the anti-ghoul forces, with their bolt action rifles, advancing on shank's pony - and the other was in effect a loose collection of roving death squads, with Bradleys and Abrams and automatic weapons. They could punch through a moat half a kilometre thick and liquidate the fractious defenders of whatsoever compound or settlement they were assigned to deal with.
It worked well - if slowly - against disordered and ineffectual resistance, such as they'd seen west of the Rockies and saw also from the weird neo-nazi compounds in Idaho.
It worked less well as resistance stiffened.
For those of you less plugged into American news - any Mexicans reading this, for example - you may be surprised to learn that Mexico has been taken over by Aztec Restorationists. This is because the Americans are currently engaged in possibly the dumbest and most racist propaganda campaign they've tried since the war.
They never
liked the new Mexican government, and they
certainly didn't like the way the Mexicans interacted with the neo-Zapatistas, but it really got worse once Mexico started to move left, and become more open to indigenous rights - the "Aztlan" shit began about then, but really intensified following the Mexican Spring, which precipitated their expulsion from the UN. The American government calls them "Aztlan" because they no longer recognise the Mexican government as legitimate, and their pet journalists and channels engage in vile racist narratives about how Mexico's particular laws on religious freedoms and a secular state are "actually" a way to allow "tribes like the Aztecs" to engage in human sacrifice once again.
It is wildly out of touch, and I don't
think it has much purchase; none of their allies have tried to follow them on it, even.
Whenever you spotted Zack, either in a group or just on his own, a FAR unit would halt…
FAR?
Force Appropriate Response. You couldn't stop, like, the whole Army Group, for one or two zombies. A lot of the older Gs, the ones infected early in the war, they were starting to get pretty grody, all deflated, parts of their skulls starting to show, some bone poking through the flesh.
It is only a very little thing, but like… most ghouls should be "older Gs" right? The bulk of the dead should've been in the initial collapse.
Except, of course, if you have made the deliberate choice to sacrifice the bulk of your civilian population piecemeal to distract the ghouls, such that you are providing a steady diet of collapsing enclaves throughout the war.
I just sometimes have to draw out and think on another way the Redeker plan is stupid in its monstrosity, okay?
You'd halt a section, a platoon, maybe even a company depending on how many you encountered, just enough to take 'em down and sanitize the battlefield. The hole your FAR unit left in the battle line was replaced by an equal force from the secondary line a click and a half behind you.
Even at the scale they actually attempted these "sweep and clear" operations - typically at the brigade or regimental level, occasionally a division if they were feeling especially confident in the sweep not finding anything - the two line system would obviously and immediately disintegrate into a ramshackle mess - you drop out of line and a replacement force moves to take your place but whilst they're marching that 1.5k, another three "FAR units" have dropped out and it's become incomprehensible where the actual line is.
Now imagine doing this across a continent. Bafflingly stupid misunderstanding of the operation, and since it is a matter of public record that Wainio was in the army by this point, he's not making this up! He genuinely thinks this is how they cleared America! He's just dumb enough to mistake his brigade for the whole army, I fear.
And there was fog. I didn't know fog could be so thick that far inland. I always wanted to ask a climatologist or someone about that. The whole front might get slammed, sometimes for days. Just sitting there in zero visibility, occasionally one of your Ks would start barking or a man down the line would shout "Contact!" You'd hear the moan and then the shapes would appear.
Fog was an intermittent hazard to us actually - it was more of an issue up north, for the royalists - but it was always one of the more disruptive; when visibility drops that severely, you just can't do anything about it, you can't really manoeuvre and your effective engagement range collapses to only a few feet.
I saw a movie once,1 this BBC documentary about how because the UK was so foggy, the British army would never stop. There was a scene, where the cameras caught a real firefight, just sparks from their weapons and hazy silhouettes going down. They didn't need that extra creepy soundtrack.2 It freaked me out just to watch.
It will be a cold day in hell before I give the royalists credit for any acts of valour or bravery, and so I shall simply not discuss this except to note it wouldn't have been a problem if they hadn't based themselves in northern Scotland, and it's really their own fault they were fighting in the foggiest part. The casualty figures bear this out - not a small death toll, by any account.
It also slowed us down to have to keep pace with the other countries, the Mexicans and Canucks. Neither army had the manpower to liberate their entire country. The deal was that they'd keep our borders clear while we get our house in order.
Nonsense claim. The problem wasn't that they lacked the manpower, it was that they had different strategies of advance, and America's unguided bullrush for the East Coast outpaced them pretty quickly. Mexico could - and did - clear their own territory, they just didn't do it by pissing soldiers away so they could "win" the race to reclaim all their land.
That was the start of the UN multinational force, but I was discharged long before those days. For me, it always felt like hurry up and wait, creeping along through rough terrain or built-up areas. Oh, and you wanna talk about speed bumps, try urban combat.
The UN multinational force, or "Diet NATO" because half of pre-war NATO has been refusing to send America any support and the other half doesn't have the stability to deploy soldiers outside their own borders. America is really reliant on their remaining allies who are all they way bought in - the UK, the USSA, the Holy Russian Empire, Brazil…
It'd sure be a shame if something happened to those places!
On another note, if you wrote down every insight Todd Wainio has about urban warfare, you will, perhaps, be able to cover a postage stamp. Double spaced.
The strategy was always to surround the target area. We'd set up semipermanent defenses, recon with everything from satellites to sniffer Ks, do whatever we could to call Zack out, and go in only after we were sure no more of them were coming. Smart and safe and relatively easy. Yeah, right!
Not a terrible doctrine, offhand. We used to encircle the city, determine the routes into it that are most effective, liaise with any survivor enclaves within, draw out the floating ghoul population with music and scouts, and only then push along various vectors to break it up into manageable chunks which can be cleared at leisure.
Their strategy was similar; honestly there's only so many ways you
can clear a city, I suppose. Interestingly the difference at first blush seems to be that they don't doctrinally expect survivors.
As far as surrounding the "area," someone wanna tell me where that area actually begins? Cities weren't cities anymore, you know, they just grew out into this suburban sprawl. Mrs. Ruiz, one of our medics, called it "in-fill." She was in real estate before the war and explained that the hottest properties were always the land between two existing cities.
Alright so this is actually slightly confusing to a lot of people, I will grant, but it's pretty straightforward beneath it all - armies will, if given no specific orders - flow like a liquid.
So as you approach a city, where the front hits the suburbs, it will slow, whilst the flanks - which have not yet - will advance, and steadily come to sort of engulf the city?
It is more complicated, I'm sure - I was never higher rank than Lieutenant, so I missed any and all high command decisions on this - for larger cities it was typically more planned out, but ultimately this was the underlying mechanism.
We tended to clear suburbia when we controlled it, though - living in individual houses is a spook which discourages any sense of communal ownership of the space you live in, and - more pragmatically - leaves you more susceptible to dying preventably without anyone noticing.
I thought, hey, once the temp drops, we're little more than garbage men: find 'em, Lobo 'em, mark 'em for burial once the ground begins to thaw, no problem. But I should be Lobo'd for thinking that Zack was the only bad guy out there.
Abjectly moronic of them to continue the advance under winter conditions, and an undeniable proximate cause of their remaining sporadic ghoul outbreaks. When it starts to get too cold to dig the fire pits for the dead, you know the ghouls have frozen, and you'll need to stop advancing or you'll miss them in the snow.
Also, if you want to talk about bad guys in the winter, fuck all his whining about "Quislings" and "Ferals" - the enemy is
winter, idiot. Frostbite, hypothermia, pneumonia, snowblindness… there is a reason why most armies went to winter quarters in the darker months, and that first glorious campaign against the CSA convincing the Americans they didn't need to was the cause of an absurd amount of casualties - and just because the number that were actually permanently taken out of action was pretty low doesn't mean the poor bastards with three fingers on each hand and no nose, ears or lips are "fine"?
Todd Wainio has, or presents at interview at least, a
child's view of war, where the only obstacle is The Enemy and you can just deal with them with sufficient application of unflinching violence. Even odds whether it's because he is ideologically blind, just saying what the junta wants their soldiers to tell the civilians, or just his dumb luck that he was never stationed anywhere
really cold. He barely talks about winter at all, even when he does finally bring it up in this interview.
Ferals were a much more dangerous threat. A lot of them weren't kids anymore, some were teenagers, some full grown. They were fast, smart, and if they chose fight instead of flight, they could really mess up your day. Of course, HR would always try and dart them, and, of course, that didn't always work. When a two-hundred-pound feral bull is charging balls out for your ass, a couple CCs of tranq ain't gonna drop him before he hits home.
HR - human reclamation - was a sad little pet project of the Governor of Oregon, and he rode it the whole way into the ground. Underfunded, underappreciated and largely only treated as a fig leaf, you just need to look at how soldiers like Wainio talk about "feral bulls" to know how HR was treated by the army at large. Hell, even "HR" is an acronym with some
baggage under the junta, right? Casualty of their war on the professional managerial class as being weak and effeminate.
Anyway, a "200 pound feral bull" is more accurately going to be used to describe a teenager - statistically likely to be African-American based on figures for which "ferals" were shot dead by Junta forces (though as we only have vague figures taken from defectors and Mexican troops detached to the US, the figures could be wrong, I suppose) which makes use of "bull" sit uncomfortably with various nasty strains of American racism, if in this case possibly unintentionally - who has been so malsocialised that they need a soft touch. Generally speaking the children and teenagers in this position could be - based on similar cases in other countries - talked down by a qualified specialist. No need for tranquilisers, certainly no need for incendiary rounds. Brute.
If a dart didn't stop a feral, we sure as hell did. Nothing screams as high as a feral with a PIE round burning in his gut. The HR pukes had a real problem with that. They were all volunteers, all sticking to this code that human life, any human's life, was worth trying to save. I guess history sorta backed them up now, you know, seeing all those people that they managed to rehabilitate, all the ones we just woulda shot on sight.
I am trying to imagine the mindset required to still be this transparently pissed at the "HR pukes" with their politically correct notion that human life has value.
I just can't do it though. To be this begrudging about the utter vindication of the idea that not murdering kids was the right call, you have to be
so deeply invested in the idea that murdering kids was the right thing to do.
Am I saying Todd Wainio murdered kids en masse whilst on active duty? Yes, I am - what's he gonna do about it? Try to sue me for libel? I'm in Cuba, moron.
Anyway, it isn't just me. [HERE] is the testimony of a Human Reclamation operative he served with, which I found with only a little digging. Hideous little war criminal.
Man, feral packs, that freaked me out more than anything else. I'm not just talking dogs. Dogs you knew how to deal with. Dogs always telegraphed their attacks. I'm talking "Flies"3: F-Lions, cats, like part mountain lion, part ice age saberfuck. Maybe they were mountain lions, some sure looked like them, or maybe just the spawn of house cats that had to be super badass just to make it.
Either feral cats just got super big, or the persistent conspiracy theories of Great Britain having a stable breeding population of Big Cats released from Victorian-era private zoos were a lot more substantiated than anyone pre-War gave credence to, because we had these great vicious beasties, too.
I've mentioned before that I've always been a cat person, so this shouldn't really be a surprise - I love these murderous kitkats. We managed to half-tame one, actually, in the countryside beyond Birmingham. Great big black beauty, she was something of a unit mascot. Our anarchists always got a kick out of having a black wildcat for a mascot. I just loved giving her scritches, and I got pretty good at working out when she would let me.
She's in a zoo in Havana now, which is a kinder fate than a lot of our unit.
That must have been a hazard for the sniffer dogs.
Are you kidding? They loved it, even the little dachmutts, made 'em feel like dogs again. I'm talking about us, getting jumped from a tree limb, or a roof. They didn't charge you like F-hounds, they just waited, took their sweet time until you were too close to raise a weapon.
Got to agree with Todd here - even small dogs
are stupid enough to think they can fight a giant murderous cat.
Beyond that… yeah, feral cats sucked to deal with.
I was stepping through the window of a Starbucks and suddenly three of them leap at me from behind the counter. They knock me over, start tearing at my arms, my face. How do you think I got this?
[He refers to the scar on his cheek.]
Godspeed you beautiful feline bastards, Godspeed.
Anyway, it is worth noting - he was on cleanup, in Minneapolis. The Gateway to the Socialist Republic, Jewel of the West, the SRGL held onto that city like a terrier with a bone. The city centre was a burnt out ruin, surrounded by the blazing skeletons of the first rate tanks of both armies.
It was only once that was finished and the front had moved on that the less professional core of the US Army was sent in, the mass conscripts with their Standard Infantry Rifles and Lobos, to clear out the ghouls, GDs, and feral children and animals. He was effectively a janitor, which is probably why he blundered into an ambush like that.
I guess the only real casualty that day was my shorts. Between the bite-proof BDUs and body armor we'd started wearing, the vest, the helmet…I hadn't worn a hard cover in so long, you forget how uncomfortable it is when you're used to going soft top.
Wild to pretend he was wearing this for protection against individual dipshits with guns. Do you really, truly, believe that the US Army in this war was overflowing with concern for their soldiers sufficient to do that? Come on now. No, it was for stay-behind units.
I'm not talking organized rebels, just the odd LaMOE,[5] Last Man on Earth. There was always one or two in every town, some dude, or chick, who managed to survive. I read somewhere that the United States had the highest number of them in the world, something about our individualistic nature or something.
"I read somewhere" he says, like a liar. This is just… not true? By literally any measure, this isn't the case.
Anyway, "LaMOEs" - which is such a snivelling phrase for these people, by the way - just were not very common, sorry. Humans are not built to live alone under these conditions. They're effectively a fiction to explain the guerrilla war they found themselves fighting, because "Actually people are mad as hell we destroyed their government" doesn't fit when they are so committed to downplaying the prominence of their rival governments?
Even so far as they did exist, the largest number of them per capita was in Aotearoa, and the largest number
total was in Nigeria. On all counts this is a lie, Todd's such a prick.
We were closing on the Sears Tower in Chicago. Chicago, that was enough nightmares for three lifetimes. It was the middle of winter, wind whipping off the lake so hard you could barely stand, and suddenly I felt Thor's hammer smash me in the head. Slug from a high-powered hunting rifle. I never complained about our hard covers anymore after that. The gang in the tower, they had their little kingdom, and they weren't giving it up for anyone. That was one of the few times we went full convent; SAWs, nades, that's when the Bradleys started making a comeback.
I do not know a single veteran of the SR's army who does not openly wish they had been part of this stay-behind force. Approximately two thousand volunteers who went underground until the increasingly threadbare frontline psychopaths with most of what was left of the Junta's armour had gone through and was planning the assault on Detroit and into the East, then occupied various spots to tie up the cleanup front, of which Todd was a part.
They put snipers in Sears Tower, set landmines all about the city, put razorwire in doorways… They did whatever they could to make the city a horrific quagmire, and it worked - the Americans had to rush their armour back to Chicago, and the month and a half it took for them to crush them was more than long enough for the mass evacuation of the Eastern half of the Socialist Republic.
Chicago has not, to the best of my knowledge, been completely rebuilt. There used to be more skyscrapers in Chicago alone than all of California.
After Chicago, the brass knew we were now in a full, multithreat environment. It was back to hard covers and body armor, even in summer. Thanks, Windy City. Each squad was issued pamphlets with the "Threat Pyramid."
It was ranked according to probability, not lethality. Zack at the bottom, then F-critters, ferals, quislings, and finally LaMOEs.
Slowed their advance all the way down, too. It breaks my heart, it really does. I used to wish I had been allowed to do the same from the top of the Shard or something, but it would've been pointless - our government rolled over without even losing a battle, whilst the SR continued to do what was best for its people until the very last. There's no use dying for nothing.
At least the guys down south knew that once they swept an area, it stayed swept. They didn't have to worry about rear area attacks like us. We swept every area at least three times. We used everything from ramrods and sniffer Ks to high-tech ground radar. Over and over again, and all of this in the dead of winter. We lost more guys to frostbite than to anything else. And still, every spring, you knew, you just knew…it'd be like, "oh shit, here we go again." I mean, even today, with all the sweeps and civilian volunteer groups, spring's like winter used to be, nature letting us know the good life's over for now.
I think literally only vanity and hubris can explain why they continued their advance during the winter, hand on heart. There is no other justification, it was just pure stupidity.
Tell me about liberating the isolated zones.
Always a hard fight, every single one. Remember these zones were still under siege, hundreds, maybe even thousands. The people holed up in the twin forts of Comerica Park/Ford Field, they must have had a combined moat—that's what we called them, moats—of at least a million Gs. That was a three-day slugfest, made Hope look like a minor skirmish. That was the only time I ever really thought we were gonna be overrun.
Look up "survivorship bias" on this - no one who survives the war has many occasions to speak of where they nearly got overwhelmed, because anyone who got overwhelmed
definitely died and so there's no survivors' accounts from those battalions or even, like, divisions.
It happened with startling regularity, though.
What were the reactions of the people who you liberated?
Kind of a mix. The military zones, that was pretty low-key. A lot of formal ceremonies, raising and lowering of flags, "I relieve you, sir—I stand relieved," shit like that. There was also a little bit of wienie wagging. You know "we didn't need any rescuing" and all. I understand. Every grunt wants to be the one riding over the hill, no one likes to be the one in the fort. Sure you didn't need rescuing, buddy.
The machismo running through the American military is quite something!
I don't know. Personally never saw this - even military units would usually be grateful as and if we relieved them? - though admittedly, we avoided any that were frothing at the mouth about the royalists, so perhaps those would've been more hostile, or at least cold with us.
What about the civilian zones?
Different story entirely. We were so the shit! They'd be cheering and shouting. It was like what you'd think war was supposed to be, those old black-and-whites of GIs marching into Paris or wherever. We were rock stars. I got more…well…if there's a bunch of little dudes between here and the Hero City that happen to look like me…[Laughs.]
Civilians who the junta left to die but who turned around and celebrated them finally coming back are some of the most pathetic losers in the world, even if I don't necessarily blame them for their gratitude.
And to be fair to them, it has largely faded as the militarism of the junta has failed to disappear, and as various public services and infrastructure commitments have fallen by the wayside in favour of increasingly military funding. Not many pockets of fervent loyalism to the Junta even left any more, East of the Rockies.
Rarely, like, blue-moon rarely, we'd enter a zone where we were totally not welcome. In Valley City, North Dakota, they were like, "Fuck you, army! You ran out on us, we don't need you!"
Incredibly funny to act like anyone is going to believe you when you claim it was "blue-moon rarely" - this was frankly the overwhelmingly most common response? The death squads only came for free zones that would be actively hostile, not for ones that were "just rude" - which then made up the bulk of zones the mainline army would ever encounter.
Pretending most people were actually totally fine with being left behind by the US Army, fine with being lied to by the US Government, fine with being treated as sacrificial lambs for the survival of the rich arseholes and government officials who hid beyond the Rockies is, like… no one could possibly believe this outside of, like, a handful of the most profoundly pessimistic leftists?
Was that a secessionist zone?
Oh no, at least these people let us in. The Rebs only welcomed you with gunshots. I never got close to any of those zones. The brass had special units for Rebs. I saw them on the road once, heading toward the Black Hills. That was the first time since crossing the Rockies that I ever saw tanks. Bad feeling; you knew how that was gonna end.
The Lakota.
This was vaguely hidden from the army for a while, but it leaked eventually - you don't get to be the sort of person who can be in a death squad without being the sort of person who brags about being in a death squad.
There's been a lot of stories about questionable survival methods used by certain isolated zones.
Yeah, so? Ask them about it.
I give Todd credit so rarely, but this is one of those occasions - this is, in fact, the correct response to a journalist trying to prod you into endorsing the Junta's show trials of anyone from the isolated zones who is now trying to crack into American politics.
I know historians like to talk about how the U.S. Army had such a low casualty rate during the advance. Low, as in compared to other countries, China or maybe the Russkies. Low, as in only counting the casualties caused by Zack. There were a million ways to get it on that road and over two-thirds weren't on that pyramid.
American Historians do this, and you can see the trick they play. First, compare only with Russia and China, other countries that fought a civil war against a peer opponent, rather than with countries that didn't - the obvious comparator would be Mexico, right? But they don't use it.
Second, only count the casualties "caused by Zack" - and you had better believe they don't quibble this for China or Russia, they just call it "causes unclear".
It is quite effective, if a little insultingly obvious.
Sickness was a big one, the kinds of diseases that were supposed to be gone, like, in the Dark Ages or something. Yeah, we took our pills, had our shots, ate well, and had regular checkups, but there was just so much shit everywhere, in the dirt, the water, in the rain, and the air we breathed. Every time we entered a city, or liberated a zone, at least one guy would be gone, if not dead then removed for quarantine. In Detroit, we lost a whole platoon to Spanish flu. The brass really freaked on that one, quarantined the whole battalion for two weeks.
Conspiracy theories about what disease it was that killed a platoon of American occupying troops in Detroit are insanely commonplace. I've heard it was the Spanish Flu, I've heard it was a bioweapon, I've heard it was a virus that made the jump from a bird or mammal someone shouldn't have eaten - like, a virus that would "usually" just give you a cold, but since it was completely new to their system, it was a lot worse? - but for my money, it was just the flu? Like, a normal flu. People die, especially people who are exhausted and malnourished.
Todd is parroting rumours he's heard and trying to pass them off as things he knows from personal experience again. Exhausting.
Then there were mines and booby traps, some civilian, some laid during our bugout west. Made a lot of sense back then. Just seed mile after mile and wait for Zack to blow himself up. Only problem is, mines don't work that way. They don't blow up a human body, they take off a leg or ankle or the family jewels. That's what they're designed for, not to kill people, but to wound 'em so the army will spend valuable resources keeping them alive, and then send 'em home in a wheelchair so Ma and Pa Civilian can be reminded every time they see 'em that maybe supporting this war isn't such a good idea.
I've never said the stay behind units were entirely clean and moral, and I never would. This shit sucks. Was it necessary? I don't know that I can answer that, but it was shit, and I don't think I could do it.
Mines are theoretically useful against zombies occasionally - a ghoul with a leg blown off is a lot less of a threat - but not actually, because the main purpose of a minefield is to slow the enemy down by forcing their sappers to clear a path, but ghouls don't slow down out of fear, because they don't fear.
I lost a buddy of mine that way, in a Wal-Mart in Rochester, New York. He was born in El Salvador but grew up in Cali. You ever heard of the Boyle Heights Boyz? They were these hard-core LA bangers who were deported back to El Salvador because they were technically illegal. My buddy was plopped there right before the war. He fought his way back up through Mexico, all during the worst days of the Panic, all on foot with nothing but a machete. He didn't have any family left, no friends, just his adopted home. He loved this country so much. Reminded me of my grandpa, you know, the whole immigrant thing. And then to catch a twelve-gauge in the face, probably set by a LaMOE who'd stopped breathing years before. Fuckin' mines and booby traps.
The Junta has an odd relationship with immigrants, I think - they consistently fearmonger about how they made up 25% of all ghouls in America, overwhelmed the infrastructure and so on - but also talk about how they're the "real" patriots, because they love America so much.
Curious sort of doublethink to keep sweet the immigrant workforce that props America up, whilst also not angering the wildly racist freaks who make up a lot of the bleeding edge of their military and are disproportionately represented in higher ranks - even under the New Clique.
On the note of that last - how long does he think a springwire trap can last? It almost assuredly was not set up by a "LaMOE who'd stopped breathing years before" but by someone who was deliberately seeking this outcome.
And then you just had accidents. So many buildings had been weakened from the fighting. Throw in years of neglect, and foot after foot of snow. Whole roofs collapsed, no warning, whole structures just tumbling down. I lost someone else like that. She had a contact, a feral running at her across an abandoned auto garage. She fired her weapon, that's all it took. I don't know how many pounds of snow and ice brought that roof down.
Buildings will just, like… collapse? After a decade of neglect, so many places you would've bet hard money would last for centuries were crumbling into ruins. Even a couple of the bridges across the Thames had subsided into the river by the time we got there, and were a stiff breeze from actual collapse, and gunshots are more disruptive than you'd think on issues like this.
She was…we were…close, you know. We never did anything about it. I guess we thought that would make it "official." I guess we thought it would make it easier in case something happened to one of us.
[He looks over at the bleachers, smiling at his wife.]
Didn't work.
Making it official and "taking what joy we can get" doesn't work either. At the time it hurt like someone had reached into my chest and pulled out my heart with red-hot claws.
She was from Glasgow and she never lost her accent or her hope for a better world, and I loved her so much, and I didn't truly think I would lose her, you know? We thought were were invincible. And then we were in those fucking tunnels and she died under Waterloo. Her name was Anna and I loved her. I thought the pain wouldn't ever end, and I still feel guilty sometimes that I found someone new and love her
more.
One guy in our platoon, an Amish guy, used to read all their suicide notes, commit them to memory, then give himself this little cut, this tiny half-inch nick somewhere on his body so he would "never forget." Crazy bastard was sliced from his neck to the bottom of his toes. When the LT found out about it…sectioned eight his ass right outa there.
Oh Todd, Todd, Todd.
He genuinely cannot help himself - he fought a war, he was by the metric of his country a war hero, he
got away with child murder - but he still needs to embellish his record. Every single one of his anecdotes was a famous or notable rumour going around the army at the time, and somehow every single one of them was in his squad or his platoon or his company.
It's almost sad how pathetic he is, then you remember he murdered kids.
I knew this one guy, massive 'roidasaurus, he'd been a professional wrestler before the war. We were walking up the freeway near Pulaski, New York, when the wind picked up the scent of a jackknifed big rig. It'd been loaded with bottles of perfume, nothing fancy, just cheap, strip mall scent. He froze and started bawlin' like a kid.
He can't help himself. Every fucking anecdote and rumour going through the army, he was right there, best friends with the guy it happened to. Is Todd a pathological liar? Like, there's easier ways to reflect glory than to pretend every famous or infamous person in the army was your close, personal confidant.
Another guy, nothing special about him, late forties, balding, bit of a paunch, as much as anyone could have back then, the kinda face you'd see in a prewar heartburn commercial. We were in Hammond, Indiana, scouting defenses for the siege of Chicago. He spied a house at the end of a deserted street, completely intact except for boarded-up windows and a crashed-in front door. He got a look on his face, a grin. We should have known way before he dropped out of formation, before we heard the shot. He was sitting in the living room, in this worn, old easy chair, SIR between his knees, that smile still on his face. I looked up at the pictures on the mantelpiece. It was his home.
Noting and setting aside that they were forced to set up defences for besieging Chicago, because the junta doesn't even really put a lot of effort into their claims that the rival governments were just especially large gangs, I do believe this one happened, actually.
The combination of it being just a guy, not a celebrity or someone with an interesting enough story to spread through the army, and it beginning with Todd being completely oblivious to one of his soldiers wandering off? Really sells it, to me.
One night in Portland, Maine, we were in Deering Oaks Park, policing piles of bleached bones that had been there since the Panic. Two grunts pick up these skulls and start doing a skit, the one from Free to Be, You and Me, the two babies. I only recognized it because my big brother had the record, it was a little before my time. Some of the older Grunts, the Xers, they loved it.
People will take any excuse to distract themselves when they're off duty. One of the people I used to shepherd with in Wales was this old guy who would try to entertain everyone when he was off duty by doing Monty Python skits and then painstakingly explaining the context around the skit. It filled the hours.
No idea why anyone would think this behaviour is symptomatic of being cracked, but Todd clearly did? It's just people being dumb, dude.
I don't know, exactly, why piles of bones needed to be policed? What was going to happen? I suspect it was literally just a way to get some time off.
Our squad leader, you'd probably recognize her. She was in The Battle of the Five Colleges. Remember the tall, amazon chick with the ditch blade, the one who'd sung that song? She didn't look like she used to in the movie. She'd burned off her curves and a crew cut replaced all that long, thick, shiny black hair. She was a good squad leader, "Sergeant Avalon."
He's such a lying sack of shit. He did not know her, he did not meet her. Do not call her "Avalon" - Avalon is not the movie, Avalon is not the song, Avalon is not her. Avalon was girl she was singing to.
People called her "Sergeant Avalon" if they had never met her, only knew her through reputation and the propaganda around her.
See, Five Colleges had bombed, but it picked up a cult following, because it was - so I have heard - his most "real" film, and that gained cache as his later films became increasingly staid and drab, and she was effectively the face of the film, so she was a useful propaganda soldier for them.
One day we found a turtle in a field. Turtles were like unicorns back then, you hardly saw them anymore. Avalon got this look, I don't know, like a kid. She smiled. She never smiled. I heard her whisper something to the turtle, I thought it was gibberish: "Mitakuye Oyasin." I found out later that it was Lakota for "all my relations." I didn't even know she was part Sioux. She never talked about it, about anything about her. And suddenly, like a ghost, there was Doctor Chandra, with that arm he always put around their shoulders and that soft, no-big-deal offer of "C'mon, Sarge, let's grab a cup of coffee."
There's a weird undercurrent here, because this is half a story being presented as the whole one?
He's also played stupid games with the timeline of when this happened. This was just after Valley City, in North Dakota, not - as he implies - after all these other anecdotes. Her permanent absence from the army was only announced as they approached New York, but she was long gone by then.
She was on medical leave for a month or so in a convalescence home back in Billings, and she got bored like two weeks in. There was this one guy in the home with her with a broken foot, and apparently he really wanted to impress her, so he was talking about his war so far, and - being a dumb bigoted asshat - he decided to do it by bragging about how he and "the boys" had been some of the first ones through the perimeter at the Black Hills, and they sent those - and here he used a slur - running.
And she didn't say a word even though she wanted to die, even though his face still haunts her dreams to this day, even though he told her about how the army she was serving in had slaughtered her whole family, had tried again to slaughter her whole people, and the grin on his face never dropped.
She opened his throat with a scalpel that night, then fled. Picked her way across Zack infested America and eventually washed up in Cuba after working the trade ships for a while out of Baton Rouge. That is what happened to "Sergeant Avalon" who never used that name.
That was the same day the president died. He must have also heard that little voice. "Hey, buddy, it's cool now, you can let go." I know a lot of people weren't so into the VP, like there was no way he could replace the Big Guy. I really felt for him, mainly 'cause I was now in the same position. With Avalon gone, I was squad leader.
It didn't matter that the war was almost over. There were still so many battles along the way, so many good people to say good-bye to.
I don't know who Todd's actual sergeant was, but I do believe he only took over his squad that close to the finish line, because if he had any authority any earlier, I truly think he would've gotten his entire squad killed.
The President's death was one of those moments of profound unfairness. These people should not be allowed to slip away peacefully, never punished for their ill deeds, still being valourised by their evil flunkies for the evil they put into the world.
By the time we reached Yonkers, I was the last of the old gang from Hope. I don't know how I felt, passing all that rusting wreckage: the abandoned tanks, the crushed news vans, the human remains. I don't think I felt much of anything. Too much to do when you're squad leader, too many new faces to take care of. I could feel Doctor Chandra's eyes boring into me. He never came over though, never let on that there was anything wrong. When we boarded the barges on the banks of the Hudson, we managed to lock eyes. He just smiled and shook his head. I'd made it.
Oh, you didn't feel much of anything passing through Yonkers? I'm sure.
Whoever blew the bridges to Manhattan genuinely has got to be the single largest contributor to the survival of the Hero City, for what that's worth.
It also helped a lot with keeping the Hero City kind of culturally independent, and it has
assuredly helped the thriving black market up there, which we're starting to see have some knock on effects.
That brings Total War to an end, so all I have left to cover is the last chapter of this book - Goodbyes. Not entirely sure how I'm going to do that, so watch this space!
Remember to mask up if you're going to a protest or riot!
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE]; now the HRE is down to only the one city, they're pretty sure all the breeding camps have been liberated and… fuck.
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. Exciting to see the list get shorter for good reasons! Too used to the reasons being, like, bad?
Donate to the Namibian Relief Fund [HERE] - just because it's a war zone does not magically remove the civilians.
Donate to the Red Cross [HERE] - wars are getting ugly across the world, they could use the help.
AN: God, I'm really sorry this one took so long to get out. I've had a bastard couple of months.
This is, so far as I could see, the last proper-length interview, so from here on out, I'll be trying to fit several into an update again. Some of this was written more than a month ago, so I hope it all hangs together okay.
fuldapocalypsefiction.com
OOC I'm given to understand that Aztec Reconstructionism or whatever you'd call it isn't, like, a thing in Mexico, so I'm not sure what causes American reactionaries to think that Mexicans are just itchin' to throw up some huge pyramids so they can start carving out people's hearts again. Probably their usual mix of racism and projection; they go out of their way to never learn anything about their closest neighbour except for atrocities committed centuries ago and the most obviously terrible things happening there now, and they want to bring back religious and governmental forms that were abandoned centuries ago and so figure that everybody does. Hmm.
