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.
It's pretty effective on anyone who doesn't pay enough attention to international news. And it's not 2002 any more; most people in my neighborhood don't have a family computer they can use to access the world wide web. If you don't actively seek out information (and aren't in touch with remaining socialist groups), you're probably going to accept the narrative you hear in the government-approved newspaper and radio broadcasts, because that Shadowrun fanfic is the only source you've got for Mexican politics.
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.
Where did Waino grow up and how does he not know fog happens inland?? It's not a function of ~sea air~ or whatever, it's a function of humidity and temperature!
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"?
"Don't fight wars in winter" is one of the oldest tricks in the book, up there with "Don't march through a desert without enough supplies". Industrialized warfare lets you bend some of those old rules, but the infected wrecked pretty much everyone's logistical capabilities.
And that's on top of how the infected "freeze" in the winter. The community where I spent my first post-plague winter organized some ghoul-smashing trips when we realized they froze in the snow, but it is fucking
impossible to find them when they're not moving or moaning. It wasn't a complete waste of time—it was good practice for when the infected thawed—but it was utterly ineffective at the intended purpose.
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.
Now, I'm one of those loons who thinks that we should be investigating ways to
cure the infection instead of just shooting
every infected on sight. Maybe I'm too much of a bleeding-heart commie to understand what these little army guys were going through, when they faced those big bad 15-year-olds and their super-scary fingernails or rocks.
But I'm pretty sure most people would find this callous, and I don't want to hang out with people who'd shoot an uninfected kid with motherfucking incendiary rounds, whether or not they fondly reminisce about the kid's screams of agony. What the shit.
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.
It seems like Wainio is actively obfuscating the distinction between the
de facto death squads and the anti-ghoul forces. If you add the entire hostile communities pacified by death squads to all the individual homesteads and lone survivors who Waino and his buddies inseminated, you might reduce the hostile responses to a minority. At the very least, you'd probably reduce them to a small enough statistical percentage that people who get all their news from the Junta's media buddies will find it plausible that it averaged out that way over the entire continent.
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.
I'm not surprised; flus aren't
supposed to kill people. Of course, that expectation was established when people had access to kleenex and sick days and antibiotics and health care professionals that were slightly less overworked.
A new strain of avian influenza or something is the most plausible "conspiracy theory" I've heard, but I haven't seen any evidence for it beyond being more deadly than flu is "supposed" to be. It was
probably 100% normal flu, but I would not personally state that as definitive fact.
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.
The Boyle Heights Buddy seems like a pretty good example of how they toe that line. He's a nameless everysemi-mythic figure who acted as a proper warrior-patriot, just the same as any white citizen. It pacifies all but the most murderous racists by identifying this guy as One Of The Good Immigrants, separate from the ordinary [insert slur here], who don't live up to his example. It also extends an olive branch to ordinary immigrants and POC, assuring them that the junta is capable of elevating and openly praising even people like them...though it of course condemns any who aren't One Of The Good Ones, anyone too unruly or unproductive or ambitious or critical of the Powers That Be.
am
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.
If I were to engage in WWZ apologetics, I could say that "doctrine" in this case was referring to the
intent, the
plan, the way it was
supposed to work out. Of course, that only works if we accept an overconfident American junta as doomed to failure as the Battle of Yonkers, except for strategic blunders instead of using technology the author doesn't like.
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.
It's a plan that makes sense on paper. Line 1 dispatches some troops to deal with zombies, line 2 dispatches some troops to fill the gap, line 1 fills in the gap in line 2.
It's also a plan that has no chance of working in reality. Marching in two reasonably continuous lines across an entire continent is hard enough on its own! If you have a million soldiers in the line, ten thousand of them are going to suffer
some kind of setback at some point in the day, which will force them to stop or slow down, which means either
one million soldiers need to stop/slow until that one unlucky soldier sorts things out (and do it again for the other 9,999), or you need some system that lets parts of the army stop and catch up later. And don't get me started about night! Mr. Brooks, do you
seriously expect me to believe the army camps in two straight lines of tents each night? How do they clump up into individual camps when they go to sleep, or spread back out into the lines in the morning?
And of course, adding zombies and FAR unit coordination to the mix makes everything
so much worse. This plan won't survive long enough to break down on first contact with the enemy.
"Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult."
—Carl von Clausewitz
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.
Is there a word for wanking the concept of America?
No, not patriotism, that's not derisive enough.
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!
I wonder how they did that quick enough to keep up with Line 2 before they ran out of spare manpower for FAR units.
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.
This reminds me of
a post I saw on Tumblr recently. TL;DR: A bunch of lefties reacting in horror to a meme where cops laugh at a social worker trying to de-escalate a situation involving a "6'3", 280 pound, buck naked psycho". It's not the exact same energy; the meme is actively mocking the social worker for not murdering some guy going through a mental health crisis the instant he seems like a threat, but Max Brooks is just treating that guy as a lost cause.
But it's still gross. It's still identifying a type of human who are
subhuman, whose lives can be casually snuffed out by officers who claim to protect the public, at said officers' discretion. Inventing a term dehumanizing enough to convince your friends that it's OK to treat them as disposable, not worth considering as anything but threats, certainly not
people. And of course, the group they targeted is one already at the margins of society, who can't function in society because they've been denied the resources necessary to do so, and using that largely artificial shortcoming as a justification to label them as inherently inferior.
And it's not like Max Brooks
had to include ferals! They're not a genre staple he wanted to put a spin on. When zombie media has human antagonists, they're organized groups of bandits who know what they're doing and why. But either Brooks couldn't imagine that significant numbers of mentally well people would resist the government, or he wasn't comfortable having the army mass-murder humans without a dehumanizing label, and decided to add ferals instead of removing conflict between the army and civilians.
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.
Wank wank wank.
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.]
...I suddenly feel uncomfortable describing this as wank.
I don't have a specific quote to attach to this, but what the fuck are F-critters? Are they just normal wild animals? Wild animals driven mad by zombie fumes? Fallout-style mutant animals? Why are mountain lions more than a footnote or anecdote in this kind of narrative?
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.
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.
His mother's very proud.
Not sure how that joke will land with anyone who hasn't seen the video essay I'm referencing.
That brings Total War to an end, so all I have left to cover is the last chapter of this book - Goodbyes.
Getting ready to wrap this up? Well, it's been a fun ride.
It's so they can call them "Lame-os" which is apparently how they pronounce it.
It's extremely "I'm not owned" energy.
"I have already drawn you as the soyjak and me as the chad!"
Then again he's also saying shit like this. He is, as he grouses about how people gave him shit for murdering children, and admitting that they where also able to save those kids that he was causally murdering.
Considering the discourse around police brutality, I don't find that remarkable. Most kids the police murder have families and teachers and dreams of getting a job and contributing to society in some fashion; the "feral bulls" are
way easier to dehumanize.
