[It is spring, “hunting season.” As the weather warms, and the bodies of frozen zombies begin to reanimate, elements of the UN N-For (Northern Force) have arrived for their annual “Sweep and Clear.” Every year the undead’s numbers dwindle. At current trends, this area is expected to be completely “Secure” within a decade.

We haven’t yet been introduced to much of zombie behavior yet, so this seems reasonable, and the idea frozen zombies would be trapped by ice should be savored as emminantly reasonable on its own and also a rare exception to the nonsense we’ll mostly be getting.

Our interviewee today is Travis D’Ambrosia, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe there to be in charge of zombie mopup, and unlike last chapter’s friendly principal personality, is more of a broken man:

There is a softness to the general’s voice, a sadness. Throughout our interview, he struggles to maintain eye contact.

I won’t deny mistakes were made. I won’t deny we could have been better prepared. I’ll be the first one to admit that we let the American people down. I just want the American people to know why.

That’s right, “Surpreme Allied Commander, Europe” is an American. And yet the average American reads this book and is wowed by the multiculturalism.

He says that after the Israeli’s enacted “voluntary quarantine” that seemed to involve a lot of marching struggling people into black vans where they were never seen again, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had a meeting to discuss hypothetically discuss the theoretical outcome of a fantasy scenario that happened to involve possibly everybody dying of zombie.

We kept up with the charade as long as we could, speaking with a smile or punctuating with a joke…I’m not sure when the transition happened. It was so subtle, I don’t think anyone even noticed, but suddenly you had a room full of military professionals, each one with decades of combat experience and more academic training than the average civilian brain surgeon, and all of us speaking openly, and honestly, about the possible threat of walking corpses.

This is why I’m going to be spending this whole section repeating stuff about everyone involved being a pack of morons.

It doesn’t matter that they’re corpses. People are definitely dying of something, the government should be entirely capable of reacting to that. Even completely ignoring the part where they get up and attack more people, they have bite marks oozing vile black goo that causes them to shortly afterward collapse and die. Refuse to believe they’re getting bit by zombies, and you have a completely unknown epidemic with a 100% fatality rate and no idea how it’s transmitted. That’s enough information to round everyone with symptoms up. Manage the idea it’s transmitted through fluids, something that’s completely accepted as possible, and you understand the whole disease without needing to involve stupid stuff about magic walking corpses.

And Israel just invented an apparently foolproof sniff test. You don’t have to believe the dogs are smelling future zombies. All that matters if that if dogs bark, it’s because there’s an injury oozing black goo that indicates incoming death. The idea dogs can smell sickness is not new. Science is also totally fine with that already, and even if they weren’t, it can be proven quickly in any tests people want to do to verify it.

Refusing to believe they’re corpses might hamper people’s ability to switch from treatment to headshots, but not significantly so. Also, personally? I don’t think the government would actually have that much trouble with quarantine by way of killing.

I mean, remember the whole bird flu scare? What I remember was the government announcing their official anti-epidemic plan consisted of Fuck You. “The government’s role is not to handle epidemics.” So, if they were faced with a growing number of untreatable, contagious, insane sick people that were a pain to keep locked up? I don’t think the zombies would last long.

He also says he only saw the W-K report that’ll keep popping up all book a few years later. I really don’t care because as I keep saying it’s not like anti-zombie plans are all that difficult. You kill them before they bite you.

Most of its military measures were almost line for line in step with our own.
Your own what?
Our proposal to the White House.

This is the pics or gtfo moment. Everyone is going to keep saying they had the same idea. I think the author really means it to be that all the lower down people knew what to do and it was only the people at top that fucked up, not that everyone’s desperately shifting the blame. Sure reads better that way, though, especially when apparently everyone knew but weren’t taken seriously because no one else believed it.

We outlined a fully comprehensive program, not only to eliminate the threat within the United States, but to roll back and contain it throughout the entire world.

I mean, yeah right. “We were totally going to save the entire world, because that’s America’s policy and absolutely no one was creaming their pants as they imagined all those other countries being toppled and leaving behind their sweet, sweet resources.”

And that might actually be an interesting story in its own right – the US doesn’t want it contained because they’re planning to swoop in later and take over, only for it to turn out far worse and the dead overwhelm the US too.

Maybe something like the zombies evolving like in the Left 4 Dead series, or simply the virulence skyrocketing as was implied in the movie.

Anyway, their plan had a couple phases, and this is where it goes wrong.

The White House loved Phase One. It was cheap, fast, and if executed properly, 100 percent covert. Phase One involved the insertion of Special Forces units into infested areas. Their orders were to investigate, isolate, and eliminate.

Now, let’s take a moment to ponder that covert there. Again, I don’t think this is intended, but it sounds like they were doing the same thing as China. Because it’s very rare to find an infested area that’s solidly zombie, and likely even rarer to find such an area where the zombies are all still there and not spilling out toward the humans. How do you keep that under wraps? There’s no way this is just a matter of removing a single person who’s just turned and a couple who’ve been bit, because we’re talking “infested” here, not “infected”, and even that would be pretty hard to keep covert – though admittedly, it’s easier in a world where no one knows what a camera is or how to post something on the web.

Eliminate?
With extreme prejudice.
Those were the Alpha teams?
Yes, sir, and they were extremely successful. Even though their battle record is sealed for the next 140 years, I can say that it remains one of the most outstanding moments in the history of America’s elite warriors.

But yeah, totally murdering everyone. You wouldn’t hide something that everyone could be proud of, and even more to the point, after our world zombie war almost wipes us out, I don’t think anyone would respect sealed records. You want to know how the government could possibly have fucked up, so you want to know if their method for dealing with zombies had been, say, nerve gas the place and not bother to check if it worked. Someone would have to have fought very, very hard to keep this sealed.

But our intrepid reporter doesn’t seem to notice anything.

And our probably a war criminal interviewee explains that the first phase was supposed to just delay the disease’s spread, but no one even started phase two. Personally, I think phase one would’ve done it if only they closed the borders. We know this is not a disease that spreads easily, has very visible symptoms, and doesn’t lie dormant to confuse you. Ground the planes, refuse boats (or just demand they wait X period before you’ll let them in, given how quickly infection takes hold), build the stupid wall on the Mexican border – doesn’t even have to be that high since zombies aren’t the best climbers and you can deal with the occasional infected but not zombified person getting through. And tell the guards on the Canadian border to stop infected. I don’t think we much need to worry about Canadians running from their cold, low-population country with its functional health care system into our country, so there shouldn’t be much worry there. Maybe make sure they’ve grounded planes too, but considering that’s obvious, they’ll probably have done it on their own already.

Then send your alpha teams into the couple hotspots that have flared up while you were going this, and then keep them on the coastline for the occasional ship trying to smuggle people in. As the infection burns itself out, fewer and fewer of those ships will arrive until the disease is contained.

Phase Two required a massive national undertaking, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the darkest days of the Second World War. That kind of effort requires Herculean amounts of both national treasure and national support, both of which, by that point, were nonexistent.

Okay so let me just point out that the Second World War involved people who could manufacture bombs. Bombs are better at killing people than zombies. No, they are. Stop arguing. They are better at killing people than zombies and this is a fact. Other things that are better at killing people include tanks, machine guns, snipers, mines, and mustard gas.

And our way of fighting back against people making planes and tanks and bombs is to make them right back, which is why it involves a massive national undertaking as you attempt to make even more better planes and tanks and bombs, and also giant ships to move them to the place where you’ll use them to kill people.

The solution to zombies, in contrast, is a wall. Optionally, you can put a couple people who have guns on the wall. Or if you’re stingy, a rock on a rope they drop. Zombies obligingly keep their weak point on the top of their body.

But anyway, they didn’t want to do phase two because The American people had just been through a very long and bloody conflict. They were tired.

BULLSHIT.

We haven’t been through anything. That’s why there’s no draft, the government wants to keep this happy state of affairs. A small percentage of our population is being fed into the meat grinder, and it sure sucks to be them, but if America had any sense of solidarity we’d still have unions.

No, what people want is a purpose. They’d love to be told that they can do important work. To keep us from noticing there’s a long and bloody conflict going on, our world is a bunch of navel gazing bullshit as conditions slowly worsen and our infrastructure breaks down. What got Obama elected? The idea we could accomplish anything. That maybe, finally, someone would try to do stuff, and we could all work on that, and then things could be better.

In totalitarian regimes—communism, fascism, religious fundamentalism—popular support is a given. You can start wars, you can prolong them, you can put anyone in uniform for any length of time without ever having to worry about the slightest political backlash.

This is why the only thing totalitarianism is renowned for more than their stability is their incredible longevity.

In other news, someone’s sure bitter we’re not a theocracy.

In a democracy, the polar opposite is true. Public support must be husbanded as a finite national resource. It must be spent wisely, sparingly, and with the greatest return on your investment.

You’re actually describing an oligarchy, which is fitting because that’s what we’ve got.

In a democracy, popular will is what’s actually making the decisions. A democracy where you have to manipulate the people to support your own agenda isn’t one. That’s not necessarily evil. The Lincoln movie showed how Lincoln manipulated people for what most of us now agree was a good purpose. In fact, many cherished rights we have today are the result of a few people talking the many into doing it. And many good programs are held back today by the stupid opinions of the many.

He then explains that stupid America always wants to cut and run if it seems like it’s going to lose.

We like the big win, the touchdown, the knockout in the first round. We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t only uncontested, it was positively devastating. If not…well…look at where we were before the Panic. We didn’t lose the last brushfire conflict, far from it. We actually accomplished a very difficult task with very few resources and under extremely unfavorable circumstances. We won, but the public didn’t see it that way because it wasn’t the blitzkrieg smackdown that our national spirit demanded. Too much time had gone by, too much money had been spent, too many lives had been lost or irrevocably damaged.

He appears to be unfamiliar with pyrrhic victories, let alone the idea people might just not like blowing up other countries.

Did we “win” Iraq? I’ve heard the military talk about how great their new technology is and how high their body count is. As someone who did not think it was a good idea before we went to war, naturally the more lives lost and money blown (especially as that money not being there translates to other lives lost elsewhere), the worse of a decision it is to me. And yes, surprisingly, our government going to war for bad reasons and then killing lots of people doing so while our own country goes bankrupt paying for it does make me that much more unhappy with the idea of another war. That doesn’t mean I wanted the war to be more devastating to Iraq, and I don’t care how “difficult” you tell me the task of securing oil and blowing up civilians was and how few resources they had to work with in the process, because my objection is not that the military wasn’t impressive enough. It is not about my team not looking cool enough as they scored points.

This is, I think, a fundamental incompatibility of thought between me and the military.

We’d not only squandered all our public support, we were deeply in the red.

Also this latter part is mostly because our government used it as an excuse to hand out money to their buddies!

That may be another incompatibility of thought.

Do you know the price tag of putting just one American citizen in uniform? And I don’t just mean the time that he’s actively in that uniform: the training, the equipment, the food, the housing, the transport, the medical care.

Medical care for soldiers. Oh, that’s a good one. Book, you are a very naive thing.

I’m talking about the long-term dollar value that the country, the American taxpayer, has to shell out to that person for the rest of their natural life.

Not since we figured out that if we denied them counselling there’s good odds that natural life would come to an abrupt bullet-related end. And a fine day for human resources that was.

About now the book gets to the less gritty bits of current functioning, about the whole thing where we keep extending the tour of duty.

After Vietnam, when I was a young platoon leader in West Germany, we’d had to institute an incentives program just to keep our soldiers from going AWOL. After this last war, no amount of incentives could fill our depleted ranks, no payment bonuses or term reductions, or online recruiting tools disguised as civilian video games.

This, though? They’ve got this problem locked up. Kill enough of your economy and you’ll create a decent class of people with no choice but to join the military, but sure we’ll call those “incentives” because the Hunger Games is totally not a critique of our society. And my poor cousin is currently teaching at one of our failing schools where the kids skip off to the military because they just really want to kill people who look different than them, but sure, war shooters with realistic guns definitely didn’t have any impact on their decisions.

Interestingly, there is absolutely no mention of relaxing restrictions – I am told that in the past “how fast can I get to watch someone die” made them think twice about letting you near the guns.

And we close on him saying the usual thing that I think is supposed to be comforting and always creeps me out terribly:

I’m not blaming the civilian leadership and I’m not suggesting that we in uniform should be anything but beholden to them.

The split between the civilian and military is not, I think, a helpful one in the end. The soldier in uniform is part of our mostly democratic republic, and their opinions matter. I think a lot of problems can be traced to the fact the civilian leadership feels fine sending them off to get killed and then ignoring the injured who make it home and beyond that, accountability is just a generally good thing.

If you want an example of a much more extended essay from this sort of mindset, which may get across what disturbs me, On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs is the best I’ve seen. It opens pretty reasonably and just slowly…descends into something. The sheepdog in the essay gives up happiness and acceptance to protect the ungrateful delusional sheep, and the more the author claims he’s not judging the sheep and that the sheepdogs shouldn’t feel resentment at how the sheep don’t always like them, the more convinced I am he’s about to snap.

That’s what I get whenever military types try to reassure people that they’re subsumed their identity into obedience and will never feel a hint of resentment about anything.