On the heels of the last chapter being about military fuckups, it’s time to really go into that. This is the chapter that a good 90% of the online arguments are about. Generally, the focus is on the milirary aspect of this, but as we’ll see, this book provides so much more. (Like how this is the fifth chapter to take place in the US so far, and there’ve been other chapters with Americans in foreign locations.)

This chapter is set at a mural of a famous picture of soldiers near the end of the zombie war, to compare to the interviewee who’s been worn out from his time in the army. It’s time to hear about the infamous Battle of Yonkers.

He tells us that during the panic people were killing and stealing everywhere and that he thinks this killed more than the zombies managed. That’s very dramatic but stupid. Scared people who are a bit trigger happy are very dangerous compared to our baseline level of life, but not compared to walls of zombies, and for the most part, you’d have the most panicked people killing each other. If you just board up your house and say you’ll shoot anyone who approaches, most people just won’t approach. If you’re running around stealing and killing, well, you’ll probably run afoul of one of those people or the boarded up house people.

I’m sure it could do plenty of damage, but not much compared to zombie walls.

Anyway, because of the panic they decided to show off how their military could totally handle the zombies.

Now, earlier we learned that the government was originally keeping a lid on this with crack zombie teams, but that the details are all sealed. At the time I speculated this was because hello atrocities, but in addition to that, this also suggests they were not actually crack anythings, because if they had them, those would be the first choice for propaganda broadasts about how under control everything was. My alternative theory is now that they just razed every area that had confirmed zombies.

The Saw Mill River Parkway ran right through the center of our main line of defense and the refugees streaming down the freeway were leading the dead right to us.

The infected refugees thing will last most of the book. It’s as if no one has any advance warning, even though the refugees themselves should be providing one. Also, at the point where the zombies are five feet behind you, it’s time to hole up rather than migrate.

[Todd reaches for another “Q,” the homegrown, American variety cigarette so named for its one-quarter tobacco content.]

…America grows plenty of tobacco already. There’s no point this would be a big deal.

He begins explaining how everyone fucked up, starting with the fact they were on the ground and not the roofs. This is one of the few fuckups that feels halfway plausible – not only is sandbags on the ground more recognizable, but it conveys the idea of defending against and stopping the flow of zombies, while sniping them from rooftops conveys more that the military is scared and out to protect themselves.

That said, sniping zombies from roofs should already be in use. The book is presenting this as the first disastrous attempt on the zombies, but by the time zombie numbers are enough to provide an endless flood of zombies, the idea there’s been no engagements before this is insane.

Good “cover and concealment,” they told us. Cover and concealment? “Cover” means physical protection, conventional protection, from small arms and artillery or air-dropped ordnance. That sound like the enemy we were about to go up against? Was Zack now calling in air strikes and fire missions? And why the hell were we worried about concealment when the whole point of the battle was to get Zack to come directly at us! So backasswards! All of it!

What’s backasswards is that apparently our educational standards are so low soldiers don’t remember sandbag walls have any use other than against planes. The fact it’s a physical wall between you and something is irrelevant now, because zombies. And bear in mind that the exact targeting method the zombies use is never explained, so just making it hard for the zombies to see individual people, concealing them if you will, is a perfectly good idea.

I’m sure whoever was in charge must have been one of the last of the Fulda Fucktards, you know, those generals who spent their nard-drop years training to defend West Germany from Ivan. Tight-assed, narrow-minded…probably pissed off from so many years of brushfire war.

The real reason this chapter doesn’t make sense is because it’s trying to be a commentary on the Iraq war while taking place after it. It’s trying to make a big deal about how the military always gears up to win the last war rather than the next one, except that in this context, the people fucking up by assuming it’s the last war should be picturing urban warfare against outnumbered but really clever enemies. There are plenty of ways that would produce fuckups when you tried to roll it forward to zombies, but no, that’s too subtle and you might miss how it’s referencing how the military went into Iraq like it was the Cold War, so instead everything we did freakin’ stunk of Cold War Static Defense still.

He goes on to say in a lot of words that photo op where they had all sorts of stuff useful for every possible aspect of warfare, much of which was irrelevant to zombies. But most of it sounds like it’d be useful in a pinch:

we had this AVLB portable bridge layer system, perfect for the three-inch-deep creek that ran by the freeway.

Because bridges are only used for water. It’s impossible roads themselves might be damaged. You never need to get over anything unless it’s a creek.

He then goes on to whine about how they had portable toilets despite the fact there’s still water pressure to flush toilets in buildings. That’s why whenever I see construction, I scream obscenities at the idiots who have portable toilets there, because if flush toilets exist, they must be totally accessible to an infinite number of people.

Yes, fine, you didn’t literally need this stuff. But there’s very little you literally need. In practice, there’s generally an awful lot of stuff that make life easier when it’s there, like portable toilets. Look, the American military has its flaws, but one of the things it’s good at understanding is that people work better if they get the stuff to make their life easier.

The one thing that does seem unnecessary is XM5 electronic warfare vehicles all crammed with radar and jamming gear but given the stupidity of the other complaints, there’s probably something useful in there too. Or maybe it’s there because they’re still trying to figure out how the zombies target. Sensing electricity or something is more plausible than the zombies targeting using sight, hearing or smell given we know a lot about how those things work and how it’s impossible for the corpses to have any human senses left. The mere fact they’re able to remain upright requires a nonhuman balance sense, since ours require delicate nerves and liquid in the ear. We’re down to electromagnetic or magic as far as targeting goes, and at that point sure, try jamming gear why the fuck not.

And yes, so it was there to look impressive. It’s a photo op. The chapter’s trying to present this as an either/or, where the presence of stuff they didn’t need right then is another lost case of the stuff they did need, but really, being able to move a ton of shit onto the site is an impressive show of the army’s ability to move shit, which is kind of how you win wars. Now, if he said they didn’t have lots of the necessary stuff because the army was worried fortifying too much would make it seem like the zombies were more impressive…I could more likely see that, barely. But when it’s the full might of the military-industrial complex laser-focused on a photo op, I don’t think it’s a situation where they only had the ability to move five tons and wasted two of them on unnecessary stuff. It’s more likely they moved ten tons when they only needed five.

Like with the celebrities, this is trying to intensify the later fuckups by making it fuckups all the way down, and like with the celebrities, I register bitching about stuff that doesn’t deserve it as meaning your other points probably aren’t all that valid – otherwise, you’d have focused on that instead of trying to distract and bias me with quantity.

Anyway, there’s press everywhere, including lots of helicopters.

you’d think with so many they’d spare a few to try and rescue people from Manhattan…

It’s impossible any of those helicopters could be in use trying to track the zombie wave. And honestly, if people are still in Manhattan and haven’t been bitten, they can wait at least a day for you guys to try to blow up a good chunk of the problem – and much longer if they’re in a building with access to water. And even if the zombies aren’t all gone, waiting a day for them to be a little less thick seems like a really good idea before trying to rescue people. (And, come to think of it, assuming fortified positions, only rescuing people who’ve been there over a day seems just smart – if they’re still talking by that point, there’s better odds they’re not infected.) Sending helicopters in to try to rescue probably infected anyway people while the shambling dead swarm them is idiotic, especially given the chances of losing those helicopters in the process when you’ll need them later.

The idiot who suggested that continues by bitching at the idea they’re in sealed, armored outfits.

Could your superiors have believed the undead virus was airborne?
If that’s true, why didn’t they protect the reporters? Why didn’t our “superiors” wear them, or anyone else immediately behind the line. They were cool and comfortable in their BDUs while we sweated under layers of rubber, charcoal, and thick, heavy body armor. And what genius thought to put us in body armor anyway? Because the press reamed ’em for not having enough in the last war? Why the hell do you need a helmet when you’re fighting a living corpse? They’re the ones who need the helmets, not us!

Your superiors weren’t planning on being right there breathing it in when the bombs pureed the black-goo filled zombies.

The only reason you don’t have to worry about contamination from the incurable zombie death virus is because the author waved his hands to say it instantly dies outside the human body despite that human body being room temperature and full of holes seconds before.

To pause to think of a better zombie thing, in Black Gas, the good twin to the abominable Crossed comics, contamination is a major concern. Everyone quickly grasps the obvious biting aspect, but there’s this lovely scene where the main characters are trying to get to the hospital safe area, and they see the planes drop bombs to destroy the zombies outside before they break down the barricades. And the main characters look at the aerosoled goo and turn around, because at best, everyone in the hospital is now infected and at worst, a few aren’t and are going to be torn apart over the next few minutes.

Also, yes, he did just bitch about the fact he’s in body armor so the zombies won’t be able to bite him.

Finally, we get to one of the good ideas in this chapter:

And then you’ve got the Net Rigs…the Land Warrior combat integration system. It was this whole personal electronics suite that allowed each one of us to link up with each other and the higher-ups to link up with us. Through your eyepiece you could download maps, GPS data, real-time satellite recon. You could find your exact position on a battlefield, your buddies’ positions, the bad guys…you could actually look through the video camera on your weapon, or anyone else’s, to see what’s over a hedge or around a corner. Land Warrior allowed every soldier to have the information of an entire command post, and let the command post control those soldiers as a single unit.

Now, new shiny things that seem like a good idea but turn out to fail catastrophically if things go off-script? This is a mistake I can totally see the military making.

Finally, zombies.

Zack started entering the first kill zone, the one designated for the MLRS. I didn’t hear the rockets
launch, my hood muffled the noise, but I saw them streak toward the target. I saw them arch on their way down, as their casings broke away to reveal all those little bomblets on plastic streamers. They’re about the size of a hand grenade, antipersonnel with a limited antiarmor capacity. They scattered amongst the Gs, detonating once they hit the road or an abandoned car. Their gas tanks went up in like little volcanoes, geysers of fire and debris that added to the “steel rain.”
…
Only three-quarters.

See, in fine zombie tradition, the fact that they’re not specifically aiming at the brain means it’s random chance which hundreds of spots are hit, which means it doesn’t hit the brain. A good quarter of the zombies keep intact brains and bits of body, because like animated skeletons, it doesn’t matter if what’s there actually has any way of doing so. Is there still an arm dangling from a spinal column? It’s mobile, despite every muscle and ligament in the arm being cut in a dozen places!

Bear in mind also that the human mouth is two pieces. If you knock off the lower jaw, which isn’t particularly hard given gravity will do most of the work for you, it can’t bite. I’m sure zombies standing there resting their upper jaw on your arm hopefully is kind of annoying, but it’s not transmitting jack.

The second “steel rain” didn’t have half the impact of the first, no more gas tanks to catch, and now the more tightly packed Gs just happened to be shielding each other from a possible head wound.

I would like to remind everyone that the head is on the top of the body.

Next up, standard HE 155s, a high explosive core with a fragmentation case. This doesn’t work at all.

No balloon effect for one. When a bomb goes off close to you, it causes the liquid in your body to burst, literally, like a freakin’ balloon. That doesn’t happen with Zack, maybe because he carries less bodily fluid than us or because that fluid’s more like a gel.

Okay, first off, the liquid isn’t bursting, the things holding the liquid are. Incidentally, the brain is a lot of tiny sacks of liquid in a bigger sack. Second, hello magic zombies. Any head trauma will stop you, but only if we can see it. Jam anything through the skull to nick a couple cells, instant death. Liquefy the entire brain with shock waves, nothing happens.

And no, it doesn’t matter if the brain’s full of “gel”. That just means that after the liquid in the zombie’s brain is shook, causing the cells it’s in to burst, the resultant gloop might not immediately begin draining out of the skull. The brain is still completely gone. The only way this could even have a chance of working is if the black ooze of the zombies was exactly the right consistency to let the shockwave travel through at the same rate as the rest of the cell, and even then the shockwave coming from the skull and going out the other end of the skull both involve a transition which would cause damage there, much more than a mere katana to the forehead.

Even if there’s a plausible mechanism here, like most of the stuff about his mary sue zombies, there’s the problem they had no way of evolving these protections. Assuming this is a virus that’s been around for a long time, you could argue adaptations like moving toward noise and making noise to draw others – insanely implausible, but at least there’s a mechanism. However, never before has the virus needed to worry about keeping the brain intact from a modern bomb’s shockwave. And yet, here it is, apparently perfectly calibrated for exactly this situation. It’s not unlike their survival underwater – while the ocean has existed long enough to matter, the odds of a given zombie making it back out of the ocean in time to bite anyone new is just about impossible prior to the zombie epidemic, so there’s no selection force.

Now, the movie zombies I will absolutely grant you, since those things kept going when they were dismembered and the soldiers even said a headshot just slows them down more. If the brain wasn’t the weak point, all this stuff would be valid. All they need to move in that case is a few remaining bits of ligament, and explosions wouldn’t do much to those.

But in this case, these are basically Shrodinger zombies. Zombies can only be hurt when we perceive the brain as being damaged. Quite possibly these zombies would die if only someone could crack the skull open and see that what’s inside has the consistency of soup. That’d actually be an interesting idea for magic rules, where it’s about perception shaping reality and all that, but here? Stupid.

He then explains that shockingly, they also weren’t incapacitated by the nerve trauma of an explosive. Really. Dead people’s dead nervous system doesn’t work like ours? Wow.

The author clarifies that he’s not saying this stuff didn’t hurt any of the zombies, just…it didn’t really work.

We saw bodies blown to shit, tossed into the air, ripped to pieces, even complete heads, live heads with eyes and jaws still moving, popping sky high like freakin’ Cristal corks…we were taking them down, no doubt, but not as many or as fast as we needed to!

Again, the trauma of that to a skull would take out the brain. The fact the bone itself is not powder doesn’t mean the brain is okay. Head trauma is in fact done by slamming the brain into the skull, because the skull is a lot tougher. That’s part of why we picture death as a skull, because that’s the last thing to go! Not the brain. The brain falls apart from just a good shake.

Incidentally, he does not realize that under such circumstances it’s a good idea to have cover. If we accept that all this stuff is still live,anything that prevents it from shooting into you is good.

The stream was now like a river, a flood of bodies, slouching, moaning, stepping over their mangled bros as they rolled slowly and steadily toward us like a slow-motion wave.

Which reminds me, another reason why mangling the zombies is perfectly valid in these circumstances is that they’ll just get crushed by the next wave. Even just a limping zombie will be pushed over by the faster ones behind it. The zombies in this book don’t really care about physics. They can amass in such huge groups they can push down anything, but they never damage each other in the process.

Next, all the tanks and stuff open fire.

It was a fuckin’ meat grinder, a wood chipper, organic matter clouding like sawdust above the horde.

See, that’s why you were in a suit. You really want to breathe that in?

But anyway, then they run out of ammunition. I’ll give them this one as another understandable fuckup.

They fired these little tungsten balls…not perfect you know, wasting like a hundred balls for every G, but fuck, dude, at least it was something! Each Abrams only had three, three! Three out of a total load out of forty! The rest were standard HEAT or SABOT! Do you know what a “Silver Bullet,” an armor-piercing, depleted-uranium dart is going to do to a group of walking corpses? Nothing!

…of course, by run out of ammunition we mean run out of ammunition the author has deemed acceptable, because anything that merely damages the zombies won’t do anything. What good could something that will tear through every zombie in front of it for god knows how far possibly do?

So time for this guy to start firing his machine gun.

The initial burst was too low. I caught one square in the chest. I watched him fly backward, hit the asphalt, then get right back up again as if nothing had happened.

Because they’re animated skeletons, and the fact they’re now missing everything required to actually hold themselves upright is unimportant.

Guns: actually pretty powerful these days.

He points out that it’s really hard to get trained soldiers to switch gears to aim for the head, because you’re not supposed to do that (part of my issue with Tris’ insistence on it). But because this is a zombie book where aiming for the head is paramount, the fact that shredding everything below the head will work pretty well for keeping the zombie down is ignored.

Because the author likes low-tech over high-tech, the bullets still work pretty well overall, and instead what ruins the battle is the high tech gadgets in their helmets. Apparently, those things were all on perpetual live mic, despite the fact that’d be chaos (I don’t know how anyone can even hear over the sound of thousands of people breathing, let alone the feedback of picking up the sound of that a thousand times again), so every time anyone was nervous or thought things were going wrong, everyone heard and they ended up panicking.

“Everyone pipe down!” someone shouted. “Hold the line! Stay off the net!” an older voice, you could tell, but suddenly it was drowned out in this scream and suddenly my eyepiece, and I’m sure everyone else’s, was filled with the sight of blood spurting into a mouth of broken teeth. The sight was from a dude in the yard of a house behind the line. The owners must have left a few reanimated family members locked in when they bugged out. Maybe the shock from the explosions weakened the door or something, because they came bursting out, right into this poor bastard. His gun camera recorded the whole thing, fell right at the perfect angle. There were five of them, a man, a woman, three kids, they had him pinned on his back, the man was on his chest, the kids had him by the arms, trying to bite through his suit. The woman tore his mask off, you could see the terror in his face. I’ll never forget his shriek as she bit off his chin and lower lip.

That’s cool enough you can almost ignore questions like “who told that camera to start broadcasting?” and “seriously the camera just happened to fall away and yet aim at the scene so everyone could see it perfectly?” Almost.

I think with more effort it could’ve worked. Maybe have the soldier see the zombies come through the door, freak out, and send out some sort of code red that made everyone tune it to his camera just in time to see them tear into him, since informing them of a new zombie front does seem relevant. Also cut out the stupid bit about the camera being so perfect, seeing blood splatter everywhere from behind it would get things across. Aside from everything else, it’s just inherently bad writing to say “and then by coincidence it happened that the scene was framed exactly like if it was a movie and the director wanted a clear shot, by the way who wants to buy the movie rights”.

(Pointing out that the body armor, while protective in theory, wasn’t designed against things that would try to pull it off would’ve been a much better complaint as well. Although wait…are zombies ever smart enough to pull stuff off at other points? I realize that’s a very minor standard of intelligence, but these guys seem to otherwise be about as smart as a kid’s robot.)

Regardless, this causes new panic as people assume the zombies are just coming from everywhere now. The feed is finally cut, and really, if they can then why wouldn’t they just do that as soon as people started using it to talk about how there were too many and they were doomed?

This is immediately followed by some planes dropping bombs.

I felt this weight slam between my shoulder blades, soft and heavy. I rolled over, it was a head and torso, all charred black and still smoking and still trying to bite!

But no gratitude for the body armor.

And then they came, right out of the smoke like a freakin’ little kid’s nightmare! Some were steaming, some were even still burning…some were walking, some crawling, some just dragging themselves along on their torn bellies

So in general, the author just seems to really not understand how incredibly much damage weapons can do, especially to us frail organics.

Time for people are bastards again.

I remember a dude forcing open the door of a news van, jumping in, throwing out a pretty blond reporter, and trying to drive away before a tank crushed them both.

Because obviously people in a mobile fortress would be panicking the hardest.

I know “professional” historians like to talk about how Yonkers represented a “catastrophic failure of the modern military apparatus,” how it proved the old adage that armies perfect the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one.

The “last one” being Iraq. Because expecting the army to charge you blindly and directly is what we’ve learned about Iraq.

Personally, I think that’s a big ’ole sack of it. Sure, we were unprepared, our tools, our training, everything I just talked about, all one class-A, gold-standard clusterfuck, but the weapon that really failed wasn’t something that rolled off an assembly line.

This is technically correct in that the helmet cams that cause the panic are not weapons and also may have been used once or twice before rather than being just out of the factory – certainly the soldier was familiar enough to hit the REPLY ALL button in time for everyone to see him eaten.

This idiot, though, is trying to be philosophical, and as usual, that just makes it worse. See, what really made them lose? It’s fear, dude. Like, whoa.

He then proceeds to explain that war is actually about getting the other guy to surrender in a panic (as they did), apparently ignorant of the fact many historical societies and some current ones would’ve killed the lot of them for running. While I am generally opposed to such methods, it’s hard to care much here about doing that given that I’m pretty sure these guys are just slightly more advanced robots with a whining subroutine.

“Shock and Awe”? Perfect name, “Shock and Awe”! But what if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed?

As Wikipedia lists, dropping two nukes on Japan was an example of shock and awe.

Shock and awe doesn’t mean sparklers. It means overwhelming force. Many of the other examples are about completely slaughtering the soldiers to end the war with minimum civilian deaths.

As applied to this situation, shock and awe works fine in both senses. America has the military equipment to death with zombies by just pouring tanks onto the problem until it’s buried, and since, as he admits, a big concern is human morale, watching zombies vaporize sure helps that. It’s not the politician’s fault that in this universe people look at three-quarters destruction of zombies in a single burst with most of the remaining ones barely twitching and think oh fuck the zombies are unstoppable we’re all gonna die!

The idiot then raves about how zombies don’t feel fear and that’s scary and it means shock and awe tactics are meaningless, because again, American school systems teach nothing.

They’re not afraid! No matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they will never, ever be afraid!

I will grant that this chapter is a good read with your brain very thoroughly turned off. If you just look at the emotional content, the way this guy talks, and completely ignore what he’s actually saying, it’s very dramatic. You’re right, ranting guy, zombies aren’t afraid and any plan to beat them through fear will fail!

Just don’t think that wait, isn’t fear generally the thing that makes it harder to kill things? Isn’t their lack of fear what made them keep crowding in to get bombed to slurry?

Then they drop a thermobaric bomb while they’re huddling inside a vehicle. It means a huge fireball.

What you won’t hear about is the immediate aftereffect, the vacuum created when that fireball suddenly contracts. Anyone left alive will either have the air sucked right out of their lungs, or—and they’ll never admit this to anyone—have their lungs ripped right out of their mouth.

Given the vacuum of space itself wouldn’t do this to, no, no it would not.

Also, god, it’s not like all the other things bombs actually do to you are any less gruesome. It’s not like this is some sort of horrible horrible consequence that must kept secret from everyone. It’s not even that bad compared to getting your face melted off by radiation. If, somehow, these things break physics and can create greater suction than the vacuum of space, the American military may want to cover up the dealings with Cthulhu necessary to invent it but they’re going to be pretty damn proud of the results anyway, and anything that can yank organs out of your mouth can certainly pull brain out your ears

Of course, the zombies are magic so he ends with a quip about if anyone sees a zombie with lungs pulled out still staggering around, he’d like to meet his fellow Yorkers veteran, because only bullets, which are magic, can harm the brain, not mere overwhelming city-leveling force.