Realistic: World War Z.

[Voran]

On additional consideration, I'm wondering if we're also overestimating some of our abilities to survive (at least remaining sane). The one thing I keep seeing in zombie threads time and again is the "we can fortify and turtle up and just keep killing zombies as they come".

Most of the time, what I don't see in those threads is: what do you do with hundreds, if not thousands of dead zombies and zombie parts two inches away from your walls. Burn them? With what? Did you store huge stockpiles of fuel for that purpose? Go outside and rake up the mess? When? During the lulls in attacks? What lulls in attacks? Do you have hazmat suits to clean up zombie parts so you don't get infected? Do hazmat suits even work? Do you know how to use a hazmat suit?

We're talking civil war levels of dead bodies lying around. Can you imagine the stench? Are flies still attracted to zombie flesh a it decays? Stench, maggots, rotting flesh, dismembered pieces, the occasional 'still alive' zombie you can't see, but can hear somewhere out in the lumps of dead. That'd be horrific.

[Wicked]

Originally Posted by Galahad

Why would you need to even debate which rifle is better ? One AH-64 gunship can carry 1500 rounds of 30 mm ammo and iirc 80 FFAR rockets. Zombies take no cover, move in huge, densely packed mobs. They would be a pilots wet dream. A burst of chaingun or a rocket salvo would be felling zombies by dozens.

A single Apache gunship could easily wipe out several thousand zombies before landing, rearming and making another sortie in a hour.

Several THOUSANDS? That won't even put a dent in the Yonkers horde.

And late-book there was little fuel left to fly stuff like that.

[Chris O'Farrell]

Originally Posted by cypress_z

Riiiight. That's why we were critically undermanned during the recent Iraq invasion. That's why Vietnam was a total disaster. That's why, time and again, we made poor policy decisions. Because politicians dictated poor policy to their generals who had to make the most of a bad situation. Make no mistake - it's rare that this happens. But it does happen.

The US military was NOT 'critically undermanned' during the Iraq invasion. In fact, it proves my point; Rummy TRIED to force the military to an 'invasion' that was little more then 10,000 troops, claiming that the people would welcome the American troops with open arms and flowers and liberators.

The Brass, even the Brass the Neocons tried to put in play, all told him to frack off, politely, and forced him to move up the total personnel to a quater of a million combined services. And the US military rolled right over the Iraqi army. Sure they took losses, but they were light and they acheived the objectives, occupting the country faster then almost anyone thought they could. And they sure as hell didn't run out of ammo and have to retreat from the Iraqi Army, like the US Army did from the Zombies at Yonkers. Sure then they screwed up the Phase IV planning -as they didn't HAVE any- but that had no bearing on the actual invasion itself.

Fighting off a Zombie hoard on US soils is a difficult, but far more straight forward exercise in logistics, tactics and strategy then something like Invading a crazy nation like Iraq. But they failed miserably at the most basic threat assesment and logsitical shaping of their battle plans, something far more simple to do in this situation then the staging for Iraqi Freedom halfway around the frigen world!

And I pointed out McNamarra as the key example of Vietnam, and the reason the modern US military is so terribly resistant to politicians micromanging where they shouldn't. Its the reason why Rummy, despite being The Boss and giving An Order of how it Was To Be Done, got compeltly stonewalled until he came around to THEIR way of thinking. The US learned very painful lessons from Vietnam.

Those of us who support America like to wear rose tinted glasses and pretend we never make mistakes. But we do. And put in the proper context, the deployment setup isn't actually an enormous mistake.

Yes but in your rabid defense of Yonkers, you still can't see that the ONLY contextal situation any half sane and half decent General Staff would see Yonkers as is a military operation to defeat a MAJOR threat, which would in turn provide a great moral boost from the victory. The former provides the later, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. Though all of WW2, military victories were milked for propagana purposes, no General or Leader in the European or Pacific theaters bloody launched an offensive operation for pure political propaganda purposes! They WON the victory and THEN played the news reals to the adording masses.

Its a very simple concept here...

And frankly, we've never seen the real world US government pushed as hard as it was in WWZ. The us has never had a real, huge plague combined with total civil breakdown and a military threat all at the same time facing it.

You can't have it both ways. Yonkers was not a rash last minute panicked operation put together in five hours from thirty different chains of command and eighty different divisions. The Government took the time to move the troops, half the damn army in fact, to the theater, set up their logistics, move all the media in and get them set up to beam the whole thing live around the country, and then fight their little battle to show everyone that the Government WAS still in control and the situation was contained.

In fact, their rational for the battle is quite clear;

"I guess I can see why the powers that be thought that one big stand-up battle was such a good idea. They wanted to show the people that they were still in charge, get them to calm the hell down so they could deal with the real problem. I get it, and because they needed a propaganda
smackdown, I ended up in Yonkers."

Its very clear, their objective was to SMACK the zombies down and thus SHOW everyone that they were in control. It wasn't a holywood motion picture set where looking cool doing it was the objective! Ergo, they have no exucse for not doing it RIGHT if they had all that lead time.

What they wanted - what they NEEDED, was a propaganda win. And from the perspective of a propaganda battle, their plan wasn't that bad. It had every reason to win.

And what you just apepar to be completly incapable of getting was that thier actions DESTROYED any chance of a propaganda win, that every lesson learned ABOUT propaganda is about NOT putting the cart before the horse, Propaganda is nothing more then spin combined with smoke and mirrors! Their obejctive was to crush the Zombie hoard and in doing so, show the world that they are awesome zombie killers and in control. THAT was it, they don't then tell the army to fight the battle in ways that SIGNIFICANTLY DIMINISH ITS CAPBILITIES to that end! Its completly, and utterly, COUNTER PRODUCTIVE TO THE END GOAL OF A GETTING THE PROPAGANDA WIN!

I can't make it any more clear then that. Your contention that the battle was fought for propaganda purposes is a complete non sequitur as there is nothing in contradicting to the fact that they could do that more realsiticly and effectivly WHILE fighting the battle without comprisiming it for the idiocy we see in the book!

1: Vietnam and McNamara happened. That means total cock ups like them can and probably will happen again, as there's always someone in charge who doesn't learn from the past.

Again, I point to Iraqi Freedom and how when Rummy tried to BE a McNammara, the Pentagon just ignored him until he saw sense. And even invading Iraq was a far smaller task in scale compared to Yonkers, yet at the same time logistically far less straight forward.

2: The US government was pressed harder than it's ever been pressed in real life. In real life, the more pressure on a government means a greater likelihood of a major cock-up like Yonkers.

Except that in that case its far more likely if the situation was turning increasing bleak that the military would just tell the politicans to STFU and get out of their way, that this is a military operation of immence importiance and huge in scale, and they need to just get on with the job without a bunch of idiot politicians looking over their shoulder and screwing it up.

Yeah, well, I'm going to go over your points one by one and show you where you're wrong.

There wasn't that much wrong with their plan. They knew their weapons would kill zombies. They DID kill zombies. They had infantry to mop up any very lucky zombies that made it through the artillery fire.

In extreemly poor positions, without any kind of defense in depth or contingecy planning for defensive operations in MOUT situations, which is just basic work in this kind of scenario. Even the bloody Iraqi's in Fallujah had extensive setups of fighting positions which they would abandon quickly once the preasure got too much, falling back to new positions and forcing the USMC forces to fight for every meter as they traded space for inflicting maximum damage.

Against a frigen shuffle hoard, divisions of mechanised infintry with plenty of time to prepare the ground instead looking to build bloody tank traps and dig fox holes in an urban setting, well...incompetent is far too light a word...

Were their forces positioned optimally from a tactical perspective? No. But they were positioned well enough to do their secondary job of killing zombies, and spectacularly for their primary job of looking cool. The plan worked perfectly until there was a supply line stoppage.

Already dealt with the absurdity that a propaganda objective couldn't be easily -more easily in fact- met by doing their jobs properly and that their primary objective wasn't to kill the hoard. Will get to the logistics a little further down...

As for backup plans, they had their infantry lay down fire to keep everyone safe, then pulled their forces back and dropped bombs. Clearly, they did have contingency plans.

Infintry does not lay down fire for armor to withdraw, ESPECIALLY when they are the only unit on the field to actually be under threat from the zombies. The air support should also have been in action from the start of the engagement, and with heavy bomber strikes and PROPERLY equipped tactical aircraft. The fact that they had to resort to frigen CHOPPERS using their blades like massive buzzsaws to try and manage the situation shows that they had no real contingecy planning at all in fact.

Hell, for that matter, they should NEVER have conceded the entire field to the Zombies. If they had properly mananged the battle; they should have had second, third, forth and so on tier phase lines they could withdraw, reload and continue the engagement from, even WITH an airstrike called in. They should NEVER have conceded the field after the airstrike, they should have gone right back in and continued the engagement and WON it after the airstrike finished them.

Instead, they just shrugged and walked away.

They did a decent job of killing zombies. The real issue was that it was a propaganda failure. That's all.

No, they MADE it a propaganda failure by screwing up the battle the way they did. And the only way they managed to lose the battle was by the books author hand waving it into that state not through 'realsitic' lapses, but by a series of utterly miserable and stupid events one after the other that made sure it came out that way in a highly unrealistic way.

Alright, I should state here that the reporters were never explicitly mentioned to be in the way of anyone, and are more or less pointed out as being behind the lines.

Yet when everything went to hell they became a tactical liability as they got in the way;

"And that was when the line collapsed. I don’t remember it all at once. I see these flashes: people running, grunts, reporters. I remember a newsman with a big Yosemite Sam mustache trying to pull a Beretta from his vest before three burning Gs pulled him down…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. Two news choppers crashed together, showering us with their own steel rain."

It was a complete cockup of a withdrawl.

I theorized they might have been in the way as a reason they might not have run over the zombies with tanks, but as I used my basic common sense more, I realized that they didn't use the tanks to run over the horde because they used air-dropped bombs instead, and didn't want to blow up their own tanks. Which is also a good reason to pull back the infantry; they didn't want to kill their own men either.

Their infintry were already on the front line, the survivors WATCHES the entire battle form RIGHT on the front line where they drop the ordinance. They were catostophcaly too close. They also waited WAY too long to pull back, and the command was never issued, it all just fell appart. Given the speed of the hoard, there is zero excuse of this, they should have had PLENTY of time to pull back and THEN call in the airstrike. The fact that they did not undertake this most *basic* of planning ANY officer worthy of the name would undertake, rather bluntly shows the authory is just making crap up now.

They abandoned the east coast as part of an effort to establish "safe zones" where they could maintain a zombie free area, rather than trying to protect every square mile of the united states. They clearly killed a large majority of the New York horde at Yonkers.

Which is nonsensical and counter productive; by that point in time the plauge is all through the population, a reduced US military can't defend half the coutnry any more then it could defend the whole country and, if anything, its making more of a problem for itself as they are giving the Hoard a whole population base to consume and grow on.

Most of the people in the US had fled to the rocky mountains by this point, so that's where the US relocated and set up shop. There's no point clearing a dead city before you protect the ones full of the living.

Unless I'm mistaken, at the time of Yonkers the population were still generally distributed normally, it was only 3 weeks later that the virus had spread so widely and the non infected had, where possible, moved West.

Maybe you aren't understanding me. They were there to look pretty. Look pretty. They had no effective value whatsoever, other than to make things look cool.

Really?

"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. He must
have been an FF because everything we did freakin’ stunk of Cold War Static Defense. You know they even tried to dig fighting holes for the tanks? The engineers blasted them right out of the A&P parking lot."

-Nothing here about doing it because it 'looked preaty', it reads to me like the orders were given in complete honesty as an effective tactical strategy to fight the Hoard, and everyone cheerfully went right along with it. Hence, they are all the offspring of the heir of the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots.

You say the military wouldn't waste time. It probably wouldn't if this was purely about killing zombies. But this was a propaganda battle. It was all about having things look cool. They were in a position where they could build tank traps, so they did. It doesn't matter that they wouldn't do anything to the zombies.

The battle was about fighting a set piece battle that would crush the hoard and show the people everything was good. It was NOT a show about crushing the hoard with some zombies being killed in the process. They just went about it in the most horridly stupid way.

They channeled them into a zone for the artillery. They focused on killing them with artillery fire; not infantry fire. The infantry was just there to mop up the lucky zombie that made it through the arty. That's it.

Yes, except that they DIDN'T use their arty fire properly, they were frigen wasting MRLS rockets on a DOZEN ZOMBIES at a time, not holding them until they had a target rich Environment!

Just shooting zombies in the head for several hours is boring.

And repeated carpet bombing and arty and tank fire is equally borning after hours upon hours of it. People don't want to stay glued to their TVs watching zombies get turned into paste for the hours or days the engagement went on, which in fact is a big point AGAINST a live spectacular. The TV studios will do what they want to do and provide their own bloody pictures, the Miltiary isn't there to co-ordinate it for their cameras.

They wanted to create a spectacle with explosions and cool military looking stuff.

No, they wanted to crush the Zombies and incedently PROVE that they were still in control of the situation.

The visuals weren't there for you, mister armchair general military buff. It was there for Joe sixpack, who'll just see the tank traps and think, "cool".

No, the General put them there because he thought they were EFFECTIVE -by writer fiat- not because he thought they would look cool on TV.

This is not an argument. This is whining. If you don't respond to my points, I'm not going to debate with you.

I'll respond to my points when you actually make some that make sense. So far all you have done is try to wave all the impossible levels of incompetence in the engagement away by saying that for some magical reason, everyone involved in the planning of this battle had no problem with countless BASIC mistakes being made at every level in what should have been the most critical battle in the history of the US military. We're not talking about small things, these are bloody HUGE failures of inteligence, command, logistics, tactics, and planning ina a situation where they had plenty of time to get it right, and every reason to make bloody sure they DID get it right, to acheive the ultimate objective of scoring a big victory to show everyone the situation was in hand.

You just keep waving at every mistake and saying 'propaganda' like it excuses the militry acting in a way CONTRERY to just about every damn way they SHOULD be acting in the situation, and it just doens't hold any water. The only answer is pure writer fiat.

If you look at it from the perspective of killing lots of zombies; yes. If you look at it from the perspective of a propaganda battle, no.

And for the nth time as you don't appear to get it, THE TWO ARE NOT IRRECONCILABLE! The former naturally leads to the other in the most simple way possible!

I'm going to cut this short now.

Tomorrow, I'm going to, for the entire board to see, post the entire text of the battle so we can see EVERYTHING straight up. I will then take it appart section by section so I can show the countless, stupid mistakes made that no military worth the name in an engagement of this critical stature would make, and present the case that Yonkers is a horrible low point in an otherwise not too bad book, where the author twists around impossibly to MAKE SURE that the military loses the battle, because he clearly WANTS it that way, and not because it makes any sense, nor is consistent with other parts of the book.

[robertliguori]

Originally Posted by Chris O'Farrell

Tomorrow, I'm going to, for the entire board to see, post the entire text of the battle so we can see EVERYTHING straight up. I will then take it appart section by section so I can show the countless, stupid mistakes made that no military worth the name in an engagement of this critical stature would make, and present the case that Yonkers is a horrible low point in an otherwise not too bad book, where the author twists around impossibly to MAKE SURE that the military loses the battle, because he clearly WANTS it that way, and not because it makes any sense, nor is consistent with other parts of the book.

I would be very interested in seeing this. Especially because I, with my extremely rudimentary knowledge of military history, know of a few blunders by militaries most people would call militaries by forces that ignored objective reality in favor of what they thought should happen, and suffered for it. And these armies weren't having to deal with a massive out-of-context problem that meant that any one of them could be infected, infect a bunch of other people, die, and rise as zombies.

In short, I see contrived but not unreasonable stupidity in Yonkers. You are welcome and invited to point out where the stupidity of Yonkers exceeds the stupidity of similar catastrophic military cock-ups over the years.

[Damar]

Originally Posted by robertliguori

And these armies weren't having to deal with a massive out-of-context problem that meant that any one of them could be infected, infect a bunch of other people, die, and rise as zombies.

Are you saying that human opponents are less dangerous than zombies?

[Aratech]

Originally Posted by Mr_Dowdy

I wrote the "aside" bull-crap in tiny print because its off topic, that comment was pretty much about the problems I had with the Zombie survival guide (author favoring bolt action/thinking the M16 is fragile/saying the M16 has no stopping power when you don't need it against zombies/thinking the AK has a steel rod in the butt-stock), and zombie fiction in general.

Since the board ate my post and I must retype it later, I'll tack something on to this: Helicopter. Fucking. Blender.

That is all.

[Captain Orsai]

Originally Posted by robertliguori

I would be very interested in seeing this. Especially because I, with my extremely rudimentary knowledge of military history, know of a few blunders by militaries most people would call militaries by forces that ignored objective reality in favor of what they thought should happen, and suffered for it.

I would be very, very interested to see which examples you are going from here.

[Galahad]

How many zombies in the world again ? And if a single tank kill 1000 zombies an hour how many can a division with all the cool supporting toys like artillery and air power kill ? And how many armored vehicles are on US soil again ?

[Big Orange]

Originally Posted by Chris O'Farrell

Which is nonsensical and counter productive; by that point in time the plauge is all through the population, a reduced US military can't defend half the coutnry any more then it could defend the whole country and, if anything, its making more of a problem for itself as they are giving the Hoard a whole population base to consume and grow on.

Callously pulling back the core forces and population to the Rockies was all part of the Redeker Plan, where they could use the abandoned population centres along the way as "bait" to lead the hordes away from the Safe Zone.

[SGTschlock]

Originally Posted by Big Orange

Callously pulling back the core forces and population to the Rockies was all part of the Redeker Plan, where they could use the abandoned population centres along the way as "bait" to lead the hordes away from the Safe Zone.

Which is pretty stupid idea.

If the "bait" cities can hold up without the military, then you could have made a stand at the bait cities and stop the infection.

If the "bait" cities can't hold up without the military, then the horde's show up at the safe zones a bit later, but significantly larger.

[Yitzi]

Originally Posted by SGTschlock

Which is pretty stupid idea.

If the "bait" cities can hold up without the military, then you could have made a stand at the bait cities and stop the infection.

If the "bait" cities can't hold up without the military, then the horde's show up at the safe zones a bit later, but significantly larger.

I think (just from the description here, so I may be totally off) the idea was that they wouldn't be too much larger (having been evacuated) and that they'd give time to mobilize.

[cypress_z]

I'll respond to your post, Chris, but first I'm going to repost the Yonkers section for you, since I don't want your biased interruptions coloring anyone's view of the scene.

Before I post this, I wish to remind you to look for the points I mentioned - the primary ones being that this is a propaganda battle, and that it only went south due to a supply fuck up - and look past the narrator's pessimism. He is an unreliable narrator, as you'll clearly see yourself.

*****

DENVER, COLORADO, USA





[My train is late. The western drawbridge is being tested. Todd Wainio doesn’t seem to mind waiting for me at the platform. We shake hands under the station’s mural of Victory, easily the most recognizable image of the American experience in World War Z. Originally taken from a photograph, it depicts a squad of soldiers standing on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, their backs turned to us as they watch dawn break over Manhattan. My host looks very small and frail next to these towering, two-dimensional icons. Like most men of his generation, Todd Wainio is old before his time. With an expanding paunch, receding, graying hair, and three, deep, parallel scars down the side of his right cheek, it would be difficult to guess that this former U.S. Army infantryman is still, at least chronologically, at the beginning of his life.]







The sky was red that day. All the smoke, the crap that’d been filling the air all summer. It put everything in an amber red light, like looking at the world through hell-colored glasses. That’s how I first saw Yonkers, this little, depressed, rust-collar burb just north of New York City. I don’t think anybody ever heard of it. I sure as hell hadn’t, and now it’s up there with, like, Pearl Harbor…no, not Pearl…that was a surprise attack. This was more like Little Bighorn, where we…well…at least the people in charge, they knew what was up, or they should have. The point is, it wasn’t a surprise, the war…or emergency, or whatever you want to call it…it was already on. It had been, what, three months since everyone jumped on the panic train.



You remember what it was like, people just freaking out…boarding up their houses, stealing food, guns, shooting everything that moved. They probably killed more people, the Rambos and the runaway fires, and the traffic accidents and just the…the whole shit storm that we now call “the Great Panic”; I think that killed more people at first than Zack.



I guess I can see why the powers that be thought that one big stand-up battle was such a good idea. They wanted to show the people that they were still in charge, get them to calm the hell down so they could deal with the real problem. I get it, and because they needed a propaganda smackdown, I ended up in Yonkers.



It actually wasn’t the worst place to make a stand. Part of the town sat right in this little valley, and right over the west hills you had the Hudson River. 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. It was a natural choke point, and it was a good idea…the only good idea that day.







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







Why didn’t they put us on the roofs? They had a shopping center, a couple of garages, big buildings with nice flat tops. They could have put a whole company right above the A&P. We could have seen the whole valley, and we would have been completely safe from attack. There was this apartment building, about twenty stories, I think…each floor had a commanding view of the freeway. Why wasn’t there a rifle team in each window?



You know where they put us? Right down on the ground, right behind sandbags or in fighting holes. We wasted so much time, so much energy preparing these elaborate firing positions. 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!



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. He must have been an FF because everything we did freakin’ stunk of Cold War Static Defense. You know they even tried to dig fighting holes for the tanks? The engineers blasted them right out of the A&P parking lot.



You had tanks?



Dude, we had everything: tanks, Bradleys, Humvees armed with everything from fifty cals to these new Vasilek heavy mortars. At least those might have been useful. We had Avenger Humvee mounted Stinger surface-to-air missile sets, we had this AVLB portable bridge layer system, perfect for the three-inch-deep creek that ran by the freeway. We had a bunch of XM5 electronic warfare vehicles all crammed with radar and jamming gear and…and…oh yeah, and we even had a whole FOL, Family of Latrines, just plopped right there in the middle of everything. Why, when the water pressure was still on and toilets were still flushing in every building and house in the neighborhood? So much we didn’t need! So much shit that only blocked traffic and looked pretty, and that’s what I think they were really there for, just to look pretty.



For the press.



Hell yeah, there must have been at least one reporter for every two or three uniforms! 1 On foot and in vans, I don’t know how many news choppers must have been circling…you’d think with so many they’d spare a few to try and rescue people from Manhattan…hell yeah, I think it was all for the press, show them our big green kill power…or tan…some were just back from the desert, they hadn’t even been repainted yet. So much of it was for show, not just the vehicles but us as well. They had us in MOPP 4, dude, Mission Oriented Protective Posture, big bulky suits and masks that are supposed to protect you from a radioactive or biochem environment.



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! 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. “Netrocentric,” that’s what I kept hearing from the officers in front of the cameras. “Netrocentric” and “hyperwar.” Cool terms, but they didn’t mean shit when you’re trying to dig a fighting hole with MOPP gear and body armor, and Land Warrior and standard combat load, and all of it on the hottest day in what was one of the hottest summers on record. I can’t believe I was still standing when Zack began to show up.



It was just a trickle at first, ones and twos staggering between the abandoned cars that jammed the deserted freeway. At least the refugees had been evacuated. Okay, that was another thing they did right. Picking a choke point and clearing the civilians, great job. Everything else…



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.” I got to be honest, it was a rush, dudes were cheering in their mikes, me too, watching ghouls start to tumble. I’d say there were maybe thirty, maybe forty or fifty, zombies spread out all across this half mile stretch of freeway. The opening bombardment took out at least three-quarters of them.



Only three-quarters.



[Todd finishes his cigarette in one long, angry drag. Immediately, he reaches for another.]







Yep, and that’s what should have made us worry right then and there. “Steel rain” hit each and every single one of them, shredded their insides; organs and flesh were scattered all over the damn place, dropping from their bodies as they came toward us…but head shots…you’re trying to destroy the brain, not the body, and as long as they got a working thinker and some mobility…some were still walking, others too thrashed to stand were crawling. Yeah, we should have worried, but there wasn’t time.



The trickle was now turning into a stream. More Gs, dozens now, thick among the burning cars. Funny thing about Zack…you always think he’s gonna be dressed in his Sunday best. That’s how the media portrayed them, right, especially in the beginning…Gs in business suits and dresses, like, a cross section of everyday America, only dead. That’s not what they looked like at all. Most infected, the early infected, the ones who went in that first wave, they either died under treatment or at home in their own beds. Most were either in hospital gowns, or pajamas and nightshirts. Some were in sweats or their undies…or just naked, a lot of them completely buck bare. You could see their wounds, the dried marks on their bodies, the gouges that made you shiver even inside that sweltering gear.



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 wasn’t scared, not yet. Maybe my wood was gone, but I was pretty sure it’d be back when Zack entered the Army’s kill zone.



Again, I couldn’t hear the Paladins, too far back up the hill, but I sure heard, and saw, their shells land. These were standard HE 155s, a high explosive core with a fragmentation case. They did even less damage than the rockets!



Why is that?



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. I don’t know. But it didn’t do shit, neither did the SNT effect.



What is SNT?



Sudden Nerve Trauma, I think that’s what you call it. It’s another effect of close-in high explosives. The trauma is so great sometimes that your organs, your brain, all of it, just shuts down like God flickin’ your life switch. Something to do with electrical impulses or whatnot. I don’t know, I’m not a fuckin’ doctor.



But that didn’t happen.



Not once! I mean…don’t get me wrong…it’s not like Zack just skipped through the barrage unscathed. 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!



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.



The next kill zone was direct fire from the heavy arms, the tank’s main 120s and Bradleys with their chain guns and FOTT missiles. The Humvees also began to open up, mortars and missiles and the Mark-19s, which are, like, machine guns, but firing grenades. The Comanches came whining in at what felt like inches above our heads with chains and Hellfires and Hydra rocket pods.



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



Nothing can survive this, I was thinking, and for a little while, it looked like I was right…until the fire started to die.



Started to die?



Petering out, withering…







[For a second he is silent, and then, angrily, his eyes refocus.]







No one thought about it, no one! Don’t pull my pud with stories about budget cuts and supply problems! The only thing in short supply was common fucking sense! Not one of those West Point, War College, medals-up-the-ass, four-star fart bags said, “Hey, we got plenty of fancy weapons, we got enough shit for them to shoot!?!” No one thought about how many rounds the artillery would need for sustained operations, how many rockets for the MLRS, how many canister shots…the tanks had these things called canister shots…basically a giant shotgun shell. 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! Do you know what it feels like to see a sixty-something-ton tank fire into a crowd with absolutely ass-all result! Three canister rounds! And what about flechettes? That’s the weapon we always hear about these days, flechettes, these little steel spikes that turn any weapon into an instant scattergun. We talk about them like they’re a new invention, but we had them as far back as, like, Korea. We had them for the Hydra rockets and the Mark-19s. Just imagine that, just one 19 firing three hundred and fifty rounds a minute, each round holding, like, a hundred 2 spikes! Maybe it wouldn’t have turned the tide…but…Goddammit!



The fire was dying, Zack was still coming…and the fear…everyone was feeling it, in the orders from the squad leaders, in the actions of the men around me…That little voice in the back of your head that just keeps squeaking “Oh shit, oh shit.”



We were the last line of defense, the afterthought when it came to firepower. We were supposed to pick off the random lucky G who happened to slip through the giant bitchslap of our heavier stuff. Maybe one in three of us was expected to fire his weapon, one in every ten was expected to score a kill.



They came by the thousands, spilling out over the freeway guardrails, down the side streets, around the houses, through them…so many of them, their moans so loud they echoed right through our hoods.



We flipped our safeties off, sighted our targets, the order came to fire…I was a SAW 3 gunner, a light machine gun that you’re supposed to fire in short, controlled bursts about as long as it takes to say “Die motherfucker die.” 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. Dude…when they get back up…







[The cigarette has burned down to his fingers. He drops and crushes it without noticing.]







I did my best to control my fire, and my sphincter. “Just go for the head,” I kept telling myself. “Keep it together, just go for the head.” And all the time my SAW’s chattering “Die motherfucker die.”



We could have stopped them, we should have, one guy with a rifle, that’s all you need, right? Professional soldiers, trained marksmen…how could they get through? They still ask that, critics and armchair Pattons who weren’t there. You think it’s that simple? You think that after being “trained” to aim for the center mass your whole military career you can suddenly make an expert head shot every time? You think in that straitjacket and suffocation hood it’s easy to recharge a clip or clear a weapon jam? You think that after watching all the wonders of modern warfare fall flat on their high-tech hyper ass, that after already living through three months of the Great Panic and watching everything you knew as reality be eaten alive by an enemy that wasn’t even supposed to exist that you’re gonna keep a cool fucking head and a steady fucking trigger finger?







[He stabs that finger at me.]







Well, we did! We still managed to do our job and make Zack pay for every fuckin’ inch! Maybe if we’d had more men, more ammo, maybe if we’d just been allowed to focus on our job…







[His finger curls back into his fist.]







Land Warrior, high-tech, high-priced, high-profile netro-fucking-centric Land Warrior. To see what was in front of our face was bad enough, but spybird uplinks were also showing how truly large the horde was. We might be facing thousands, but behind them were millions! Remember, we were taking on the bulk of New York City’s infestation! This was only the head of one really long undead snake stretching all the way back to Times Fuckin’ Square! We didn’t need to see that. I didn’t need to know that! That little scared voice wasn’t so little anymore. “Oh shit, OH SHIT!” And suddenly it wasn’t in my head anymore. It was in my earpiece. Every time some jerkoff couldn’t control his mouth, Land Warrior made sure the rest of us heard it. “There’s too many!” “We gotta get the fuck outta here!” Someone from another platoon, I didn’t know his name, started hollering “I hit him in the head and he didn’t die! They don’t die when you shoot them in the head!” I’m sure he must have missed the brain, it can happen, a round just grazing the inside of the skull…maybe if he’d been calm and used his own brain, he would have realized that. Panic’s even more infectious than the Z Germ and the wonders of Land Warrior allowed that germ to become airborne. “What?” “They don’t die?” “Who said that?” “You shot it in the head?” “Holy crap! They’re indestructible!” All over the net you could hear this, browning shorts across the info superhighway.



“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. “They’re behind us!” someone was shouting. “They’re coming out of the houses! The line’s broken! They’re everywhere!” Suddenly the image went dark, cut off from an external source, and the voice, the older voice, was back again…“Stay off the net!” he ordered, trying real hard to control his voice and then the link went dead.



I’m sure it must have taken more than a few seconds, it had to, even if they’d been hovering above our heads, but, it seemed like right after the communications line blacked out that the sky was suddenly screaming with JSFs. 4 I didn’t see them release their ordnance. I was at the bottom of my hole cursing the army and God, and my own hands for not digging deeper. That ground shook, the sky went dark. Debris was everywhere, earth and ash and burning whatever flying above my head. 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! I kicked it away and scrambled out of my hole seconds after the last of the JSOW 5 fell.



I found myself staring into this cloud of black smoke where the horde had been. The freeway, the houses, everything was covered by this midnight cloud. I vaguely remember other guys getting out of their holes, hatches opening on tanks and Bradleys, everyone just staring into the darkness. There was a quiet, a stillness that, in my mind, lasted for hours.



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…maybe one in twenty was still able to move, which left…shit…a couple thousand? And behind them, mixing with their ranks and pushing steadily toward us, the remaining million that the air strike hadn’t even touched!



And that was when the line collapsed. I don’t remember it all at once. I see these flashes: people running, grunts, reporters. I remember a newsman with a big Yosemite Sam mustache trying to pull a Beretta from his vest before three burning Gs pulled him down…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. Two news choppers crashed together, showering us with their own steel rain. One Comanche driver…brave, beautiful motherfucker…tried to turn his rotor into the oncoming Gs. The blade diced a path right down their mass before catching on a car and hurling him into the A&P. Shooting…crazy random shooting…I took a round in the sternum, in my armor’s center plate. I felt like I’d run into a wall, even though I’d been standing still. It knocked me on my ass, I couldn’t breathe, and just then some dumbass lobbed a flash bang right in front of me.



The world was white, my ears were ringing. I froze…hands were clawing me, grabbing my arms. I kicked and punched, I felt my crotch get warm and wet. I shouted but couldn’t hear my own voice. More hands, stronger, were trying to haul me somewhere. Kicking, squirming, cursing, crying…suddenly a fist clocked me in the jaw. It didn’t knock me out, but I was suddenly relaxed. These were my buddies. Zack don’t punch. They dragged me into the closest Bradley. My vision cleared just long enough to see the line of light vanish with the closing hatch.







[He reaches for another Q, then abruptly decides against it.]







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. 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. It’s as old as…I don’t know, I guess as old as war. It’s fear, dude, just fear and you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day. Break their spirit, that’s what every successful army goes for, from tribal face paint to the “blitzkrieg” to…what did we call the first round of Gulf War Two, “Shock and Awe”? Perfect name, “Shock and Awe”! But what if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed? Not just won’t, but biologically can’t! That’s what happened that day outside New York City, that’s the failure that almost lost us the whole damn war. The fact that we couldn’t shock and awe Zack boomeranged right back in our faces and actually allowed Zack to shock and awe us! They’re not afraid! No matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they will never, ever be afraid!



Yonkers was supposed to be the day we restored confidence to the American people, instead we practically told them to kiss their ass good-bye. If it wasn’t for the Sou’frican Plan, I have no doubt, we’d all be slouching and moaning right now.



The last thing I remember was the Bradley being tossed like a Hot Wheels car. I don’t know where the hit was, but I’m guessing it must have been close. I’m sure had I still been standing out there, exposed, I wouldn’t be standing here today.



Have you ever seen the effects of a thermobaric weapon? Have you ever asked anyone with stars on their shoulders about them? I bet my ballsack you’ll never get the full story. You’ll hear about heat and pressure, the fireball that continues expanding, exploding, and literally crushing and burning everything in its path. Heat and pressure, that’s what thermobaric means. Sounds nasty enough, right? 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. Obviously no one’s going to live long enough to tell that kind of horror story, probably why the Pentagon’s been so good at covering up the truth, but if you ever see a picture of a G, or even an example of a real walking specimen, and he’s got both air bags and windpipe just dangling out from his lips, make sure you give him my number. I’m always up for meeting another veteran of Yonkers.

[cypress_z]

A breakdown of some important points:

You remember what it was like, people just freaking out…boarding up their houses, stealing food, guns, shooting everything that moved. They probably killed more people, the Rambos and the runaway fires, and the traffic accidents and just the…the whole shit storm that we now call “the Great Panic”; I think that killed more people at first than Zack.

I guess I can see why the powers that be thought that one big stand-up battle was such a good idea. They wanted to show the people that they were still in charge, get them to calm the hell down so they could deal with the real problem. I get it, and because they needed a propaganda smackdown, I ended up in Yonkers.

This is a blatant statement that reinforces my original assertion that this is a propaganda battle for the benefit of the people, and that the zombies themselves weren't doing that much damage, comparatively.

Why didn’t they put us on the roofs? They had a shopping center, a couple of garages, big buildings with nice flat tops. They could have put a whole company right above the A&P. We could have seen the whole valley, and we would have been completely safe from attack. There was this apartment building, about twenty stories, I think…each floor had a commanding view of the freeway. Why wasn’t there a rifle team in each window?

Again, if you read the rest of his statements, it's clear they did this for propaganda purposes. They wanted people to be able to see the soldiers.

The "cover and concealment" statement was probably something a higher up said as a quick statement to shut them up, get the soldiers to stop complaining and do what they were told. There's no indication this was an armywide instruction.

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. He must have been an FF because everything we did freakin’ stunk of Cold War Static Defense. You know they even tried to dig fighting holes for the tanks? The engineers blasted them right out of the A&P parking lot.

As our pedantic military enthusiasts will note, nothing in this battle is like the cold war. This is a whining statement designed to deride the leadership. The narrator has a chip on his shoulder.

Dude, we had everything: tanks, Bradleys, Humvees armed with everything from fifty cals to these new Vasilek heavy mortars. At least those might have been useful. We had Avenger Humvee mounted Stinger surface-to-air missile sets, we had this AVLB portable bridge layer system, perfect for the three-inch-deep creek that ran by the freeway. We had a bunch of XM5 electronic warfare vehicles all crammed with radar and jamming gear and…and…oh yeah, and we even had a whole FOL, Family of Latrines, just plopped right there in the middle of everything. Why, when the water pressure was still on and toilets were still flushing in every building and house in the neighborhood? So much we didn’t need! So much shit that only blocked traffic and looked pretty, and that’s what I think they were really there for, just to look pretty.

Again, a blatant statement that reinforces my assertion - this is a propaganda battle. The armies position is designed to look as flashy as possible for the cameras, to calm down the real military threat - the rioting, panicking, fleeing populace. It IS all just there to look cool. That is the whole purpose of the entire battle, and the battle was planned with this - not killing zombies efficiently - in mind.

So much of it was for show, not just the vehicles but us as well. They had us in MOPP 4, dude, Mission Oriented Protective Posture, big bulky suits and masks that are supposed to protect you from a radioactive or biochem environment.



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?

I think this was partly for show; but also because as the narrator states later, the artillery DID turn zombies into a "fine red mist", and they probably didn't know if breathing zombie gore would infect you. The command and reporters were behind the lines, presumably far enough back that no mist was likely to reach them.

Yep, and that’s what should have made us worry right then and there. “Steel rain” hit each and every single one of them, shredded their insides; organs and flesh were scattered all over the damn place, dropping from their bodies as they came toward us…but head shots…you’re trying to destroy the brain, not the body, and as long as they got a working thinker and some mobility…some were still walking, others too thrashed to stand were crawling. Yeah, we should have worried, but there wasn’t time.

If the zombies were human, all of them would have been dead. However, it seems that a VERY few of them didn't get hit in the spine or brain, and their legs weren't severely damaged enough that they couldn't walk.

It should be noted that there's about 50 zombies spread across a very wide space here - not the "tightly compressed" mass we see later, and most of the zombies were outright killed, and of those that weren't, he only describes a "few", meaning perhaps two or three, that are still walking. The rest are crawlers, hence taken out of the battle.

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!

Despite his complaints, his figures for the first barrage are 47 out of 50 disabled. Assuming an equal number of zombies for the second barrage (although there were certainly more by this point) "half as effective" would mean 44 out of 50 zombies killed. The Paladin tank rounds being "even less effective" could mean anything - but keep in mind they aren't airburst, and are weapons designed to explode only within a certain radius.

Assuming the tank rounds were only half again as effective as the MLRS, it would mean that thirty eight out of 50 widely dispersed zombies would die.

Also, he states clearly here that where the rounds struck, the zombies basically exploded. They aren't as lethal to zombies as to humans due to the overpressure immunity, but their bodies can be ripped apart due to external stresses just as easily as any normal human's.

EDIT: Also, this is an excellent example of his unreliability as a narrator, as he was waaaay too far away to actually see any jaws moving on zombie heads. It's clear he's suffering from PTSD, and definitely trying to put the battle in the worst light he can.

The next kill zone was direct fire from the heavy arms, the tank’s main 120s and Bradleys with their chain guns and FOTT missiles. The Humvees also began to open up, mortars and missiles and the Mark-19s, which are, like, machine guns, but firing grenades. The Comanches came whining in at what felt like inches above our heads with chains and Hellfires and Hydra rocket pods.



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

The combination of firearms was totally effective, and no zombies made it beyond a certain point. The plan at this point worked perfectly and looked awesome for the cameras.

No one thought about it, no one! Don’t pull my pud with stories about budget cuts and supply problems! The only thing in short supply was common fucking sense!

This statement clearly shows that there WERE official explanations involving supply problems. He does not elaborate on them, instead wanting to go on a long rant about how stupid the leadership was.

We don't know why the fire died off. But so long as they had bullets, it was a perfectly effective operation.

We were the last line of defense, the afterthought when it came to firepower. We were supposed to pick off the random lucky G who happened to slip through the giant bitchslap of our heavier stuff. Maybe one in three of us was expected to fire his weapon, one in every ten was expected to score a kill.

Again, this confirms that the battle was supposed to be artillery centric, and the infantry wasn't expected to actually have to shoot much, and was just there to mop up the very lucky zombie that got through somehow.

I’m sure it must have taken more than a few seconds, it had to, even if they’d been hovering above our heads, but, it seemed like right after the communications line blacked out that the sky was suddenly screaming with JSFs.

At this point, they clearly realize the supply problems have made the plan unworkable, and respond quickly with is what is obviously a backup plan. They drop bombs on the horde.

I found myself staring into this cloud of black smoke where the horde had been. The freeway, the houses, everything was covered by this midnight cloud. I vaguely remember other guys getting out of their holes, hatches opening on tanks and Bradleys, everyone just staring into the darkness. There was a quiet, a stillness that, in my mind, lasted for hours.



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…maybe one in twenty was still able to move, which left…shit…a couple thousand? And behind them, mixing with their ranks and pushing steadily toward us, the remaining million that the air strike hadn’t even touched!

In spite of his pessimism, the weapon worked and killed off the VAST majority of the horde. Those that still moved were not unscathed, and the ones on fire would almost certainly go down before long. Out of them, there were clearly vastly less than one in twenty as viable, potential threats.

This also bought breathing room for the infantry to move back so the actual bombing runs could begin.

Have you ever seen the effects of a thermobaric weapon?

The actual bombing runs start after the withdrawl of the military forces in the battle. The Yonkers horde was destroyed, and if you go back and actually tally the casualties, it's probably less than ten human deaths in the whole battle, most all freak accidents (which is easy in a large, confusing battle) and the Yonkers horde was destroyed. Repeated for emphasis.

[Big Orange]

I can more forgive the Galactic Empire's laughable tactics at Endor from The Return of the Jedi, since it's unambiguously fantasy and the Empire is an absolute dicatorship, with the egotistical Palpatine more feasibly micromanaging the Imperial forces.

A person being smart and people being panicky, stupid creatures is a feasible explanation for some people leaving the cities to their squalid deaths in doomed refugee camps, but you get different reactions from different people - not just committing mass ritual suicide, you could have Christian fundies and paranoid rural militia finally getting a palpable enemy to crusade against, with much the same results to what was seen in the original Dawn of the Dead (with good ole' boys in plaid popping zombie skulls alongside the US Army).

I don't see why a horribly organized set piece battle is really necessary, when word will get out and photos and footage would spread, showing how unremarkable and easily killed individual zombies are. Most media film crews are usually around after a high intensity battle has finished, not during it enmasse, and getting in the way. And why have the Land Warrior? People have a deep instinctive fear of being torn apart and eaten alive, why broadcast cannibalism to all the infantry?!

Despite that, a few straggling zombies catching a handful of men unaware was still very likely, even with extreme precautions, so why was that an excuse for a full withdraw, despite the still amazingly vast superiority in intelligence and firepower?

[MJ12 Commando]

I think the full withdrawal was to prevent any more losses as infantry-in-IFVs can move faster and get out of lethal range for MOABs faster.

This is useful when you're dropping a lot of boom on a horde.

[cypress_z]

Originally Posted by Big Orange

I can more forgive the Galactic Empire's laughable tactics at Endor from The Return of the Jedi, since it's unambiguously fantasy and the Empire is an absolute dicatorship, with the egotistical Palpatine more feasibly micromanaging the Imperial forces.

A person being smart and people being panicky, stupid creatures is a feasible explanation for some people leaving the cities to their squalid deaths in doomed refugee camps, but you get different reactions from different people - not just committing mass ritual suicide, you could have Christian fundies and paranoid rural militia finally getting a palpable enemy to crusade against, with much the same results to what was seen in the original Dawn of the Dead (with good ole' boys in plaid popping zombie skulls alongside the US Army).

Other chapters go over different things happening. I cannot stress enough just how different a lot of other perspectives are.

I don't see why a horribly organized set piece battle is really necessary, when word will get out and photos and footage would spread, showing how unremarkable and easily killed individual zombies are. Most media film crews are usually around after a high intensity battle has finished, not during it enmasse, and getting in the way. And why have the Land Warrior? People have a deep instinctive fear of being torn apart and eaten alive, why broadcast cannibalism to all the infantry?!

They've clearly been trying that, but they'd also tried to keep a lid on it for far too long, and things have gotten bad. REALLY bad. It would be an insane understatement to say that people had gone absolutely bonkers. The gas is gone, international trade is stopped, infected refugees from Mexico have basically invaded the place en mass, and most major cities seem to have emptied or been taken over by the zombies. Most of the US population is running towards northern Canada, or the Rocky Mountains, or somewhere where it's cold enough for the zombies to freeze.

This isn't even counting all the South American refugees, or foreign refugees from countries all over the world. Technically, the borders probably would have bee long cut off, but the coast guard is probably otherwise occupied at the moment.

Despite that, a few straggling zombies catching a handful of men unaware was still very likely, even with extreme precautions, so why was that an excuse for a full withdraw, despite the still amazingly vast superiority in intelligence and firepower?

Originally Posted by MJ12 Commando

I think the full withdrawal was to prevent any more losses as infantry-in-IFVs can move faster and get out of lethal range for MOABs faster.

This is useful when you're dropping a lot of boom on a horde.

Basically, what MJ said. They decided to drop bombs on the horde, and pulled back the vehicles to avoid any getting hit. Which didn't totally work, as we see.

[cypress_z]

Originally Posted by Chris O'Farrell

The US military was NOT 'critically undermanned' during the Iraq invasion. In fact, it proves my point; Rummy TRIED to force the military to an 'invasion' that was little more then 10,000 troops, claiming that the people would welcome the American troops with open arms and flowers and liberators.

The Brass, even the Brass the Neocons tried to put in play, all told him to frack off, politely, and forced him to move up the total personnel to a quater of a million combined services. And the US military rolled right over the Iraqi army. Sure they took losses, but they were light and they acheived the objectives, occupting the country faster then almost anyone thought they could. And they sure as hell didn't run out of ammo and have to retreat from the Iraqi Army, like the US Army did from the Zombies at Yonkers. Sure then they screwed up the Phase IV planning -as they didn't HAVE any- but that had no bearing on the actual invasion itself.

Oh, they did great with the invasion. But not the occupation. And occupation is a part of war. They didn't provide enough troops for the occupation, and things went poorly because of that.

Now you can argue this point, but I want you to think back to the last time you and I argued about Iraq and the military. Do you really want to lose that hard again?

I was in the military, I fought in Iraq, and I'm well read. Believe me, I know this material better than you.

Besides that, it's off topic. I suggest we kill this line of debate now, so it isn't wasting my time and you don't get embarrassed.

Fighting off a Zombie hoard on US soils is a difficult, but far more straight forward exercise in logistics, tactics and strategy then something like Invading a crazy nation like Iraq. But they failed miserably at the most basic threat assesment and logsitical shaping of their battle plans, something far more simple to do in this situation then the staging for Iraqi Freedom halfway around the frigen world!

Except that there were refugees coming right at them down the freeway, refugees behind them, refugees around them, a lot of zombie hordes wandering in and around cities, and most civilian infrastructure to support their logistics had totally shut down. It's a much, much harder job than you think in this case.

Even with that said, we don't know exactly why there were supply issues. The narrator gives a clearly biased rant on the issue, but doesn't say anything specific like, "our supply trucks got caught behind a zombie horde," or "refugees got in the way", or something like that. They had supplies, they had supply lines, but for some reason that we don't know the supplies did not get from point A to point B in a timely enough fashion to continue the zombie grinder they started with.

And I pointed out McNamarra as the key example of Vietnam, and the reason the modern US military is so terribly resistant to politicians micromanging where they shouldn't. Its the reason why Rummy, despite being The Boss and giving An Order of how it Was To Be Done, got compeltly stonewalled until he came around to THEIR way of thinking. The US learned very painful lessons from Vietnam.

Again, I just suggest we drop this point.

Yes but in your rabid defense of Yonkers, you still can't see that the ONLY contextal situation any half sane and half decent General Staff would see Yonkers as is a military operation to defeat a MAJOR threat, which would in turn provide a great moral boost from the victory. The former provides the later, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. Though all of WW2, military victories were milked for propagana purposes, no General or Leader in the European or Pacific theaters bloody launched an offensive operation for pure political propaganda purposes! They WON the victory and THEN played the news reals to the adording masses.

Its a very simple concept here...

They were winning victories against smaller hordes. It wasn't restoring public confidence.

They couldn't just win. They had to win BIG. Dramatically. In a flashy manner. It was the only way to calm down the people, who were causing far more damage than the zombies. THAT is why they did things the way they did.

And their plan worked. The horde was destroyed. Unfortunately, it didn't have the propaganda effect they'd hoped for - almost certainly due to the fact that the reporters on scene were scared shitless by the experience.

Reading through it again, it isn't said that they filmed live.

You can't have it both ways. Yonkers was not a rash last minute panicked operation put together in five hours from thirty different chains of command and eighty different divisions. The Government took the time to move the troops, half the damn army in fact, to the theater, set up their logistics, move all the media in and get them set up to beam the whole thing live around the country, and then fight their little battle to show everyone that the Government WAS still in control and the situation was contained.

Where do you get this "half the army" figure from again? The description of the forces there is nothing like half the army. Most of the army was widely dispersed at this time trying to restore order.

Anyway, this was a last minute battle, clearly. It was big, and clearly put together fast. And obviously, what they completed was imperfect.

And yes, you can gather together a lot of reporters quickly, provided you give them a news story. A lot of them were probably seeking refuge with the government's people anyway.

You could probably find a lot of the equipment for this battle at the New York Army base alone, and the rest wouldn't have to come from too far away.

In fact, their rational for the battle is quite clear;

"I guess I can see why the powers that be thought that one big stand-up battle was such a good idea. They wanted to show the people that they were still in charge, get them to calm the hell down so they could deal with the real problem. I get it, and because they needed a propaganda
smackdown, I ended up in Yonkers."

Its very clear, their objective was to SMACK the zombies down and thus SHOW everyone that they were in control. It wasn't a holywood motion picture set where looking cool doing it was the objective! Ergo, they have no exucse for not doing it RIGHT if they had all that lead time.

Actually, it proves outright everything I've said. Everything in the battle was for show. They'd fought zombies plenty already, but it wasn't doing the trick. So they quickly threw together a big, incredibly flashy battle. As with many quickly planned things, they suffered from logistical issues.

They won militarily, and wiped out the horde, but on the propaganda front they lost. That has happened countless times in the real world.

And what you just apepar to be completly incapable of getting was that thier actions DESTROYED any chance of a propaganda win, that every lesson learned ABOUT propaganda is about NOT putting the cart before the horse, Propaganda is nothing more then spin combined with smoke and mirrors! Their obejctive was to crush the Zombie hoard and in doing so, show the world that they are awesome zombie killers and in control. THAT was it, they don't then tell the army to fight the battle in ways that SIGNIFICANTLY DIMINISH ITS CAPBILITIES to that end! Its completly, and utterly, COUNTER PRODUCTIVE TO THE END GOAL OF A GETTING THE PROPAGANDA WIN!

I'm GOING to CAPITALIZE every OTHER word SO my ARGUMENT has EMPHASIS.

The battle plan worked fine. They blew up the horde until the artillery ran out of munitions, for reasons we don't know. When that happened, they ran a backup plan and blew up the horde with bombs. From a military standpoint, they won.

I can't make it any more clear then that. Your contention that the battle was fought for propaganda purposes is a complete non sequitur as there is nothing in contradicting to the fact that they could do that more realsiticly and effectivly WHILE fighting the battle without comprisiming it for the idiocy we see in the book!

They did fight realistically at many points in the book, Yonkers being one of those times.

Armies can make mistakes and often do, far more often in fact than battle plans are planned and executed perfectly and are perfectly effective. Hell, in real life, perfectly executed and planned battles that are totally effective are non-existent.

Again, I point to Iraqi Freedom and how when Rummy tried to BE a McNammara, the Pentagon just ignored him until he saw sense. And even invading Iraq was a far smaller task in scale compared to Yonkers, yet at the same time logistically far less straight forward.

You're ignoring the massive civil unrest again.

Except that in that case its far more likely if the situation was turning increasing bleak that the military would just tell the politicans to STFU and get out of their way, that this is a military operation of immence importiance and huge in scale, and they need to just get on with the job without a bunch of idiot politicians looking over their shoulder and screwing it up.

They've clearly been running battles for some time now and they haven't restored confidence in the people. They'd be in a weak position to argue at this point.

In extreemly poor positions, without any kind of defense in depth or contingecy planning for defensive operations in MOUT situations, which is just basic work in this kind of scenario. Even the bloody Iraqi's in Fallujah had extensive setups of fighting positions which they would abandon quickly once the preasure got too much, falling back to new positions and forcing the USMC forces to fight for every meter as they traded space for inflicting maximum damage.

They clearly withdrew somewhere. It wasn't an orderly withdrawal, but morale had taken some serious hits at that point. It was, however, clearly a withdrawal.

Against a frigen shuffle hoard, divisions of mechanised infintry with plenty of time to prepare the ground instead looking to build bloody tank traps and dig fox holes in an urban setting, well...incompetent is far too light a word...

Tank traps and fox holes don't take much time at all, honestly. And the mechanized infantry and artillery were perfectly effective until they ran out of ammo.

Already dealt with the absurdity that a propaganda objective couldn't be easily -more easily in fact- met by doing their jobs properly and that their primary objective wasn't to kill the hoard. Will get to the logistics a little further down...

Just killing them wasn't enough, as the result of the battle showed.

Infintry does not lay down fire for armor to withdraw, ESPECIALLY when they are the only unit on the field to actually be under threat from the zombies. The air support should also have been in action from the start of the engagement, and with heavy bomber strikes and PROPERLY equipped tactical aircraft. The fact that they had to resort to frigen CHOPPERS using their blades like massive buzzsaws to try and manage the situation shows that they had no real contingecy planning at all in fact.

I meant the reporters and other infantry not in vehicles when I said "everyone". As should have been clear from the context.

As for the helicopter, it might have been an accident or just an idiot pilot. They didn't have to resort to it at all.

Hell, for that matter, they should NEVER have conceded the entire field to the Zombies. If they had properly mananged the battle; they should have had second, third, forth and so on tier phase lines they could withdraw, reload and continue the engagement from, even WITH an airstrike called in. They should NEVER have conceded the field after the airstrike, they should have gone right back in and continued the engagement and WON it after the airstrike finished them.

Instead, they just shrugged and walked away.

No, they pulled back so they wouldn't get blown up, then dropped bombs and destroyed the horde.

No, they MADE it a propaganda failure by screwing up the battle the way they did. And the only way they managed to lose the battle was by the books author hand waving it into that state not through 'realsitic' lapses, but by a series of utterly miserable and stupid events one after the other that made sure it came out that way in a highly unrealistic way.

I've already displayed that while they made some bad mistakes, they were realistic and plausible mistakes.

Yet when everything went to hell they became a tactical liability as they got in the way;

"And that was when the line collapsed. I don’t remember it all at once. I see these flashes: people running, grunts, reporters. I remember a newsman with a big Yosemite Sam mustache trying to pull a Beretta from his vest before three burning Gs pulled him down…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. Two news choppers crashed together, showering us with their own steel rain."

It was a complete cockup of a withdrawl.

It was a panicked withdrawal, certainly. What likely happened is that someone high up called for an airstrike, it dropped too close, then the order was given to withdraw. Because morale had been basically nonexistent just prior to the bombs going off, when the order to retreat was given it turned into a rout. (Note, I'm using the definition To put to disorderly flight or retreat, and add this definition because I'm sure someone would say something stupid if I didn't)

Their infintry were already on the front line, the survivors WATCHES the entire battle form RIGHT on the front line where they drop the ordinance. They were catostophcaly too close. They also waited WAY too long to pull back, and the command was never issued, it all just fell appart. Given the speed of the hoard, there is zero excuse of this, they should have had PLENTY of time to pull back and THEN call in the airstrike. The fact that they did not undertake this most *basic* of planning ANY officer worthy of the name would undertake, rather bluntly shows the authory is just making crap up now.

Bombs can and do fall off course during a run; that was likely the case here. You'll argue this point, but we've seen a LOT of examples in every war we've had since planes have had bombing runs. With the horde as close as it was, they erred on the side of too close rather than too far away.

Which is nonsensical and counter productive; by that point in time the plauge is all through the population, a reduced US military can't defend half the coutnry any more then it could defend the whole country and, if anything, its making more of a problem for itself as they are giving the Hoard a whole population base to consume and grow on.

If you make a stupid statement like this again, I'm going to have to post the chapter about the "West African Plan" as well. Since you clearly have the text, read that section before saying anything further about this.

EDIT: And it wasn't an instant withdrawal. They stayed on the east coast for a long while afterwards, until the West African Plan was actually released to the world.

Unless I'm mistaken, at the time of Yonkers the population were still generally distributed normally, it was only 3 weeks later that the virus had spread so widely and the non infected had, where possible, moved West.

No; the entire population of New York had already fallen, it was probably just as bad everywhere else. Most people were already out of the cities in areas affected, and ones that weren't were already starting to panic.

Really?

"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. He must
have been an FF because everything we did freakin’ stunk of Cold War Static Defense. You know they even tried to dig fighting holes for the tanks? The engineers blasted them right out of the A&P parking lot."

-Nothing here about doing it because it 'looked preaty', it reads to me like the orders were given in complete honesty as an effective tactical strategy to fight the Hoard, and everyone cheerfully went right along with it. Hence, they are all the offspring of the heir of the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots.

I just went over this point in my comments on the chapter, and yes, it WAS all there to look pretty. That paragraph is pure speculation and heavily biased at that. Looking at it from an information gathering perspective, it should be totally ignored.

The battle was about fighting a set piece battle that would crush the hoard and show the people everything was good. It was NOT a show about crushing the hoard with some zombies being killed in the process. They just went about it in the most horridly stupid way.

You're wrong, but either way, the horde was wiped out. The plan effectively killed zombies in either case.

Yes, except that they DIDN'T use their arty fire properly, they were frigen wasting MRLS rockets on a DOZEN ZOMBIES at a time, not holding them until they had a target rich Environment!

No, because they wanted to open the battle in a very flashy way. Again, it was a propaganda battle; they wanted to start things off with a very literal bang. It wasn't about holding back their fire and fighting conservatively - it was about blowing them all to hell and back.

And repeated carpet bombing and arty and tank fire is equally borning after hours upon hours of it. People don't want to stay glued to their TVs watching zombies get turned into paste for the hours or days the engagement went on, which in fact is a big point AGAINST a live spectacular. The TV studios will do what they want to do and provide their own bloody pictures, the Miltiary isn't there to co-ordinate it for their cameras.

Again, I'm not sure it was live.

No, they wanted to crush the Zombies and incedently PROVE that they were still in control of the situation.

Well, they did the first. The latter, they failed at.

No, the General put them there because he thought they were EFFECTIVE -by writer fiat- not because he thought they would look cool on TV.

At no time does the writer come out and say he thought tank traps would be effective on zombies. The tank traps are there, but with no given explanation. The narrator does state that a lot of it was there for appearance sake. Ergo; as this had no functional use, the only explanation for it being there was that it was there for looks.

I'll respond to my points when you actually make some that make sense. So far all you have done is try to wave all the impossible levels of incompetence in the engagement away by saying that for some magical reason, everyone involved in the planning of this battle had no problem with countless BASIC mistakes being made at every level in what should have been the most critical battle in the history of the US military. We're not talking about small things, these are bloody HUGE failures of inteligence, command, logistics, tactics, and planning ina a situation where they had plenty of time to get it right, and every reason to make bloody sure they DID get it right, to acheive the ultimate objective of scoring a big victory to show everyone the situation was in hand.

You just keep waving at every mistake and saying 'propaganda' like it excuses the militry acting in a way CONTRERY to just about every damn way they SHOULD be acting in the situation, and it just doens't hold any water. The only answer is pure writer fiat.

You are wrong, pure and simple. There were mistakes, but they were plausible ones, save probably for giving people land warrior equipment.

What you're basically doing is taking a PTSD suffering war vet's account of the battle where all the negative points are blown all out of proportion and a lot of vital information was missing, and making it even more unrealistically negative and blowing everything out of proportion.

And for the nth time as you don't appear to get it, THE TWO ARE NOT IRRECONCILABLE! The former naturally leads to the other in the most simple way possible!

However you cut it, the horde was wiped out. Prioritizing the latter over the former changes how the battle would be fought, and the fact that they are fighting zombies and not humans changes the allowances for different battle plans they could make.

That is the important thing. They didn't have to fight like they did against humans, and they had different priorities than being efficient. That does make it all plausible.

I'm going to cut this short now.

Tomorrow, I'm going to, for the entire board to see, post the entire text of the battle so we can see EVERYTHING straight up. I will then take it appart section by section so I can show the countless, stupid mistakes made that no military worth the name in an engagement of this critical stature would make, and present the case that Yonkers is a horrible low point in an otherwise not too bad book, where the author twists around impossibly to MAKE SURE that the military loses the battle, because he clearly WANTS it that way, and not because it makes any sense, nor is consistent with other parts of the book.

I'm glad that you at least have read the rest of the book.

[FireHazard]

I repeat one major point that Cypress has been making about Yonkers.

They won.

The overall sense of Yonkers was that they destroyed a fairly large Zombie horde with minimal casualties using a combination of artillery and airstrikes. The infantry played a part as well. And then they withdrew before the much larger horde behind the first arrived because they were low on/out of ammo for the big guns. Considering the complete collapse of infrastructure during the great panic that had already happened by this point supply problems are not unbelievable.

Then, despite a decent sized victory, the news people painted it as a failure of the army to contain the Zombie threat at Yonkers and so things the panic was not quelled. And so the Govt introduced the Redecker plan fully and tried to rebuild. As a military engagement the battle was successful. As a propaganda piece it was a failure. And don't say it can't happen because I read newspapers released days after the Iraqi invasion began calling it a terrible mess and a horrific meatgrinder etc, when things were going well. Hell the press generally try to call the 200 casualties british forces in Afghanistan have suffered horrific losses. It's sad yes, but really for a multi year military operation it isn't much. I can believe the press would call Yonkers a failure when it wasn't.

And later battles were operated on a cost:kill planning system because of resource problems, not because they couldn't kill Zombies with big guns.

[Big Orange]

But the retreat at Yonkers still seemed a shambling rout, rather than a relatively orderly withdrawl, and the dimwitted news crew took quite serious fatalties (with retreating M1 Abrams vehicles running over news vans with occupants still insided and reporters getting dragged down by advancing zombies). The witness only just got out their rigt before the daisy cutters hit.