There’s been a lot of stories about questionable survival methods used by certain isolated zones.
Yeah, so? Ask them about it.
Did you see any?
Nope, and I didn’t want to. People tried to tell me about it, people we liberated. They were so wound up inside, they just wanted to get it off their chests. You know what I used to say to them, “Keep it on your chest, your war’s over.” I didn’t need any more rocks in my ruck, you know?
What about afterward? Did you talk to any of those people?
Yeah, and I read a lot about the trials.
How did they make you feel?
Shit, I don’t know. Who am I to judge those people? I wasn’t there, I didn’t have to deal with that. This conversation we’re having now, this question of “what if,” I didn’t have time for that back then. I still had a job to do.
I know historians like to talk about how the U.S. Army had such a low casualty rate during the advance. Low, as in compared to other countries, China or maybe the Russkies. Low, as in only counting the casualties caused by Zack. There were a million ways to get it on that road and over two-thirds weren’t on that pyramid.
Sickness was a big one, the kinds of diseases that were supposed to be gone, like, in the Dark Ages or something. Yeah, we took our pills, had our shots, ate well, and had regular checkups, but there was just so much shit everywhere, in the dirt, the water, in the rain, and the air we breathed. Every time we entered a city, or liberated a zone, at least one guy would be gone, if not dead then removed for quarantine. In Detroit, we lost a whole platoon to Spanish flu. The brass really freaked on that one, quarantined the whole battalion for two weeks.
Then there were mines and booby traps, some civilian, some laid during our bugout west. Made a lot of sense back then. Just seed mile after mile and wait for Zack to blow himself up. Only problem is, mines don’t work that way. They don’t blow up a human body, they take off a leg or ankle or the family jewels. That’s what they’re designed for, not to kill people, but to wound ’em so the army will spend valuable resources keeping them alive, and then send ’em home in a wheelchair so Ma and Pa Civilian can be reminded every time they see ’em that maybe supporting this war isn’t such a good idea. But Zack has no home, no Ma and Pa Civilian. All conventional mines do is create a bunch of crippled ghouls that, if anything, just makes your job that much harder because you want them upright and easy to spot, not crawling around the weeds waiting to be stepped on like land mines themselves. You couldn’t know where most mines were; a lot of the units that set them during the retreat hadn’t marked them correctly or had lost their coordinates or simply weren’t alive anymore to tell you. And then you had all those stupid fuckin’ LaMOE jobs, the punji stakes and trip-wired shotgun shells.
I lost a buddy of mine that way, in a Wal-Mart in Rochester, New York. He was born in El Salvador but grew up in Cali. You ever heard of the Boyle Heights Boyz? They were these hard-core LA bangers who were deported back to El Salvador because they were technically illegal. My buddy was plopped there right before the war. He fought his way back up through Mexico, all during the worst days of the Panic, all on foot with nothing but a machete. He didn’t have any family left, no friends, just his adopted home. He loved this country so much. Reminded me of my grandpa, you know, the whole immigrant thing. And then to catch a twelve-gauge in the face, probably set by a LaMOE who’d stopped breathing years before. Fuckin’ mines and booby traps.
And then you just had accidents. So many buildings had been weakened from the fighting. Throw in years of neglect, and foot after foot of snow. Whole roofs collapsed, no warning, whole structures just tumbling down. I lost someone else like that. She had a contact, a feral running at her across an abandoned auto garage. She fired her weapon, that’s all it took. I don’t know how many pounds of snow and ice brought that roof down. She was…we were…close, you know. We never did anything about it. I guess we thought that would make it “official.” I guess we thought it would make it easier in case something happened to one of us.
[He looks over at the bleachers, smiling at his wife.]
Didn’t work.
[He takes a moment, a long breath.]
And then there were psych casualties. More than anything else combined. Sometimes we’d march into barricaded zones and find nothing but rat-gnawed skeletons. I’m talking about the zones that weren’t overrun, the ones that fell to starvation or disease, or just a feeling that tomorrow wasn’t worth seeing. We once broke into a church in Kansas where it was clear the adults killed all the kids first. One guy in our platoon, an Amish guy, used to read all their suicide notes, commit them to memory, then give himself this little cut, this tiny half-inch nick somewhere on his body so he would “never forget.” Crazy bastard was sliced from his neck to the bottom of his toes. When the LT found out about it…sectioned eight his ass right outa there.