A Review of World War Z Part 5: Home Front USA

Part Five: Home Front USA

The overall theme of this part is the heroics of those in the united states. 

We begin within the safe zone at the rocky mountains. There's starvation, disease, and homelessness by the millions. The US did not implement a version of The Redeker plan so they've taken responsibility for their refugees/people.
We meet a man named Arthur Sinclair, the man in charge of 'DeStRes' or 'Department of Strategic Resources.'
He explains that in order for the US to survive, they had to keep moving forward, they had to get the country back on their feet and get them working again, otherwise, they would lose the safe zone and they would lose the war.
The first thing they had to do was restructure the labor pool. 65 percent of the population was considered "unskilled" at the time and needed to be trained to be self-sufficient. This operation was called The National ReEducation Act.
It classified people from A-1's to F-6's and anywhere in between.
A-1's were skilled laborers from prewar times and F-6's were your desk-bound sedentary "cubicle mice."

There was a lot of push back from the F-6's whose prewar jobs were now obsolete but within three months of The National ReEducation Act there was almost a fifty percent reduction of requests for aid from within the safe zone.

"Those first months, I can't tell you how much information I had to cram into this withered old cortex; the briefings, the inspection tours... when I did sleep, it was with a book under my pillow, each night a new one, from Henry J. Kaiser to Vo Nguyen Giap. I needed every idea, every word, every ounce of knowledge and wisdom to help me fuse a fractured landscape into the modern American war machine. If my father had been alive, he probably would have laughed at my frustration. He'd been a staunch New Dealer, working closely with FDR as comptroller of New York State. He used methods that were almost Marxist in nature, the kind of collectivization that make Ayn Rand leap from her grave and join the ranks of the living dead. I'd always rejected the lessons he'd tried to impart, running as far away as Wall Street to shut them out. Now I was wracking my brains to remember them. One thing those New Dealers did better than any generation in American History was find and harvest the right tools and talent."
What we're look at here is a trade in personal freedoms for the wellbeing and survival of the country. It's an interesting talking point to be sure.
They've taken people with different careers and placed them in positions where they'll be useful but without a choice on what job they get. It works and it moves the country forward, but it's a freedom lost.
He mentions "tools and talents" as what he's after- so those are the talents... what about the tools?

Remember the word "collectivism"...

Sinclair begins his explanation for the tools or resources that we had by showing our journalist the list of ingredients for a rootbeer.
It required imports from eight different countries. Something they didn't have the luxury at the time. He explains that in World War 2 we won because we had the advantage in supplies over the axis. Now it was we who were the axis and we had to make good use of what we had in America.
This meant seizing land and property when needed.
More freedom lost in the name of survival.
He often found himself arguing with the prewar era military a lot about how they don't need more stealth jets because the enemy isn't that kind of enemy.
He was in charge of what projects could go forward.
When Travis D'Ambrosia invented the Resource to Kill Rate, it was a gamechanger across the board.

"What was so amazing to see was how the culture of the RKR began to take hold among the rank and file. You'd hear soldiers talking on the street in bars, on the train; "why have X, when for the same price, you could have ten Ys, which could kill a hundred times as many Zs." Soldiers even began coming up with ideas on their own, inventing more cost effective-tools than we could envision. I think they enjoyed it- improvising, adapting, outthinking us bureaucrats. The marines surprised me the most. I'd always bought into the myth of the stupid jarhead, the knuckle-dragging, locked-jaw, testosterone-driven Neanderthal. I never knew that because the Corps always has to procure its assets through the navy, and because admirals are never going to get too fired about land warfare, that improvisation has had to be one of their most treasured virtues.
[Sinclair points above my head to the opposite wall. On it hangs a heavy steel rod ending in what looks like a fusion of shovel and double-bladed battle-ax. Its official designation is the Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool, although, to most, it is known as either the "Lobotomizer," or simply, the "Lobo."]
The Leathernecks came up with that one, using nothing but the steel of recycled cars. We made twenty-three million during the war.

[He smiles with pride.]

And they're still making them today." 


This story/chapter really focuses on how they have seized land and resources from private citizens, we're told how this is a necessary thing to win the war and save millions of lives but you can see how it goes against the main principles of the united states. but it works and it works very very well. So take that as you will.

The next story brings us to "The Whacko" or more formally, The Vice President of the United States.

What. A. Guy.

The previous four parts of World War Z has shown the worst. It's shown the spread, the cowardice, the evil. It's worn away the optimism of the reader and diminished all chances of hope. It tells the reader that the world is dying, being lost to the walking dead.
Part five. brings. the. heat.
We've done the panicking, we've turned the tide. Now we get to meet the men and women who saved everyone. The people who kept moving forward.
It's Gandalf at Dawn.

"Well... we were in his temporary office, the "presidential suite" of a hotel. He'd just been sworn in on Air Force Two. His old boss was sedated in the suite next to us. From the window, you could see the chaos on the streets, the ships at sea lining up to dock, the planes coming in every thirty seconds, and ground crew pushing them off the runway once they landed to make room for new ones. I was pointing to them, shouting and gesturing with the passion I'm most famous for. "We need a stable government, fast!" I kept saying. "Elections are great in principle but this is no time for high ideals."
The President was cool, a lot cooler than me. Maybe it was all that military training... he said to me, "This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don't have a common heritage, we don't have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have is what we want to be." You see what he was saying. Our country only exists because people believed in it, and if it wasn't strong enough to protect us from this crisis, than what future could it ever hope to have? He knew that America wanted a Caesar, but to be one would mean the end of America. The say great times make great men. I don't buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn't or wouldn't. Greed, fear, stupidity, and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. My boss was a great man. We were damn lucky to have him."

The tone is set for this radical administration. I say radical because what they do is definitely radical. But it's necessary.
Instead of putting people in prison, they take the route of public lashing and putting people in the stocks to publicly shame them.
It's explained that it's a lot more effective to put a sign around someone's neck saying they stole their neighbor's firewood than put them in prison where another able-bodied person has to guard them.
The Vice President discusses the various issues with domestic enemies, people who were not a part of the living dead.
There were radicalists on either side of the spectrum but none were worse than the people who were abandoned in the initial flee west.
They'd survived being left behind and when America started to reclaim the territory lost in the east, these people wanted to keep it.

"Because, as the saying went, 'We didn't leave America. America left us.' There's a lot of truth to that. We deserted those people. Yes, we left some special forces volunteers, tried to resupply them by sea and air, but from a purely moral standing, these people were truly abandoned. I couldn't blame them for wanting to go their own way, nobody could. That's why when we began to reclaim lost territory, we allowed every secessionist enclave a chance for peaceful reintegration.

But there was violence.

I still have nightmares, places like Bolivar, and the Black Hills. I never see the actual images, not the violence, or the aftermath. I always see my boss, this towering, powerful, vital man getting sicker and weaker each time. He'd survived so much, shouldered such a crushing burden. You know, he never tried to find out what had happened to his relatives in Jamaica? Never even asked. He was so fiercely focused on the fate of our nation, so determined to preserve the dream that created it. I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them."

Again, Max Brooks brings in the psychological ramifications of having to make these decisions. These people, great as they are, are broken from the things they had to do and be in charge of. Yes, the United States didn't have a Redeker Plan but they still abandoned people. But instead of checking out like the others we've seen before them, they rise to the challenge and they meet it head-on.

In this theme, we move on to a disabled man named Joe Muhammad. He's been in a wheelchair since before the war.
He wanted to be a part of the neighborhood watch teams but since he was in a wheelchair the recruitment lady tried to talk him out of it but he eventually got his way.

Joe Muhammad is a great character for the recount of how everyday people dealt with this new world. He shares his home with a family of six because the housing development people tell him to. He patrols the neighborhoods, clearing houses, and checking for things like looters and children.

In the vein of psychological ramifications and checking out, Joe Muhammad is the character that's chosen to tell us about quislings. People who gave up and tried to become zombies. They shut off parts of their brain and attempt to join the enemy.

"Ghouls don't blink, I don't know why. Maybe because they use their senses equally, their brains don't value sight as much. Maybe because they don't have as much bodily fluid they can't keep using it to coat the eyes. Who knows, but they don't blink and quislings do. That's how you spotted them; back up a few paces, and wait a few seconds. Darkness was easier, you just shone a beam in their faces. If they don't blink, you took them down.

And if they did?

Well, our orders were to capture quislings if possible, and use deadly force only in self-defense. It sounded crazy, still does, but we rounded up a few, hog tied them, turned them over to the police or National Guard.  I'm not sure what they did with them. I've heard stories about Walla Walla, you know, the prison where hundreds of them were fed and clothed and even medically cared for.

You don't agree.

Hey, I'm not going there. You want to open that can of worms, read the papers. Every year some lawyer or priest or politician tries to stoke that fire for whatever side best suits them. Personally I don't care. I don't have any feelings toward them one way or another. I think the saddest thing about them is that they gave up so much in the end lost anyway.

Why is that?

'Cause even though we can't tell the difference between them, the real zombies can. Remember early in the war, when everybody was trying to work on a way to turn the living dead against one another? There was all this "documented proof" about infighting- eyewitness accounts and even footage of one zombie attacking another. Stupid. It was zombies attacking quislings, but you never would have known that to look at it. Quislings don't scream. They just lie there, not even trying to fight, writhing in that slow, robotic way, eaten alive by the very creatures they're trying to be."

I would say that quislings were the ultimate bottom level of giving up. We've seen the other ways people have given up, suicide, dissociation, and then quislings.
But the rest of the country had to keep going. Had to be moved forward. It was so easy to be like, "yeah, let's lie down and cry for awhile." but at some point in time you have to get back up.

This is where Roy Elliot's story comes in. I'll always love Roy Elliot's story more than a lot of the others in this book just because it touches on the thing that Redeker said we had to lose in our to win. Our humanity. What made us who we are and what made us want to be alive.
It's the driving force of this novel, it's what keeps these characters alive.

"ADS, that was my enemy: Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome, or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome,d depending on who you were talking to. Whatever the label, it killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead. No one understood what was happening at first. We'd stabilized the Rockies, we'd sanitized the safe zones, and still we were losing upwards of a hundred or so people a day. It wasn't suicide, we had plenty of those. No this was different. Some people had minimal wounds or easily treatable ailments; some were in perfect health. They would simply go to sleep one night and not wake up the next morning. The problem was psychological, a case of just giving up, not wanting to see tomorrow because you knew it could only bring more suffering. Losing faith, the will to endure it happens in all wars. It happens in peacetime, too, just not on this scale. It was helplessness or at least the perception of helplessness. I understood that feeling."

Roy Elliot, prewar was a genius film-maker. Post-war, he's a level f-6 manual labor worker. The government didn't want what he had to offer. They wanted practical things. But this story brings in the fact that the arts are needed, they are practical to some degree.
People were dying without hope and Roy Elliot felt that he could give them some of that hope back.
After making his first movie, "Victory At Avalon; The Battle of Five Colleges"
The night the movie debuted, ADs dropped by five percent in Los Angeles. 

Wherever it was screened, there was a marked difference.
So the military asked Roy Elliot to make a series of movies about the technological wonders they were working on. All duds that did nothing for the physical war but were what Roy called a "psychological game-changer."

"Yes, they were lies and sometimes that's not a bad thing. Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used. The lies our government told us before the war, the ones that were supposed to keep us happy and blind, those were the ones that burned, because they prevented us from doing what had to be done. However, by the time I made 'Avalon' everyone was already doing everything they could possibly to survive. The lies of the past were long gone and now the truth was everywhere, shambling down their streets, crashing through their doors, clawing at their throats. The truth was that no matter what we did, chances were most of us, if not all of us, were never going to see the future. The truth was that we were standing at what might be the twilight of our species and that truth was freezing a hundred people to death every night. They needed something to keep them warm. And so I lied, and so did the president, and every doctor and priest, every platoon leader and every parent, "We're going to be okay."
And that brings us to our last story of this section. The lies we tell people to keep them hoping to keep them alive, but what about the lies we tell ourselves?
Christina Eliopolis is a person who doesn't give up. She doesn't lay down and die. She doesn't commit suicide and she doesn't succumb to becoming a quisling. Christina brings her hope from within herself and survives.

Her plane crashes over Lousianna and she's one of the only two people to parachute out.

"Self-contained, self-reliant, and always, unquestionably self-assured. That's the only thing that got me through four years of Academy hell, it was the only thing I could count on as I hit the mud in the middle of G country."

She finds the corpse of the only other person to make it out of the wreck and he's already been torn apart by five zombies. She goes into graphic detail of his intestines around the neck of a zombie and how she loses it, emptying an entire clip into them, wasting bullets, wasting energy.

"I found myself burning up mentally. Fucking weakling, I told myself, fucking loser. I started to spiral, not just hating myself but hating myself for hating myself. Does that make any sense? I'm sure I might have just stayed there, shaking and helpless and waiting for zack.
But then my radio started squawking. "Hello? Hello? Is anyone out there? Anyone punch outta that wreck?" It was a woman's voice, clearly civilian by her language and tone."

Enter the character "Mets."
Mets is a skywatcher stuck in a cabin surrounded by zombies and can't make it to Christina. But she can help direct her to safety.
Thus begins a harrowing journey to the highway where Mets promises Christina she'll be rescued. Christina hits the highway, and is indeed rescued. But not by who Mets says is going to rescue her and what's more- they swear her radio never worked in the first place.

The reader is lead to believe that Christina hallucinated the voice of Mets to help her get through the crash.
Mets gave Christina hope, even if she was a lie.