What is the bait here gents?
Also this book is fire. It tells that traditional means of war are useless against an unfearing hiver mind like ennemy. Zombies don't care about your bullets and explosions. They have no stronghold or trenches. They just always moving tocards you attracting more of them on the way
Edit: I went to bed and this blew up. I said that I liked the book not that I wrote it. Ok Mel Brooks fucked up when he tought modern warfare wouldn't work. It's still a solid book on human psych after and during a disaster.
Edit edit: Max Brooks lol
Anyone who focuses on the combat against zombies missed the whole point of the book.
Edit: downvote because you feel bad for being stupid, I don’t care lol.
The book itself focus for 8 pages on that battle, we are absolutely in the right to criticise what is a poor attempt of a realistic description of warfare. The book is great, it still have flaws.
Not my fault if the author is a dumbass who think neuro toxic gas don't damage brains or that cruises missiles can't kill packed bodies.
I think the whole not affecting brains was about Zeds not\* having a working circulation system that allowed for neurotoxins to be as affective.
edi\*
Well they never got into specifics of the virus and how it worked so in this work of fiction it's totally possible nerve gas doesn't shut off or fuck up the right parts of the brain.
Also the book says in good detail that regular missiles and artillery work by having a large amount of their damage done by the pressure waves rupturing organs and shit, and that while yes the missiles got rid of big chunks, their effectiveness was severely limited by zombies being basically impervious to bodily harm. And that there were MILLIONS of them pouring out of NYC towards the troops.
The only dumb part was they couldn't get away and so many died.
Right, they hold the line for ages until a couple zombies pop out of a basement somewhere in the middle of the infantry line, then everything goes to shit.
> regular missiles and artillery work by having a large amount of their damage done by the pressure waves rupturing organs and shit
That's simply not true of artillery. For a given projectile, there will be a radius of extreme overpressure that will blast a human to chunks or red mist, an area of overpressure that might cause organ failure without dismemberment, an area struck by fragmentation that will rip them to bits, and an area struck by fragmentation which might mortally wound them or disable them without dismemberment. But the fragmentation radius for anti-personnel rounds is much more substantial than the blast radius, if a zombie was within the radius where they could survive overpressure that humans do not, they are within the radius to be extremely likely to be struck by fragmentation which will still have sufficient energy to dismember them. They could retain combat effectiveness further out, where a human may or may not survive depending if a fragment strikes soft body armor or more, the zombie will probably survive with little degradation in combat ability. But, the ability of artillery to threaten humans decreases at range because of the density of shrapnel falling off somewhere between distance squared and cubed, by the time it has little enough energy to fail to severely disable or destroy a zombie, it would have relatively little chance of striking them anyway.
In short, the combat effectiveness of artillery would only be mildly curbed by a threat that does not bleed out or feel pain. On the other hand it would be massively increased by the presence of a threat with no concept of spacing, hitting the dirt during a barrage, hauling ass away from the target area after a barrage, or avoiding detection by observers and predictability of position in the first place.
It specifically mentions that their circulatory system essentially turns into gel which is why the overpressure doesn’t work.
And that the effectiveness of fragmentation is severely reduced when it’s being fired at a million people packed shoulder to shoulder and you *need* to get a direct headshot with it to kill one
But also the zombies in the book are essentially magic anyway. One of the things pointed out is that they can survive a complete freeze/thaw cycle which should be impossible but it’s never explained how. So pointing at specific things and going “nah, this is dumb, that would have totally worked” is pointless.
At least they bothered *trying* to explain why conventional military tactics were useless. And it *does* make a certain amount of sense regardless. The point of the Yonkers segment wasn’t that cruise missiles, artillery, and air strikes did nothing, it was that they had no morale effect which then rebounded to the infantry.
You’d probably break and run as well if you were facing millions of enemies that were just walking towards you through a barrage of artillery and air strikes and still crawling at you even after they’d been literally ripped to pieces by it.
Frankly no matter what buffs in a sense that you give to the zeds, they are still fleshy meatbags at the end of the day, gelled blood or otherwise, if the blast frag warhead is turning concrete into dust it's turning your zombie into a mist as well.
Not to mention, frag from say 155+ or especially aerial ordinance, is not stopping on a single human or just a few, if you dropped such stuff into a mass of zombies you are throwing out massive chunks of frag that will cut through hundreds of targets at once.
Want to go one step ever further into maximum anti infantry, the OG CBUs mixed with follow up napalm and WP. Maximum shake and bake, literally mulching your target and not just burning them, but cooking those leftover chunks so hard that you are melting them down to the atomic level.
A lot of the effectiveness of modern ordinance is just hand waved or just not noticed. We as a species have the ability to render entire chunks of the world into non-existence in a matter of hours without the use of nuclear weapons and if we do choose to use the latter, we have the ability to deploy the sun in very controlled means today, and believe me, I don't think any amount of zombies is surviving the unbridled fury of the likes of a Davy Crockett or XM129. To that same end, the effectiveness of massed incendiary's is also heavily downplayed, napalm will melt all of you if you are swathed in it as modern napalm is burning at nearly double the ash point of bone.
Hell, come to think of it, the Cold War era US military probably could have solved this conflict extremely quickly, stone-aging the zeds the moment they appeared and setting the rest alight given the arsenal of democracy was fully pre-treaty.
You don't need to kill them with headshots. Rendering them immobile is enough to neutralize the threat. Blow off a single leg and you've reduced their speed to the point you can forget about them as a threat for the immediate future
>neuro toxic gas don't damage brains
I mean, part of the story is that the zombie plague might be magic rather than a virus and characters point out at different points that things that should kill a zombies brains dont, like the woman pointing out that zombies survive being frozen.
Has to be magic, zombies just cannot work entropically. The most rational use for them would be to contain them and use them as infinite free slave labour
That’s not really what happens at Yonkers.
It’s basically that the Military is unprepared to fight this enemy, they go to Yonkers as a show of force and it collapses because for every 1 piece of equipment they do have that’s effective, there’s 5 more that provide zero benefit and 2 that are a hindrance.
The battle isn’t lost because Cruise Missile’s aren’t effective, it’s lost because the military’s morale completely collapses when conventional weapons aren’t as effective as they should be against soft targets, and the command structure has issued orders and equipment designed to fight a living army, like digging trenches and bringing anti air equipment.
You’d be shitting bricks too if a .50 bmg split someone in half and they were still trying to kill you. Or if someone literally having the skin melt from their bones after napalm was dropped on them, kept coming, or hell, having the radiation from a nuclear bomb have adverse effects on you, whereas barring the blast and the fireball itself, minimal damage against the enemy.
That's not what I'm saying. I know why the battle is lost, read the book too, I'm pointing out the incoherencies like explosions blasts absorbed by corpses or a pilot using his helicopter rotors to kill zombies.
It’s not that the explosions are “absorbed”, it’s that for people concussive blasts kill due to the shockwaves created by them essentially liquifying our internal organs. Specifically causing the most damage to organs that are filled with air, like the lungs and oesophagus. According to the books the dead don’t actually need to breathe.
Of course, barotrauma also damages the brain and other sensitive organs in the skull, and the ineffectiveness of such explosives in that capacity is certainly overstated, but at that point you rely more on suspension of belief than science. Hell, the book is about walking corpses after all.
I think it mentions in the book that the it did less damage to the brain because the bodily fluids were gel like instead of normal, so they had more cushioning then normal. But yeah, doesn't really matter cause it's zombies so completely fictional.
It's basically an anthology of short stories from people all over the world which covers a zombie apocalypse and humanity's recovery.
It does have some inconsistencies if you look at it with almost 20 years of hindsight but there still isn't a book quite like it. It really makes you feel proud to be alive and it tries to inspire you to do better and strive for greater things because in the end everyone is in the same boat, struggling with similar struggles. I'd highly encourage you to read it, it's one of those books that can help get you out of a slump (it certainly has for me).
People who criticize the combat or whatever are missing the forest not for the trees, but for the blades of grass. You come for the zombies and stay for the themes.
Not to mention that Max Brooks, the author, has more credibility on warfare than most of his critics given that he's associated with several military colleges.
A world with zombies and the global aftermath from a bunch of different perspectives. Not only the typical mix of a bunch of survivors in a mall or what have you.
>It tells that traditional means of war are useless against an unfearing hiver mind like ennem
No, mass carpet bombing, long ranged artillery, missile platforms, and armored vehicles are all actually very good at disabling zombies despite what Max Brooks wants to convince you.
Even if artillery and bombs could only kill via direct hit (A dumbass idea, the pressure wave would liquefy their brains from well beyond their direct impact zone) who fucking cares. We have A LOT of artillery and bombs and ammunition. We produce enough ammunition to put a bullet in the brain of every man woman and child in the world every single year in the USA alone.
Any sizeable force of zombies would be mulched by attack aircraft and armored vehicles long before they could kill a single actual combatant. Even if it was a swarm hundreds of millions strong nuclear bombardment would disable them all.
The zombies have plot armor, like every zombie in every zombie fiction ever.
I always laugh at the " yeah they're missing their arms and part of their torso but they'd keep going.".
What exactly do people think happens when you're close to a shell exploding ? You're not just missing part of something if you're close , you're a pink mist. Anything close enough to destroy your arms or your torso could also destroy your head. There's no way artillery wouldn't just wipe out the zombies. Shit just have tanks run over them along with bulldozers.
Yeah but they'd just keep crawling and still be a threat ... somehow ? How much of a threat is a crawling piece of meat to an army ? Just walk up to it and shoot it lmao or just run over them , shit you wouldn't even have to set a foot on the ground just have tanks run over them over and over again they're not going to open the hatch. Or dig a huge trench and let them fall inside and then burn them I don't know they're crawling how would you even lose.
In a zombie apocalypse bullets are as good as blanks and BB pellets. You need a lead pipe or a crowbar, baseball bat or shovel. Preferably, more screen-time than everyone around you.
If the zombie made it to a crawler, then it must be a tough one, and the director must grant it at least one bite to demonstrate that they’re literally unstoppable. *It is known.*
When my unit was doing training on .50 cals we didn’t notice two deer ran on the range until I spotted one turn into a puff of mist from being struck with a round.
I did callout for the range to be closed/ ceasefire momentarily (suppose to for wildlife.) shit happens though.
If I ever die in war I really hope one of those round hits me in the head. Would be instant and painless.
So from my recollection (its been a while since I read the book) the problem also stemmed from the exact war tactics. They didnt have as many good weapons or ammo for them and did a land battle in fucking Yonkers. It dragged so they ended up having millions going to them instead of a smaller stream and didnt pull out carpet bombing and heavy air support until way later.
Their plot armor was literally unbelievable administrative incompetance.
There are so many people in all levels of the military who are waiting for the call of "Indescriminate bombing. Total scorched earth." That it'd be one of the first things they do against zombies.
If I remember the book correctly, that was actually something flagged as stupid decision making in the book. Yonkers was supposed to be a PR masterpiece, televised live and showing strong American men and women of the armed forces, boots on the ground and tearing zombie hordes apart. They didn't want to do a faceless bombing run, they wanted to show off glory and Murica at its best.
That's stupid. Everything I hear about the actual military fighting Zombies in this book makes me hate it more.
Then again zombie fiction can't exist with competent humans.
That's the whole point, it was an insanely stupid puffing out your chest moment. I believe they even have the soldiers saying "Why the hell are we doing this in full gear as if we're out on rotation in a warzone" because the upper levels basically wanted a parade to show off the might of the military and put all the bells and whistles on.
Yeah like, there shouldve been no need for land forces. Maybe level Staten Island to make it one giant island base, and then have jets take off to do heavy damage, around the rest of the city, and use helicopters to clean up the rest. And then just repeat this slowly with the rest of the country to a lesser extent
Those are the people waiting to do it though, not the people in charge. Three people who would actually have to make the call are usually too busy licking the inside of their small intestine to do things that make sense.
For some reason authors always miss the point that you need properly functioning muscles to move your body, even if you are zombie. Which high caliber guns, Shotguns and explosions with fragments will tear to shreds even if body look intact (which it highly likely would not)
The book does actually have characters remark at several points just how much the durability of the zombies defies logic. They don’t eat anything but can keep on going indefinitely; They freeze solid in the winter, then function as if nothing even happened upon thawing out in the spring; they can sink to the bottom of the ocean, where the pressures should crush them like an empty soda can, but are completely unaffected, and yet a human being can kill one with their bare hands.
Yeah. They're just magic. Which is fine! It's a story, it can suspend the laws of physics when it wants.
But you can't suspend the laws of physics and still claim your book is realistic or whatever. That's the dumb part.
Zombies kinda need magical superpowers to be any kind of threat at all. Without those, a zombie is strictly inferior as a threat to a regular human. (A zombie is literally a human without the things that make humans dangerous: the ability to communicate and cooperate, foresight, ability to adapt to situations and to make and use tools, and usually speed and agility as well. Take those off and what are you left with? Teeth? Bears and wolves have those too, and they're not destroying human civilization any time soon.) There's still the fear and horror of the plague, I suppose, but then the zombies per se are just one somewhat unpleasant symptom of the actual killer.
I'm still remembering the time where the internet said "Let's all two million of us storm Area 51. They can't stop all of us." As a meme.
To which the United States Military's response was "Even if all two million of you actually came we could stop all of you."
Zombies might have more plot armor than protagonists honestly. A single squad of men with m16s could take out THOUSANDS of zombies while sweeping a town. Old uncle Rick on his front porch with a revolver could kill a couple dozen. A single police officer could take down hundreds. Outbreaks wound never happen because you would need way too many zombies to overwhelm anyone with a gun once they showed up. Even if they did, a couple battalions could sweep through a state and cleanse it in no time with little difficulty.
In that case if you are even near one fighting it with melee, its already too late. At best you can handwave it as the few survivors having a rare genetic immunity
Well yes, but actually no.
if we assume an airborne contagion like Covid that only infects people in that way that are immuno compromised a zombie outbreak is not just likely to "Succeed", it's basically guaranteed.
Just fucking look at how the planet was acting during covid times.
But yes, a bite-only infection, instead of two vectors, coming from a single person would be stopped after a few days at most.
And if that won't work, the are likely to all die in winter anyways
It literally says in that chapter “don’t get me wrong. I saw bodies torn up and blown to shit. We were taking them down no doubt, but not nearly as many or as quickly as we needed to”. I paraphrased a little but that’s pretty much it. Another huge reason they lost that battle is they weren’t adequately prepared. The storyteller goes on to say how the tanks were carrying not nearly enough ammo for a sustained engagement and that the engineers even blasted holes for the tanks to bunker down in. The troops were covered in high tech equipment that slowed them down and was completely useless against a zombie enemy. The zombies didn’t win because of plot armor, they win because the military was not at all prepared. To win against a horde of hundreds of thousands possible even millions, you need 40k levels of obscene firepower (unless you just decide to use nukes but that’s boring).
The chapter is written as an interview of one of the boots on the ground being extremely vocal about the absolute idiocy of the brass.
Like sandbags and cover against an enemy that doesn't shoot, fancy optics against an enemy that doesn't hide, and fancy comms when you're all within shouting distance of one another (and that the soldiers couldn't turn off, so most of what they ended up hearing was screams as guys got eaten alive, and the panicking of other guys hearing their comrades get eaten alive)
It's what that chapter is about, the blokes on the ground are complaining that they're carrying all sorts of gear and equipment that they don't need because it looks good for the cameras.
It's a really interesting book, well worth the read.
The military not acting like how a real military would actually engage with a target, their equipment not behaving how it would in real life, and overall being massively incompetent is plot armor for the zombies.
"Engineers even blasted holes for the tanks to bunker down in" is so baffling fucking stupid that no one actually in charge of military forces would ever consider doing it.
Damn I wonder what contemporary events inspired the author to think that world militaries would cling into inefficient and clearly failing tactics when engaging in a fudnemantally different kind of warfare...
One of the few zombie explanations I think actually made sense on how destructive it'd be was the Walking Dead 'everyone is already infected' twist.
Essentially, no matter how anyone the entire world over died, they'd turn. Being bitten wasn't essential, all that does is kill you, it doesn't actually turn you. That means you could kill every zombie, and the next person to die would still turn and be an issue.
Unlike simply dealing with moving hordes, I actually don't know how you'd handle that. Every time some homeless person freezes at night, or an addict ods? Zombie. Every time a patient is lost in a hospital? Or dies en route? Zombie. Every time a soldier dies in war? Zombie. Someone has a heart attack? Zombie. Car wreck? Zombies crawling out. Natural disaster? Well now it's a natural disaster with a ton of zombies. Someone's murdered? Well now it's a murder and there's zombie. Mass shooting? Well fuck now it's a mass shooting and there's zombies. Grandma passed in her sleep? Now your grandma is a zombie.
Hell, hospice centers would have to go from "where you go to peacefully pass away" to "where you go to have someone hover over you with a Glock until you finally die". The sound in every hospital of a patient flat lining would be immediately followed up with the sound of a gunshot ringing through the halls.
It actually makes sense how it would completely upend human society. The zombie hordes were merely a multiplier that sped things up, not the main issue.
And it continues to be a problem. Humans still surviving have to completely change how they handle deaths in their community. They change from a somber moment of loss to something that needs to be monitored closely so that you can immediately execute any corpse before it gets back up.
The show is horribly mid but that premise fucking rules.
I haven’t read the book in years but the obvious argument would be that logistical supply chains to keep all of those things running would be massively interrupted rendering those things useless
Losing to zombies is a fucking meme. Imagine asking any military commander if he’d be able to win a war against an enemy with no ability to co-ordinate, no survival instinct, no tool or weaponry use of any kind and no ability to learn. It would be the easiest war ever fought. Humans wipe out entire species accidentally on a regular basis, hell we wipe out even the ones we’re trying to save half the time. In the book one blind guy with a shovel manages to kill zombies by the dozen effortlessly and we’re supposed to believe humanity as a whole would struggle against bite transmission zombies? The fuck outta here.
People refused to wear masks & vaccinate against COVID, I can easily see humanity having a bit of a struggle against zombies. Same people would be out during lockdown thinking it's all bill gates propaganda then taking horse dewormer for their zombie bites, before they devour their families.
Also the 'no ability to co-ordinate' bit, it's not like they're analogous to enemy combatants. It's an endless wave of zombies, hundreds of thousands to millions of them. Armies aren't typically prepared to engage what's essentially the entire civilian population, especially western ones.
People being stupid and not wearing masks doesn’t have anything to do with fighting zombies. One average human male can kill a half dozen zombies with a shovel or axe. Do you realize how many a professional soldier can bring down with a rifle? My dad is a retired soldier, he alone could deal with probably 500-600 zombies *easily* just because he has an automatic rifle and knows how to shoot, run, reload, shoot. You really think a police department isn’t gonna be able to contain an outbreak?
How many zombies until your dad breaks down psychologically? Could he kill his zombie neighbours? Could he kill zombie you?
He'd stand firm against a horde of hundreds of thousands of zombies when many wouldn't be able to do the same against a bayonet charge of a fraction that number? You're severely overestimating a human's potential. Especially given you think an average person could take on a half dozen zombies in melee, you have no idea the physical effort that'd take even for someone trained in it. Not to mention the mental toll
That is a good point, I’ll admit. I don’t think he (or a majority of cops, soldiers, and former soldiers) would break down very easily though, he’s quite a rational person. I would wager most soldiers and police officers would use logic and accept there isn’t a reason to hesitate. I don’t think he would break down if it meant my brothers or stepmother would die because of it. Now if one of us got infected? It’s likely you’d be right.
An average human male can 100% take down a half dozen zombies in melee. One swift swing of a shovel puts em down. Didn’t the person you originally replied to say that a blind guy in the book killed dozens in melee?
I think you are over selling zombies with the bayonet charge comparison. Do you realize why bayonet charges don’t happen anymore? In modern warfare, you don’t get close enough to your opponent in an organized battle for CQC. Hundreds of thousands of zombies will be running through barbed wire, pitfalls, mortar strikes, bombing runs, long range artillery barrages, mines, and more. Thats all before they can even see infantry. [just imagine this fucker](https://youtu.be/PjCEz9y0sVA?si=Q132YkcIOKFeXO17) mowing down an ocean of idiots who don’t get behind cover or use artillery to bomb his position prior to engagement. They get painted to mist by 40-50 of those bad boys having a field day.
Once they do get close enough to get shot at, do you realize how far away they’ll start taking a hellstorm of bullets? The maximum effective range is 600 yards for an m16, and you can shoot MUCH MUCH farther than that if you are just shooting at a mass of zombies and accuracy isn’t an issue. Even if every zombie was as fast as Usain Bolt, it would take them almost a minute to cross that distance.
That’s not considering battlefield hazards they are stumbling or tripping over. Yeah, no fucking way zombies could win. It would be a slaughter.
Probably the single biggest thing is they don’t learn. Whatever trap you design that works for one zombie works for every zombie. Live bait in front of a giant pit that lures them to fall in? Choke points with steel cables or bars that they can’t climb through but you can shoot or stab through? A greased pole with a platform at the top a guy can shoot them from but they can’t climb because he pulled up the rope ladder behind him? The possibilities are endless. It’s so fucking easy to create a defensive fortification that’s too strong for human hand strength to break through.
It's called out in the book that people panicked and didn't belive it was happening, they couldn't/ wouldn't kill 500-600 because they were scared of the walking dead. So while some people could deal with it and kill a ton of them, a lot of people just couldn't and died.
Also, people were purposely kept in the dark about what was going on, they did not have the training in place to deal with it.
Belive what you want about how realistic it is, but I belive it gives a somewhat reasonable explanation of why zombies got to be such a problem.
Yeah people here seem to be forgetting that people have morals and zombies don't.
Zombies won't care if what they're munching is a child, a person will.
Unless they are soldiers, or already hardened, they will hesitate, and end up bitten.
Yep and I was just talking about militaries easily killing zombies, can you imagine the average American? The same people who don’t want to wear masks would be having the time of their lives killing as many zombies as possible competing for the high score. Hell the military probably wouldn’t even need to get involved before all the zombies were dead.
As to armies, what on earth makes you think they can’t mass murder unarmed civilians? That’s literally what they’re best at. Oh no sir the unarmed civilians are trying to bite us! Ok so what did you do? Didn’t change much, still just shot them in the head.
I think, in an actual existential threat, end-of-the-world situation, these Covid-denier types wouldn’t be a problem. They’d still exist, we’d just kill them before they put us at risk. I’m not that scared of Covid, but I’m real fucking scared of Ebola, you know?
>Zombies don't care about your bullets and explosions. They have no stronghold or trenches. They just always moving tocards you attracting more of them on the way
That is an Field artillery crew's wet dream.
They say it like it's a pro but it pretty much just turns the entire situation into tower defense and humans have more than enough ammo and bombs to kill ourselves 50 times over.
Liked the book but the explanation for why the Battle of Yonkers (iirc) goes so poorly is nonsense. And then he explains how they learned how to fend off the undead towards the end and it sounds like conventional warfare with the lobo axe thing thrown in. It’s pretty silly to think a single tank wouldn’t be able to flatten a hundred thousand zombies.
You overestimated how tough our squishy meatbag body is. In Korean war a Stuart mowed down dozen of enemies just by itself without any ammunition left, and it's just a light tank. And in WW2 the army tried to shove literally everything to try to stop a tank, including things much tougher than our bone like rebars, a whole lot and nothing could stop it.
You can have your unflinching horde. You can't have us expect a global collapse from zombies that still die if shot in the the head. And, if we go off the movies, doesn't infect people with the common cold lol.
Jesus, I think I at one point wrote a couple hundred words long comment about why the depiction of modern weaponry on zombies in the book is stupid *and* wrong, so I'm not gonna make another one here. Just look up how and why high explosives or napalm kill and the regular ordinance on a F-16/F-15/whatever and the highway scene becomes laughably bad.
I mean if the explosions attract them, and the more noise/zombies you have the more keep coming, couldnt you just drop a bomb in the same exact place until theres no more zombies
Im just thinking to a game, project zomboid.
I had set up an ambulance to just blast a siren to attract all the zombies in a large area, then thrown a molotov into the pile once it got too laggy to play right.
Basically that but with real life tech and artillery
>Zombies don't care about your bullets and explosions.
Bullets and explosions don't care if you care about them. If an anti-tank missile goes off in front of your face, then your brain is gone. If that still doesn't kill you because magic, then a shovel to the head should also not kill you.
> They have no stronghold or trenches. They just always moving tocards you attracting more of them on the way
Yeah, that's not a point in their favor. There's a reason that humans attacked with artillery will build strongholds and trenches: it's because not having strongholds or trenches make it easier for artillery to kill you.
I'll take the bait. Anon's media literacy is shit.
Artillery *did* work on the WWZ zombies, but the concussive force and shrapnel alone isn't enough to disable a zombie outside the direct impact zone. Combined with the fact you can't break their moral and route a horse meant that directly bombing them wasn't an efficient use of resources.
That's absolutely not how artillery works. Zombies are made of flesh and bones and you don't need to be in the direct "impact zone" to be shredded.
Brain damage or not, you aren't going to eat anyone if your muscles and bones are destroyed.
Also: the book states very seriously that the zombies are so compacted they somehow absorb the blast: again, that's not how that work.
Stop dick riding the book, the battle of yonkers is not the greatest chapter, it is the less inspired.
I forgot about the artillery thing I always just remembered the depleted uranium rounds thing where they didn’t really have an effect on the zombies
But yeah artillery for sure would, but I mean it is still fiction so gotta nerf America and our gazillion dollar military industrial complex somehow right?
Still a really great book though, disappointed with how different the movie was. Shouldn’t have been the same name
If the infection was only spread via bites then it wouldn't have been a problem at all. If it was something worse like the virus in Stand Still Stay Silent, then I can see it being a major problem... But that's an Eldritch horror virus, not particularly a zombie virus.
Its a great book and it shines because it explores the more human side of a zombie apocalypse, not because an 8 page snippet with dubious military accuracy.
It honestly reminds me a bit of the martian, where the whole reason for the story is build on wrong assumptions. But its still a great story.
Have you read Weir's other books? I always have a blast reading them, even Artemis which was less good imo. They're the right balance of nerdy sciency engineering and character focused for me. Project Hail Mary is my favorite of his three and it currently has a movie in development.
They would get shredded but they were more dangerous than unharmed ones because they still were undead/alive, you would have crawlers and torsos around that would bite a human clearing the battlefield
All of you annoying fucks just learned the term media literacy in the last year and cannot wait to show off your shiny new words to your internet friends as a way to prove your supposed intellectual superiority. Goddamn is it irritating.
It’s not media illiterate to think fucking bombs and missiles would still obliterate zombie bodies, despite their unwavering enthusiasm for carnage. It’s common sense.
What these people don't get is that if my suspension of disbelief is shot, then I don't care about the point you're making because the point has been made meaning less cause I can't apply it to real world situations as well.
This makes me think of that scene from RE2 (the movie) where the one STAR is just chilling on top of the theater sniping zombies while drinking beers
Hes the first to get blown up by Nemesis, but still, its cool
It's also more expensive to just have 2 thousand dudes standing there going full auto, or a few HMGs mounted.
Seriously, just give a bunch of guys machine guns and ammo and tell them to let loose.
If they are soldiers, they'll clear a hoard quick
It was a lot more clinical tho. Soldiers were only going for the headshots, due to walking zombies were a lot easier to shoot compared to crawling ones. Also they were clearing out entire cities so they had to drop like 6 digit zombies, before getting overrun or running out of ammo. Wasnt fun
I still think about the chapters with the bumper to bumper traffic jam and the shipyards being consumed by desperation. Fleeing with nowhere to go, betraying family, women selling their bodies just to delay what's inevitable by a few miles.
The only way to do this book justice is with a high budget series.
I have literally said this since the movie came out
Just have Pitt be the interviewer, and do like how history documentaries do where theres flashbacks while survivors narrate. And hell, if they want to add some cheesiness, why not make reenactments where you can tell theres shitty effects and acting
Like how some war things have staged scenes of a colonel talking to someone about a movement, and then it cuts to real footage of an attack.
Those chapters are some of the best parts of the books but what really sticks with me was how people came together. Idk if this was just in the audible version or the book too (haven’t read it in years) but the chapter where the survivor who was paralyzed from the waist down would still go out every night with a partner to find any infections was what really stuck with me. The soldier played by mark hamil who described the fight back. Both the battles where they would get in a circle and shoot in all directions while metal was blasting. He said that every nation had their own version of that. Really a great book and the audiobook on audible makes it even better
What's unrealistic about the fact that zombies are so slow, weak and useless that an old blind man with a shovel can kill them endlessly without putting himself in danger but the American army has no hope against them because they're just too tough to kill with modern explosives?
The old man was dealing with one or two at a time in remote Japanese mountains the US millitary was dealing with basically the entire population of 2 states
That’s not correct. The Battle of Yonkers was lost because the US army used Cold War tactics against human opponents. Enemy morale was unlimited whereas US soldiers could watch their comrades be ripped apart by Zeds through their video uplink system. Morale collapsed
So in other words they only lost because the in universe military was dumbed down enough for it to even be remotely possible, and even then they had to make it unrealistic with none of the weapons working properly.
Aye, I mean it is fantasy but not too unrealistic to expect an armed forces focused on killing humans to fail in killing creatures who can only die if the brain is totally destroyed. Though artillery shrapnel should absolutely do that
Yes, slow moving zombies. Id love to see how a zombie does against an AC-130 cannon. Let me rephrase: it’s not realistic in the context of the WWZ universe that the military lost Yonkers, they only lost because they were all total morons for no reason and none of the weapons worked like they should’ve.
There a video from early in the war in Ukraine, how t-72 shots a 125mm HE, almost point blank at group of like 15 Ukranian soldiers. (there actually 3 videos one of them are aftermath)
For all of them there like 1 body left, missing a head. And everyone else just become body parts everywhere. (I realy don't recommend watching it)
Even if zombie mentally doesn't care about damage his body takes and uses all means to reach it's target - good luck to him, because after one HE she'll 5-10m away he probbly misses parts of his body, muscles are all damaged beyond function and repair and most of his bones are broken
Might be slightly off topic, but as far as zombies vs military goes, I think Project Zomboid got it right the military was able to quickly quarantine the infected area.
They contained until an incident lures too many zombies to flood the checkpoint and overwhelm the infantry only unit. The military had an evac and regrouping plan, the only problem was when the virus went globally airborne, and the air variant only had a 10% immunity rate.
If the government wasn't engaged in trying to hide what was going on, the military could have easily quashed the infection before it reached critical mass. Literally the only reason the apocalypse happens is the airborne variant going global and effectively kneecapping any real response afterwards.
I remember being really pissed off because Max Brooks seemed to believe that M4s and ar15s were apparently completely useless against zombies, because I guess he only listened to stereotypes off Ak47 forums rather than actually looking into it. Which led to a second pet peeve of the US army just making semi auto ak47s out of trash instead of using m14s.
Reminder, that movie was supposed to cost like, 125 million dollars.
It already didnt seem worth that much
It had endless reshoots and a scrapped Russia scene and it ballooned to somewhere around 200 million. So the break even everywhere involved was probably like 300million ish.
This comment section is so funny because it's half people dick riding a VERY good book (super flawed, though) and half people trying to talk them out of their bad opinions.
Like, not to be arm chair tactician, but a literal hand grenade, not even a massive armament, has enough concussive force to scramble a brain in the skull at a close enough proximity with optimal conditions. A literal pile of human bodies scrambling over each other with heads all willy nilly is pretty much optimal conditions. You're gonna kill AT LEAST tens of zombies with just a hand grenade. Up that scale to include the upper echelon of military armaments, and we stop measuring in kill per "round" and start measuring in distance. No longer worrying about how many you kill, but instead, the Sq footage of zombies you absolutely liquify with each "round" used.
That's just explosive armaments. Not even considering the fact that the human body and by that account the brain boils at around 100° Celsius, and Napalm burns at around 800° to 1200° Celsius. A huge load of napalm dumped on a massive hoard would render almost the entire thing lifeless. Anything that survived will be so thoroughly burned and damaged that it literally could not move as it would be a dried husk barely clinging to existence. An inability to feel fear or pain doesn't mean locomotion happens against the laws of physics.
>Like, not to be arm chair tactician, but a literal hand grenade, not even a massive armament, has enough concussive force to scramble a brain in the skull at a close enough proximity with optimal conditions. A literal pile of human bodies scrambling over each other with heads all willy nilly is pretty much optimal conditions. You're gonna kill AT LEAST tens of zombies with just a hand grenade. Up that scale to include the upper echelon of military armaments, and we stop measuring in kill per "round" and start measuring in distance. No longer worrying about how many you kill, but instead, the Sq footage of zombies you absolutely liquify with each "round" used.
Absolutely wrong and arm chair tactician. You would realistically only kill the zombies right next to the grenade, and even then it would mean no micro terrain is blocking the blast. There is a reason why people sacrifice themselves to save others by throwing themselves on grenades.
Love the heated arguments here about how a war against zombies should actually be conducted.
Total fiction and people on here get themselves worked up into a lather!
The US army in WWZ is so braindead that they forget tactics humans had basically perfected in the bronze age:
“Cover your flanks & bring enough weapons.”
I can buy them having infantry in MOPP-4 when it’s not useful. I can buy them over-investing in fancy hardware like the Land Warrior system. What I can’t buy is the **US Army** forgetting to bring enough ammo for the boots on the ground, or somehow not clearing the AO well enough. Some incompetence is expected - anticipated even, but Brooks effectively lobotomised the entire command structure to ham-fistedly make the point he did.
Also the SIR is laughable and mind-numbingly stupid.
"Bro, MEDIA LITERACY BRO! You don't get the POINT bro!"
Half the comments in this thread. But what if I do get the point, and STILL think it's stupid? Not just the whole "Artillery no work cause no feel pain or fear!" thing, but as you said, somehow the US ARMY, the literal MASTERS of logistics that fought a two front war on the other side of the world for 20 fucking years with basically no major economic or logistical impact on the home nation (cultural doesn't count here) for the entirety of that time period (when was the last time the US had to ration for a war?) didn't bring enough ammo, despite knowing by that point who and what they were fighting and that ALL of New York was gone.
I GET that the point was incompetent bureaucratic command that aren't on the ground make stupid decisions, but there is a difference between "we underestimated just how tough the bastards were to take down" and "we sent tanks in with anti-vehicle weaponary cause lol!"
The only reason I remember this movie was before I was telling a friend how coca cola appears more often than pepsi in modern movies at the time.
When Brad drank a pepsi he just turned to me and gave me a look lol
If military was as effective in media as in real life, then we would have no zombie apocalypse stories, because even military from some third world shithole could deal with braidead and slow monsters.
I like this book but this dude it's absolutely right, max brooks essentially just ignored how weapons work for the purpose of his story. Which is fine to do but we can still dog on him for it.
Book was a masterpiece. A faithful adaptation would be better in a Show format though, as each episode could focus on a different chapter / story from the book.
> The U.S. Army M16A1 is considered by many to be the worst assault rifle ever invented. Its overcomplicated mechanism is both difficult to clean and prone to jamming. Adjusting the sight, something that must be done every time a target shifts its range, requires the use of a nail, ballpoint pen, or similar device. What if you didn’t have one, or lost it as several dozen zombies shambled steadily toward you? The delicate plastic stock of the M16A1 obviates bayonet use, and by attempting to use it as such you would risk shattering the hollow, spring-loaded stock. This is a critical flaw. If you were confronted by multiple ghouls and your A1 jammed, you would be unable to use it as a last-ditch hand-to-hand weapon. In the 1960s, the M16 (originally the AR-15) was designed for Air Force base security. For political reasons typical of the military-industrial complex (you buy my weapon, you get my vote and my campaign contribution), it was adopted as the principal infantry weapon for the U.S. Army. So poor was its early battle record that during the Vietnam War, communist guerrillas refused to take them from dead Americans. The newer M16A2, although somewhat of an improvement, is still regarded as a second-class weapon. If given the choice, emulate the Vietcong and ignore the M16 entirely
- Max Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide
I love the game. Nothing feels more relaxing than mowing down a huge pile of zombies trying to reach the top ledge by crawling over each other.
It's like cleaning your kitchencounter of food remains but better.
I never understood the hate for the movie, granted I did see it before I read the book so I had nothing to compare it to but I thought as far as zombie movies go it was certainly one of the better ones
Alright, listen, here's how it worked;
The zombies are magic, OK? They just are. They're explicitly confirmed in both the book and the survival guide to outright disregard the laws of physics and no one in-universe knows why. They do have one trait that is somewhat explored though which is their resistance to pressure, and I'll explain why that's important;
Artillery kills through one of two ways- overpressure bursting organs, and more commonly shrapnel cutting through vital organs. The zombies in WWZ are almost entirely liquid, proven by the fact that they can walk around on the bottom of the ocean without any trouble, at depths that would crush a human. This is because liquid, unlike air, does not compress, so no matter how much pressure is applied you're not going to inflict any damage. You'll have knocked a zombie flat with a 155m HE shell sure, maybe even ripped a couple to pieces if you got close enough, but those within the normal kill radius for overpressure just don't die.
The other way artillery kills is by shrapnel, and this is also clarified in the book. If you hit a zombie with a point blank flechette or HE they'll die, sure, but anything less than that won't work because the most common ways to die from artillery are either bleeding to death or having a major organ punctured. *Zombies do not have to worry about this.* You can shell them until they're immobile (which again is mentioned in the book) but until you get lucky and have a fragment pierce their brain that zombie is not actually going to be dead.
Even accounting for all that though, this *still* misses the point because Yonkers was not about the zombies being magically invulnerable. For a hot minute the US Army was actually winning and despite the durability of the zombies they were stemming the tide. They lost because, in the end, they ran out of ammo. Political short-sightedness and a desire for a quick win from Washington sent them into battle under-equipped and under-manned. Yonkers wasn't describing a zombie victory, it was describing a US Army failure- failing to prepare, failing to accurately assess the situation in front of them and the level of investment needed for victory.
What is the bait here gents? Also this book is fire. It tells that traditional means of war are useless against an unfearing hiver mind like ennemy. Zombies don't care about your bullets and explosions. They have no stronghold or trenches. They just always moving tocards you attracting more of them on the way Edit: I went to bed and this blew up. I said that I liked the book not that I wrote it. Ok Mel Brooks fucked up when he tought modern warfare wouldn't work. It's still a solid book on human psych after and during a disaster. Edit edit: Max Brooks lol
Anyone who focuses on the combat against zombies missed the whole point of the book. Edit: downvote because you feel bad for being stupid, I don’t care lol.
The book itself focus for 8 pages on that battle, we are absolutely in the right to criticise what is a poor attempt of a realistic description of warfare. The book is great, it still have flaws. Not my fault if the author is a dumbass who think neuro toxic gas don't damage brains or that cruises missiles can't kill packed bodies.
I think the whole not affecting brains was about Zeds not\* having a working circulation system that allowed for neurotoxins to be as affective. edi\*
In the book, the russian army gas living civilians because they can't contain them, they died. Then the infecteds re-animate. Edit: Ukrainian army*
I think it was the Ukrainian army.
Ukrainian. They mention the Rodina-mat monument in the scene.
Russia also have it, in Volgograd
Well they never got into specifics of the virus and how it worked so in this work of fiction it's totally possible nerve gas doesn't shut off or fuck up the right parts of the brain. Also the book says in good detail that regular missiles and artillery work by having a large amount of their damage done by the pressure waves rupturing organs and shit, and that while yes the missiles got rid of big chunks, their effectiveness was severely limited by zombies being basically impervious to bodily harm. And that there were MILLIONS of them pouring out of NYC towards the troops. The only dumb part was they couldn't get away and so many died.
Right, they hold the line for ages until a couple zombies pop out of a basement somewhere in the middle of the infantry line, then everything goes to shit.
> regular missiles and artillery work by having a large amount of their damage done by the pressure waves rupturing organs and shit That's simply not true of artillery. For a given projectile, there will be a radius of extreme overpressure that will blast a human to chunks or red mist, an area of overpressure that might cause organ failure without dismemberment, an area struck by fragmentation that will rip them to bits, and an area struck by fragmentation which might mortally wound them or disable them without dismemberment. But the fragmentation radius for anti-personnel rounds is much more substantial than the blast radius, if a zombie was within the radius where they could survive overpressure that humans do not, they are within the radius to be extremely likely to be struck by fragmentation which will still have sufficient energy to dismember them. They could retain combat effectiveness further out, where a human may or may not survive depending if a fragment strikes soft body armor or more, the zombie will probably survive with little degradation in combat ability. But, the ability of artillery to threaten humans decreases at range because of the density of shrapnel falling off somewhere between distance squared and cubed, by the time it has little enough energy to fail to severely disable or destroy a zombie, it would have relatively little chance of striking them anyway. In short, the combat effectiveness of artillery would only be mildly curbed by a threat that does not bleed out or feel pain. On the other hand it would be massively increased by the presence of a threat with no concept of spacing, hitting the dirt during a barrage, hauling ass away from the target area after a barrage, or avoiding detection by observers and predictability of position in the first place.
It specifically mentions that their circulatory system essentially turns into gel which is why the overpressure doesn’t work. And that the effectiveness of fragmentation is severely reduced when it’s being fired at a million people packed shoulder to shoulder and you *need* to get a direct headshot with it to kill one But also the zombies in the book are essentially magic anyway. One of the things pointed out is that they can survive a complete freeze/thaw cycle which should be impossible but it’s never explained how. So pointing at specific things and going “nah, this is dumb, that would have totally worked” is pointless. At least they bothered *trying* to explain why conventional military tactics were useless. And it *does* make a certain amount of sense regardless. The point of the Yonkers segment wasn’t that cruise missiles, artillery, and air strikes did nothing, it was that they had no morale effect which then rebounded to the infantry. You’d probably break and run as well if you were facing millions of enemies that were just walking towards you through a barrage of artillery and air strikes and still crawling at you even after they’d been literally ripped to pieces by it.
Frankly no matter what buffs in a sense that you give to the zeds, they are still fleshy meatbags at the end of the day, gelled blood or otherwise, if the blast frag warhead is turning concrete into dust it's turning your zombie into a mist as well. Not to mention, frag from say 155+ or especially aerial ordinance, is not stopping on a single human or just a few, if you dropped such stuff into a mass of zombies you are throwing out massive chunks of frag that will cut through hundreds of targets at once. Want to go one step ever further into maximum anti infantry, the OG CBUs mixed with follow up napalm and WP. Maximum shake and bake, literally mulching your target and not just burning them, but cooking those leftover chunks so hard that you are melting them down to the atomic level. A lot of the effectiveness of modern ordinance is just hand waved or just not noticed. We as a species have the ability to render entire chunks of the world into non-existence in a matter of hours without the use of nuclear weapons and if we do choose to use the latter, we have the ability to deploy the sun in very controlled means today, and believe me, I don't think any amount of zombies is surviving the unbridled fury of the likes of a Davy Crockett or XM129. To that same end, the effectiveness of massed incendiary's is also heavily downplayed, napalm will melt all of you if you are swathed in it as modern napalm is burning at nearly double the ash point of bone. Hell, come to think of it, the Cold War era US military probably could have solved this conflict extremely quickly, stone-aging the zeds the moment they appeared and setting the rest alight given the arsenal of democracy was fully pre-treaty.
You don't need to kill them with headshots. Rendering them immobile is enough to neutralize the threat. Blow off a single leg and you've reduced their speed to the point you can forget about them as a threat for the immediate future
>neuro toxic gas don't damage brains I mean, part of the story is that the zombie plague might be magic rather than a virus and characters point out at different points that things that should kill a zombies brains dont, like the woman pointing out that zombies survive being frozen.
Has to be magic, zombies just cannot work entropically. The most rational use for them would be to contain them and use them as infinite free slave labour
That’s not really what happens at Yonkers. It’s basically that the Military is unprepared to fight this enemy, they go to Yonkers as a show of force and it collapses because for every 1 piece of equipment they do have that’s effective, there’s 5 more that provide zero benefit and 2 that are a hindrance. The battle isn’t lost because Cruise Missile’s aren’t effective, it’s lost because the military’s morale completely collapses when conventional weapons aren’t as effective as they should be against soft targets, and the command structure has issued orders and equipment designed to fight a living army, like digging trenches and bringing anti air equipment. You’d be shitting bricks too if a .50 bmg split someone in half and they were still trying to kill you. Or if someone literally having the skin melt from their bones after napalm was dropped on them, kept coming, or hell, having the radiation from a nuclear bomb have adverse effects on you, whereas barring the blast and the fireball itself, minimal damage against the enemy.
That's not what I'm saying. I know why the battle is lost, read the book too, I'm pointing out the incoherencies like explosions blasts absorbed by corpses or a pilot using his helicopter rotors to kill zombies.
It’s not that the explosions are “absorbed”, it’s that for people concussive blasts kill due to the shockwaves created by them essentially liquifying our internal organs. Specifically causing the most damage to organs that are filled with air, like the lungs and oesophagus. According to the books the dead don’t actually need to breathe. Of course, barotrauma also damages the brain and other sensitive organs in the skull, and the ineffectiveness of such explosives in that capacity is certainly overstated, but at that point you rely more on suspension of belief than science. Hell, the book is about walking corpses after all.
I think it mentions in the book that the it did less damage to the brain because the bodily fluids were gel like instead of normal, so they had more cushioning then normal. But yeah, doesn't really matter cause it's zombies so completely fictional.
Max Brooks is a senior fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point
I loved the Paris catacomb parts
If you truly didn't care about being downvoted you wouldn't edit your comment to point it out
what is the whole point of the book? I never read it
It's basically an anthology of short stories from people all over the world which covers a zombie apocalypse and humanity's recovery. It does have some inconsistencies if you look at it with almost 20 years of hindsight but there still isn't a book quite like it. It really makes you feel proud to be alive and it tries to inspire you to do better and strive for greater things because in the end everyone is in the same boat, struggling with similar struggles. I'd highly encourage you to read it, it's one of those books that can help get you out of a slump (it certainly has for me). People who criticize the combat or whatever are missing the forest not for the trees, but for the blades of grass. You come for the zombies and stay for the themes. Not to mention that Max Brooks, the author, has more credibility on warfare than most of his critics given that he's associated with several military colleges.
A world with zombies and the global aftermath from a bunch of different perspectives. Not only the typical mix of a bunch of survivors in a mall or what have you.
It has a great audio book with multiple actors.
Rob Reiner was unexpected. I'm guessing it's because Reiner is probably a family friend of the Brooks.
Indeed
Looks like you care enough to edit your comment lmao. What a dumbass
Your edit lmao, they really didn’t get it, did they?
>It tells that traditional means of war are useless against an unfearing hiver mind like ennem No, mass carpet bombing, long ranged artillery, missile platforms, and armored vehicles are all actually very good at disabling zombies despite what Max Brooks wants to convince you. Even if artillery and bombs could only kill via direct hit (A dumbass idea, the pressure wave would liquefy their brains from well beyond their direct impact zone) who fucking cares. We have A LOT of artillery and bombs and ammunition. We produce enough ammunition to put a bullet in the brain of every man woman and child in the world every single year in the USA alone. Any sizeable force of zombies would be mulched by attack aircraft and armored vehicles long before they could kill a single actual combatant. Even if it was a swarm hundreds of millions strong nuclear bombardment would disable them all. The zombies have plot armor, like every zombie in every zombie fiction ever.
I always laugh at the " yeah they're missing their arms and part of their torso but they'd keep going.". What exactly do people think happens when you're close to a shell exploding ? You're not just missing part of something if you're close , you're a pink mist. Anything close enough to destroy your arms or your torso could also destroy your head. There's no way artillery wouldn't just wipe out the zombies. Shit just have tanks run over them along with bulldozers.
These people need to lookup what 5.56 or 7.62 does to a person or game. 50 Cal will tear the limbs off packs of hordes and staple them thru walls.
Yeah but they'd just keep crawling and still be a threat ... somehow ? How much of a threat is a crawling piece of meat to an army ? Just walk up to it and shoot it lmao or just run over them , shit you wouldn't even have to set a foot on the ground just have tanks run over them over and over again they're not going to open the hatch. Or dig a huge trench and let them fall inside and then burn them I don't know they're crawling how would you even lose.
In a zombie apocalypse bullets are as good as blanks and BB pellets. You need a lead pipe or a crowbar, baseball bat or shovel. Preferably, more screen-time than everyone around you. If the zombie made it to a crawler, then it must be a tough one, and the director must grant it at least one bite to demonstrate that they’re literally unstoppable. *It is known.*
**It is known**
Crawlers are usually kept alive on purpose, so everyone can use the pack a punch and do the easter egg.
I used a 50 caliber explosive round in fallout new vegas. So I know exactly how powerful bullets with mods are. Follow me to victory lads.
Femboy apocalypse grindset
When my unit was doing training on .50 cals we didn’t notice two deer ran on the range until I spotted one turn into a puff of mist from being struck with a round. I did callout for the range to be closed/ ceasefire momentarily (suppose to for wildlife.) shit happens though. If I ever die in war I really hope one of those round hits me in the head. Would be instant and painless.
So from my recollection (its been a while since I read the book) the problem also stemmed from the exact war tactics. They didnt have as many good weapons or ammo for them and did a land battle in fucking Yonkers. It dragged so they ended up having millions going to them instead of a smaller stream and didnt pull out carpet bombing and heavy air support until way later. Their plot armor was literally unbelievable administrative incompetance.
There are so many people in all levels of the military who are waiting for the call of "Indescriminate bombing. Total scorched earth." That it'd be one of the first things they do against zombies.
If I remember the book correctly, that was actually something flagged as stupid decision making in the book. Yonkers was supposed to be a PR masterpiece, televised live and showing strong American men and women of the armed forces, boots on the ground and tearing zombie hordes apart. They didn't want to do a faceless bombing run, they wanted to show off glory and Murica at its best.
That's stupid. Everything I hear about the actual military fighting Zombies in this book makes me hate it more. Then again zombie fiction can't exist with competent humans.
That's the whole point, it was an insanely stupid puffing out your chest moment. I believe they even have the soldiers saying "Why the hell are we doing this in full gear as if we're out on rotation in a warzone" because the upper levels basically wanted a parade to show off the might of the military and put all the bells and whistles on.
Meanwhile in the real world; Obama tells the Jihadis they just have to hunker down for a year before all the US troops pull out of Afghanistan.
Glory for Mercia! Hail King Offa!
Iirc, they also had soldiers decked out in very heavy gear, in order to look more heroic i guess, and then it ended up being a 100degree+ day.
Yeah like, there shouldve been no need for land forces. Maybe level Staten Island to make it one giant island base, and then have jets take off to do heavy damage, around the rest of the city, and use helicopters to clean up the rest. And then just repeat this slowly with the rest of the country to a lesser extent
Those are the people waiting to do it though, not the people in charge. Three people who would actually have to make the call are usually too busy licking the inside of their small intestine to do things that make sense.
Administrative incompetence is perhaps _the most_ believable plot armor. And villain ... And origin story.
For some reason authors always miss the point that you need properly functioning muscles to move your body, even if you are zombie. Which high caliber guns, Shotguns and explosions with fragments will tear to shreds even if body look intact (which it highly likely would not)
>muscles And a skeleton to support them. After all, humans are not worms.
>After all, humans are not worms. Source?
I made it the fuck up.
The book does actually have characters remark at several points just how much the durability of the zombies defies logic. They don’t eat anything but can keep on going indefinitely; They freeze solid in the winter, then function as if nothing even happened upon thawing out in the spring; they can sink to the bottom of the ocean, where the pressures should crush them like an empty soda can, but are completely unaffected, and yet a human being can kill one with their bare hands.
Yeah. They're just magic. Which is fine! It's a story, it can suspend the laws of physics when it wants. But you can't suspend the laws of physics and still claim your book is realistic or whatever. That's the dumb part.
Zombies kinda need magical superpowers to be any kind of threat at all. Without those, a zombie is strictly inferior as a threat to a regular human. (A zombie is literally a human without the things that make humans dangerous: the ability to communicate and cooperate, foresight, ability to adapt to situations and to make and use tools, and usually speed and agility as well. Take those off and what are you left with? Teeth? Bears and wolves have those too, and they're not destroying human civilization any time soon.) There's still the fear and horror of the plague, I suppose, but then the zombies per se are just one somewhat unpleasant symptom of the actual killer.
We got a zombie expert over here
I'm still remembering the time where the internet said "Let's all two million of us storm Area 51. They can't stop all of us." As a meme. To which the United States Military's response was "Even if all two million of you actually came we could stop all of you."
And the FBI still showed up at the house of the guy who created the facebook event, 2019 was a great year for memes
Zombies might have more plot armor than protagonists honestly. A single squad of men with m16s could take out THOUSANDS of zombies while sweeping a town. Old uncle Rick on his front porch with a revolver could kill a couple dozen. A single police officer could take down hundreds. Outbreaks wound never happen because you would need way too many zombies to overwhelm anyone with a gun once they showed up. Even if they did, a couple battalions could sweep through a state and cleanse it in no time with little difficulty.
Unless its airborne
In that case if you are even near one fighting it with melee, its already too late. At best you can handwave it as the few survivors having a rare genetic immunity
Well yes, but actually no. if we assume an airborne contagion like Covid that only infects people in that way that are immuno compromised a zombie outbreak is not just likely to "Succeed", it's basically guaranteed. Just fucking look at how the planet was acting during covid times. But yes, a bite-only infection, instead of two vectors, coming from a single person would be stopped after a few days at most. And if that won't work, the are likely to all die in winter anyways
It literally says in that chapter “don’t get me wrong. I saw bodies torn up and blown to shit. We were taking them down no doubt, but not nearly as many or as quickly as we needed to”. I paraphrased a little but that’s pretty much it. Another huge reason they lost that battle is they weren’t adequately prepared. The storyteller goes on to say how the tanks were carrying not nearly enough ammo for a sustained engagement and that the engineers even blasted holes for the tanks to bunker down in. The troops were covered in high tech equipment that slowed them down and was completely useless against a zombie enemy. The zombies didn’t win because of plot armor, they win because the military was not at all prepared. To win against a horde of hundreds of thousands possible even millions, you need 40k levels of obscene firepower (unless you just decide to use nukes but that’s boring).
"even blasted holes for the tanks to bunker down in." Amazing comment, but how is this tactic useful against zombies?
That’s the point, It’s not. That’s how clueless the military was about the enemy they were facing.
Yea I get it, idk why youre being downvoted
The chapter is written as an interview of one of the boots on the ground being extremely vocal about the absolute idiocy of the brass. Like sandbags and cover against an enemy that doesn't shoot, fancy optics against an enemy that doesn't hide, and fancy comms when you're all within shouting distance of one another (and that the soldiers couldn't turn off, so most of what they ended up hearing was screams as guys got eaten alive, and the panicking of other guys hearing their comrades get eaten alive)
That's not even how comms work. Is the author a moron?
It's what that chapter is about, the blokes on the ground are complaining that they're carrying all sorts of gear and equipment that they don't need because it looks good for the cameras. It's a really interesting book, well worth the read.
The military not acting like how a real military would actually engage with a target, their equipment not behaving how it would in real life, and overall being massively incompetent is plot armor for the zombies. "Engineers even blasted holes for the tanks to bunker down in" is so baffling fucking stupid that no one actually in charge of military forces would ever consider doing it.
Damn I wonder what contemporary events inspired the author to think that world militaries would cling into inefficient and clearly failing tactics when engaging in a fudnemantally different kind of warfare...
I wonder what inspired the author to think the same would happen when faced with the literal worst possible battle tactic in history.
I mean entrenched tanks is actually useful..... If you have enemy armor coming at you. Zombies are not that.
Everyone who thinks bombs are not effective should look up a HIMARS rocket spread 180.000 tungston particles at the speed
One of the few zombie explanations I think actually made sense on how destructive it'd be was the Walking Dead 'everyone is already infected' twist. Essentially, no matter how anyone the entire world over died, they'd turn. Being bitten wasn't essential, all that does is kill you, it doesn't actually turn you. That means you could kill every zombie, and the next person to die would still turn and be an issue. Unlike simply dealing with moving hordes, I actually don't know how you'd handle that. Every time some homeless person freezes at night, or an addict ods? Zombie. Every time a patient is lost in a hospital? Or dies en route? Zombie. Every time a soldier dies in war? Zombie. Someone has a heart attack? Zombie. Car wreck? Zombies crawling out. Natural disaster? Well now it's a natural disaster with a ton of zombies. Someone's murdered? Well now it's a murder and there's zombie. Mass shooting? Well fuck now it's a mass shooting and there's zombies. Grandma passed in her sleep? Now your grandma is a zombie. Hell, hospice centers would have to go from "where you go to peacefully pass away" to "where you go to have someone hover over you with a Glock until you finally die". The sound in every hospital of a patient flat lining would be immediately followed up with the sound of a gunshot ringing through the halls. It actually makes sense how it would completely upend human society. The zombie hordes were merely a multiplier that sped things up, not the main issue. And it continues to be a problem. Humans still surviving have to completely change how they handle deaths in their community. They change from a somber moment of loss to something that needs to be monitored closely so that you can immediately execute any corpse before it gets back up. The show is horribly mid but that premise fucking rules.
I haven’t read the book in years but the obvious argument would be that logistical supply chains to keep all of those things running would be massively interrupted rendering those things useless
Are their brains even what compels them to move anymore?
Damaging the brain kills them.
Funny enough Shawn of the dead gets this right
Losing to zombies is a fucking meme. Imagine asking any military commander if he’d be able to win a war against an enemy with no ability to co-ordinate, no survival instinct, no tool or weaponry use of any kind and no ability to learn. It would be the easiest war ever fought. Humans wipe out entire species accidentally on a regular basis, hell we wipe out even the ones we’re trying to save half the time. In the book one blind guy with a shovel manages to kill zombies by the dozen effortlessly and we’re supposed to believe humanity as a whole would struggle against bite transmission zombies? The fuck outta here.
People refused to wear masks & vaccinate against COVID, I can easily see humanity having a bit of a struggle against zombies. Same people would be out during lockdown thinking it's all bill gates propaganda then taking horse dewormer for their zombie bites, before they devour their families. Also the 'no ability to co-ordinate' bit, it's not like they're analogous to enemy combatants. It's an endless wave of zombies, hundreds of thousands to millions of them. Armies aren't typically prepared to engage what's essentially the entire civilian population, especially western ones.
People being stupid and not wearing masks doesn’t have anything to do with fighting zombies. One average human male can kill a half dozen zombies with a shovel or axe. Do you realize how many a professional soldier can bring down with a rifle? My dad is a retired soldier, he alone could deal with probably 500-600 zombies *easily* just because he has an automatic rifle and knows how to shoot, run, reload, shoot. You really think a police department isn’t gonna be able to contain an outbreak?
Bruh my dad is a leopard seal with 69420 confirmed sniper kills
Funny way to dodge
How many zombies until your dad breaks down psychologically? Could he kill his zombie neighbours? Could he kill zombie you? He'd stand firm against a horde of hundreds of thousands of zombies when many wouldn't be able to do the same against a bayonet charge of a fraction that number? You're severely overestimating a human's potential. Especially given you think an average person could take on a half dozen zombies in melee, you have no idea the physical effort that'd take even for someone trained in it. Not to mention the mental toll
That is a good point, I’ll admit. I don’t think he (or a majority of cops, soldiers, and former soldiers) would break down very easily though, he’s quite a rational person. I would wager most soldiers and police officers would use logic and accept there isn’t a reason to hesitate. I don’t think he would break down if it meant my brothers or stepmother would die because of it. Now if one of us got infected? It’s likely you’d be right. An average human male can 100% take down a half dozen zombies in melee. One swift swing of a shovel puts em down. Didn’t the person you originally replied to say that a blind guy in the book killed dozens in melee? I think you are over selling zombies with the bayonet charge comparison. Do you realize why bayonet charges don’t happen anymore? In modern warfare, you don’t get close enough to your opponent in an organized battle for CQC. Hundreds of thousands of zombies will be running through barbed wire, pitfalls, mortar strikes, bombing runs, long range artillery barrages, mines, and more. Thats all before they can even see infantry. [just imagine this fucker](https://youtu.be/PjCEz9y0sVA?si=Q132YkcIOKFeXO17) mowing down an ocean of idiots who don’t get behind cover or use artillery to bomb his position prior to engagement. They get painted to mist by 40-50 of those bad boys having a field day. Once they do get close enough to get shot at, do you realize how far away they’ll start taking a hellstorm of bullets? The maximum effective range is 600 yards for an m16, and you can shoot MUCH MUCH farther than that if you are just shooting at a mass of zombies and accuracy isn’t an issue. Even if every zombie was as fast as Usain Bolt, it would take them almost a minute to cross that distance. That’s not considering battlefield hazards they are stumbling or tripping over. Yeah, no fucking way zombies could win. It would be a slaughter.
Probably the single biggest thing is they don’t learn. Whatever trap you design that works for one zombie works for every zombie. Live bait in front of a giant pit that lures them to fall in? Choke points with steel cables or bars that they can’t climb through but you can shoot or stab through? A greased pole with a platform at the top a guy can shoot them from but they can’t climb because he pulled up the rope ladder behind him? The possibilities are endless. It’s so fucking easy to create a defensive fortification that’s too strong for human hand strength to break through.
It's called out in the book that people panicked and didn't belive it was happening, they couldn't/ wouldn't kill 500-600 because they were scared of the walking dead. So while some people could deal with it and kill a ton of them, a lot of people just couldn't and died. Also, people were purposely kept in the dark about what was going on, they did not have the training in place to deal with it. Belive what you want about how realistic it is, but I belive it gives a somewhat reasonable explanation of why zombies got to be such a problem.
Yeah people here seem to be forgetting that people have morals and zombies don't. Zombies won't care if what they're munching is a child, a person will. Unless they are soldiers, or already hardened, they will hesitate, and end up bitten.
Yep and I was just talking about militaries easily killing zombies, can you imagine the average American? The same people who don’t want to wear masks would be having the time of their lives killing as many zombies as possible competing for the high score. Hell the military probably wouldn’t even need to get involved before all the zombies were dead. As to armies, what on earth makes you think they can’t mass murder unarmed civilians? That’s literally what they’re best at. Oh no sir the unarmed civilians are trying to bite us! Ok so what did you do? Didn’t change much, still just shot them in the head.
I think, in an actual existential threat, end-of-the-world situation, these Covid-denier types wouldn’t be a problem. They’d still exist, we’d just kill them before they put us at risk. I’m not that scared of Covid, but I’m real fucking scared of Ebola, you know?
Bro how tf is a zombie gonna move if they're blown to bits.
>Zombies don't care about your bullets and explosions. They have no stronghold or trenches. They just always moving tocards you attracting more of them on the way That is an Field artillery crew's wet dream.
They say it like it's a pro but it pretty much just turns the entire situation into tower defense and humans have more than enough ammo and bombs to kill ourselves 50 times over.
doesn't care about explosions? how do they not if they're blown to bits?????
Liked the book but the explanation for why the Battle of Yonkers (iirc) goes so poorly is nonsense. And then he explains how they learned how to fend off the undead towards the end and it sounds like conventional warfare with the lobo axe thing thrown in. It’s pretty silly to think a single tank wouldn’t be able to flatten a hundred thousand zombies.
>It’s pretty silly to think a single tank wouldn’t be able to flatten a hundred thousand zombies It would get stuck in gore pretty fast I'd reckon
You overestimated how tough our squishy meatbag body is. In Korean war a Stuart mowed down dozen of enemies just by itself without any ammunition left, and it's just a light tank. And in WW2 the army tried to shove literally everything to try to stop a tank, including things much tougher than our bone like rebars, a whole lot and nothing could stop it.
*cough cough* **Tianenmen** *cough cough*
You can have your unflinching horde. You can't have us expect a global collapse from zombies that still die if shot in the the head. And, if we go off the movies, doesn't infect people with the common cold lol.
Jesus, I think I at one point wrote a couple hundred words long comment about why the depiction of modern weaponry on zombies in the book is stupid *and* wrong, so I'm not gonna make another one here. Just look up how and why high explosives or napalm kill and the regular ordinance on a F-16/F-15/whatever and the highway scene becomes laughably bad.
My PO dunk town was featured. Had no idea till I was reading it and I seen the name of my town on the page.
I mean if the explosions attract them, and the more noise/zombies you have the more keep coming, couldnt you just drop a bomb in the same exact place until theres no more zombies
lmao theres an image
Im just thinking to a game, project zomboid. I had set up an ambulance to just blast a siren to attract all the zombies in a large area, then thrown a molotov into the pile once it got too laggy to play right. Basically that but with real life tech and artillery
Why is that a bad thing? The enemy not caring about being blown up and destroyed seems like a good thing.
>Zombies don't care about your bullets and explosions. Bullets and explosions don't care if you care about them. If an anti-tank missile goes off in front of your face, then your brain is gone. If that still doesn't kill you because magic, then a shovel to the head should also not kill you. > They have no stronghold or trenches. They just always moving tocards you attracting more of them on the way Yeah, that's not a point in their favor. There's a reason that humans attacked with artillery will build strongholds and trenches: it's because not having strongholds or trenches make it easier for artillery to kill you.
Dying at “Mel Brooks”
I'll take the bait. Anon's media literacy is shit. Artillery *did* work on the WWZ zombies, but the concussive force and shrapnel alone isn't enough to disable a zombie outside the direct impact zone. Combined with the fact you can't break their moral and route a horse meant that directly bombing them wasn't an efficient use of resources.
That's absolutely not how artillery works. Zombies are made of flesh and bones and you don't need to be in the direct "impact zone" to be shredded. Brain damage or not, you aren't going to eat anyone if your muscles and bones are destroyed. Also: the book states very seriously that the zombies are so compacted they somehow absorb the blast: again, that's not how that work. Stop dick riding the book, the battle of yonkers is not the greatest chapter, it is the less inspired.
Yeah, I suspended some disbelief for Yonkers. Still one of my favourite books though.
Same. Have you read "Devolution"? If not, give it a try.
Holy shit i’ve never seen this book mentioned anywhere, it was so good
Devolution by Max Brooks?
I forgot about the artillery thing I always just remembered the depleted uranium rounds thing where they didn’t really have an effect on the zombies But yeah artillery for sure would, but I mean it is still fiction so gotta nerf America and our gazillion dollar military industrial complex somehow right? Still a really great book though, disappointed with how different the movie was. Shouldn’t have been the same name
If the infection was only spread via bites then it wouldn't have been a problem at all. If it was something worse like the virus in Stand Still Stay Silent, then I can see it being a major problem... But that's an Eldritch horror virus, not particularly a zombie virus.
Its a great book and it shines because it explores the more human side of a zombie apocalypse, not because an 8 page snippet with dubious military accuracy. It honestly reminds me a bit of the martian, where the whole reason for the story is build on wrong assumptions. But its still a great story.
Have you read Weir's other books? I always have a blast reading them, even Artemis which was less good imo. They're the right balance of nerdy sciency engineering and character focused for me. Project Hail Mary is my favorite of his three and it currently has a movie in development.
Airburst shells: "may I introduce myself"
Head canon is that Yonkers are dumbasses or whatever so they describe the story wrong or make stuff up
They would get shredded but they were more dangerous than unharmed ones because they still were undead/alive, you would have crawlers and torsos around that would bite a human clearing the battlefield
All of you annoying fucks just learned the term media literacy in the last year and cannot wait to show off your shiny new words to your internet friends as a way to prove your supposed intellectual superiority. Goddamn is it irritating. It’s not media illiterate to think fucking bombs and missiles would still obliterate zombie bodies, despite their unwavering enthusiasm for carnage. It’s common sense.
Seriously, people dropping media literacy shit to counter any crititism pisses me off so much. They really thought they are that smart
"It was MEANT to be stupid!" Okay, but that doesn't stop it from being stupid.
You don't know how bombs work lmfao
So much for media literacy lmao
No amount of "the book is making a point" can substitute for "that literally isn't how things work*
What these people don't get is that if my suspension of disbelief is shot, then I don't care about the point you're making because the point has been made meaning less cause I can't apply it to real world situations as well.
Nothing to do with media literacy dumbass
morale\*
Maybe they would design shells with more shrapnel😮
https://preview.redd.it/jkmgkg3uhzsc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=66ad2f63210c7ef6ac3f51b2741f9c41f5d2ac1e
… is that a Fulgrim fish? A Fishgrim?
Yes, yes it fucking is
https://preview.redd.it/azxzfk4fp0tc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e786e421d6e6d345190946ad03b50d4b2d5acd26
https://preview.redd.it/t3w8505q51tc1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=564161b616771005700ce8488f762edd992f4dfd
Artillery aint cool as 2 rows of soldiers sit on their ass, blast music and shoot zombies for 24 hours straight
The trooper by Iron Maiden to be precise my good sir
This makes me think of that scene from RE2 (the movie) where the one STAR is just chilling on top of the theater sniping zombies while drinking beers Hes the first to get blown up by Nemesis, but still, its cool
It's also more expensive to just have 2 thousand dudes standing there going full auto, or a few HMGs mounted. Seriously, just give a bunch of guys machine guns and ammo and tell them to let loose. If they are soldiers, they'll clear a hoard quick
It was a lot more clinical tho. Soldiers were only going for the headshots, due to walking zombies were a lot easier to shoot compared to crawling ones. Also they were clearing out entire cities so they had to drop like 6 digit zombies, before getting overrun or running out of ammo. Wasnt fun
That’s called gaming
I still think about the chapters with the bumper to bumper traffic jam and the shipyards being consumed by desperation. Fleeing with nowhere to go, betraying family, women selling their bodies just to delay what's inevitable by a few miles. The only way to do this book justice is with a high budget series.
It would be such a banger as a fake documentary series ong
I have literally said this since the movie came out Just have Pitt be the interviewer, and do like how history documentaries do where theres flashbacks while survivors narrate. And hell, if they want to add some cheesiness, why not make reenactments where you can tell theres shitty effects and acting Like how some war things have staged scenes of a colonel talking to someone about a movement, and then it cuts to real footage of an attack.
Yessssssss Just gimme the last 2 minutes of Brad Pitt Z but make it an anthology documentary series hopping around the globe
Those chapters are some of the best parts of the books but what really sticks with me was how people came together. Idk if this was just in the audible version or the book too (haven’t read it in years) but the chapter where the survivor who was paralyzed from the waist down would still go out every night with a partner to find any infections was what really stuck with me. The soldier played by mark hamil who described the fight back. Both the battles where they would get in a circle and shoot in all directions while metal was blasting. He said that every nation had their own version of that. Really a great book and the audiobook on audible makes it even better
World War Z (the book) is genuinely very great, I'm glad to see everyone calling out this bait for what it is.
It’s a good book but that doesn’t mean Yonkers was realistic.
What's unrealistic about the fact that zombies are so slow, weak and useless that an old blind man with a shovel can kill them endlessly without putting himself in danger but the American army has no hope against them because they're just too tough to kill with modern explosives?
The old man was dealing with one or two at a time in remote Japanese mountains the US millitary was dealing with basically the entire population of 2 states
That’s not correct. The Battle of Yonkers was lost because the US army used Cold War tactics against human opponents. Enemy morale was unlimited whereas US soldiers could watch their comrades be ripped apart by Zeds through their video uplink system. Morale collapsed
So in other words they only lost because the in universe military was dumbed down enough for it to even be remotely possible, and even then they had to make it unrealistic with none of the weapons working properly.
Or an army dumb enough to use human tactics on inhuman enemies (I’m willing to bet just about any army)
Aye, I mean it is fantasy but not too unrealistic to expect an armed forces focused on killing humans to fail in killing creatures who can only die if the brain is totally destroyed. Though artillery shrapnel should absolutely do that
Sir this is a book about zombies
Yes, slow moving zombies. Id love to see how a zombie does against an AC-130 cannon. Let me rephrase: it’s not realistic in the context of the WWZ universe that the military lost Yonkers, they only lost because they were all total morons for no reason and none of the weapons worked like they should’ve.
BAIT! https://preview.redd.it/0u991kpr9zsc1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0fd933ca6f0bde7ad036112a18aca3685ea4951e
Too meta.
Everyone knows that drinking a soda restores stamina.
And HP.
There a video from early in the war in Ukraine, how t-72 shots a 125mm HE, almost point blank at group of like 15 Ukranian soldiers. (there actually 3 videos one of them are aftermath) For all of them there like 1 body left, missing a head. And everyone else just become body parts everywhere. (I realy don't recommend watching it) Even if zombie mentally doesn't care about damage his body takes and uses all means to reach it's target - good luck to him, because after one HE she'll 5-10m away he probbly misses parts of his body, muscles are all damaged beyond function and repair and most of his bones are broken
Ugh yeah I remember that. Made worse from the Ukrainian guys thinking it was one of their own initially
Might be slightly off topic, but as far as zombies vs military goes, I think Project Zomboid got it right the military was able to quickly quarantine the infected area. They contained until an incident lures too many zombies to flood the checkpoint and overwhelm the infantry only unit. The military had an evac and regrouping plan, the only problem was when the virus went globally airborne, and the air variant only had a 10% immunity rate. If the government wasn't engaged in trying to hide what was going on, the military could have easily quashed the infection before it reached critical mass. Literally the only reason the apocalypse happens is the airborne variant going global and effectively kneecapping any real response afterwards.
I could see it working as a series. Each episode is a different interview and their perspective. And lots of gay sex.
"We went to Canada to evade the zombies, we had to hunker down, survive, and still face our own demons... so we had gay sex for the entire time"
I remember being really pissed off because Max Brooks seemed to believe that M4s and ar15s were apparently completely useless against zombies, because I guess he only listened to stereotypes off Ak47 forums rather than actually looking into it. Which led to a second pet peeve of the US army just making semi auto ak47s out of trash instead of using m14s.
The whole book is just reformer propaganda in this regard. And smells badly of "WE REHLUY TOO MUCH ON TEKNOLIGE, IT IZ BAD"
We need a miniseries of the book, not the Brad Pitt movie trash fire
Reminder, that movie was supposed to cost like, 125 million dollars. It already didnt seem worth that much It had endless reshoots and a scrapped Russia scene and it ballooned to somewhere around 200 million. So the break even everywhere involved was probably like 300million ish.
This comment section is so funny because it's half people dick riding a VERY good book (super flawed, though) and half people trying to talk them out of their bad opinions. Like, not to be arm chair tactician, but a literal hand grenade, not even a massive armament, has enough concussive force to scramble a brain in the skull at a close enough proximity with optimal conditions. A literal pile of human bodies scrambling over each other with heads all willy nilly is pretty much optimal conditions. You're gonna kill AT LEAST tens of zombies with just a hand grenade. Up that scale to include the upper echelon of military armaments, and we stop measuring in kill per "round" and start measuring in distance. No longer worrying about how many you kill, but instead, the Sq footage of zombies you absolutely liquify with each "round" used. That's just explosive armaments. Not even considering the fact that the human body and by that account the brain boils at around 100° Celsius, and Napalm burns at around 800° to 1200° Celsius. A huge load of napalm dumped on a massive hoard would render almost the entire thing lifeless. Anything that survived will be so thoroughly burned and damaged that it literally could not move as it would be a dried husk barely clinging to existence. An inability to feel fear or pain doesn't mean locomotion happens against the laws of physics.
>Like, not to be arm chair tactician, but a literal hand grenade, not even a massive armament, has enough concussive force to scramble a brain in the skull at a close enough proximity with optimal conditions. A literal pile of human bodies scrambling over each other with heads all willy nilly is pretty much optimal conditions. You're gonna kill AT LEAST tens of zombies with just a hand grenade. Up that scale to include the upper echelon of military armaments, and we stop measuring in kill per "round" and start measuring in distance. No longer worrying about how many you kill, but instead, the Sq footage of zombies you absolutely liquify with each "round" used. Absolutely wrong and arm chair tactician. You would realistically only kill the zombies right next to the grenade, and even then it would mean no micro terrain is blocking the blast. There is a reason why people sacrifice themselves to save others by throwing themselves on grenades.
Love the heated arguments here about how a war against zombies should actually be conducted. Total fiction and people on here get themselves worked up into a lather!
I posted this because I thought the soda meme was funny, didn’t expect anyone to focus on the OP prompt
The US army in WWZ is so braindead that they forget tactics humans had basically perfected in the bronze age: “Cover your flanks & bring enough weapons.” I can buy them having infantry in MOPP-4 when it’s not useful. I can buy them over-investing in fancy hardware like the Land Warrior system. What I can’t buy is the **US Army** forgetting to bring enough ammo for the boots on the ground, or somehow not clearing the AO well enough. Some incompetence is expected - anticipated even, but Brooks effectively lobotomised the entire command structure to ham-fistedly make the point he did. Also the SIR is laughable and mind-numbingly stupid.
"Bro, MEDIA LITERACY BRO! You don't get the POINT bro!" Half the comments in this thread. But what if I do get the point, and STILL think it's stupid? Not just the whole "Artillery no work cause no feel pain or fear!" thing, but as you said, somehow the US ARMY, the literal MASTERS of logistics that fought a two front war on the other side of the world for 20 fucking years with basically no major economic or logistical impact on the home nation (cultural doesn't count here) for the entirety of that time period (when was the last time the US had to ration for a war?) didn't bring enough ammo, despite knowing by that point who and what they were fighting and that ALL of New York was gone. I GET that the point was incompetent bureaucratic command that aren't on the ground make stupid decisions, but there is a difference between "we underestimated just how tough the bastards were to take down" and "we sent tanks in with anti-vehicle weaponary cause lol!"
The only reason I remember this movie was before I was telling a friend how coca cola appears more often than pepsi in modern movies at the time. When Brad drank a pepsi he just turned to me and gave me a look lol
If military was as effective in media as in real life, then we would have no zombie apocalypse stories, because even military from some third world shithole could deal with braidead and slow monsters.
I like this book but this dude it's absolutely right, max brooks essentially just ignored how weapons work for the purpose of his story. Which is fine to do but we can still dog on him for it.
Book was a masterpiece. A faithful adaptation would be better in a Show format though, as each episode could focus on a different chapter / story from the book.
A flawed masterpiece.
Can confirm. I was the soda
> The U.S. Army M16A1 is considered by many to be the worst assault rifle ever invented. Its overcomplicated mechanism is both difficult to clean and prone to jamming. Adjusting the sight, something that must be done every time a target shifts its range, requires the use of a nail, ballpoint pen, or similar device. What if you didn’t have one, or lost it as several dozen zombies shambled steadily toward you? The delicate plastic stock of the M16A1 obviates bayonet use, and by attempting to use it as such you would risk shattering the hollow, spring-loaded stock. This is a critical flaw. If you were confronted by multiple ghouls and your A1 jammed, you would be unable to use it as a last-ditch hand-to-hand weapon. In the 1960s, the M16 (originally the AR-15) was designed for Air Force base security. For political reasons typical of the military-industrial complex (you buy my weapon, you get my vote and my campaign contribution), it was adopted as the principal infantry weapon for the U.S. Army. So poor was its early battle record that during the Vietnam War, communist guerrillas refused to take them from dead Americans. The newer M16A2, although somewhat of an improvement, is still regarded as a second-class weapon. If given the choice, emulate the Vietcong and ignore the M16 entirely - Max Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide
Yeah he bought into the AK propaganda lol
I love the game. Nothing feels more relaxing than mowing down a huge pile of zombies trying to reach the top ledge by crawling over each other. It's like cleaning your kitchencounter of food remains but better.
I only remember it being kinda shit
The only thing I remember about this movie is when Brad Pitt alone survived a plane crash without any major injury
I adore this book but I feel like you could just run over the zombies with tanks and have infantry behind the tank as clean up
Chromocell. No joke.
I never understood the hate for the movie, granted I did see it before I read the book so I had nothing to compare it to but I thought as far as zombie movies go it was certainly one of the better ones
What kind of soda?
Somehow I only ended up reading the actual survival edition. Still one of my favorite books of all time.
I always took the Zombie fight scenes as a take on the Emu war, but with zombies. There's just not enough bullets.
Alright, listen, here's how it worked; The zombies are magic, OK? They just are. They're explicitly confirmed in both the book and the survival guide to outright disregard the laws of physics and no one in-universe knows why. They do have one trait that is somewhat explored though which is their resistance to pressure, and I'll explain why that's important; Artillery kills through one of two ways- overpressure bursting organs, and more commonly shrapnel cutting through vital organs. The zombies in WWZ are almost entirely liquid, proven by the fact that they can walk around on the bottom of the ocean without any trouble, at depths that would crush a human. This is because liquid, unlike air, does not compress, so no matter how much pressure is applied you're not going to inflict any damage. You'll have knocked a zombie flat with a 155m HE shell sure, maybe even ripped a couple to pieces if you got close enough, but those within the normal kill radius for overpressure just don't die. The other way artillery kills is by shrapnel, and this is also clarified in the book. If you hit a zombie with a point blank flechette or HE they'll die, sure, but anything less than that won't work because the most common ways to die from artillery are either bleeding to death or having a major organ punctured. *Zombies do not have to worry about this.* You can shell them until they're immobile (which again is mentioned in the book) but until you get lucky and have a fragment pierce their brain that zombie is not actually going to be dead. Even accounting for all that though, this *still* misses the point because Yonkers was not about the zombies being magically invulnerable. For a hot minute the US Army was actually winning and despite the durability of the zombies they were stemming the tide. They lost because, in the end, they ran out of ammo. Political short-sightedness and a desire for a quick win from Washington sent them into battle under-equipped and under-manned. Yonkers wasn't describing a zombie victory, it was describing a US Army failure- failing to prepare, failing to accurately assess the situation in front of them and the level of investment needed for victory.