“Once we realized the installation was overcome with infected, we destroyed the fortification and everything – everything within the compound – using helicopters and artillery.”
I let the General wander around the office. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and prowled across the carpet with his head bowed and the burden of those soldiers’ deaths heavy on his shoulders.
“Now the zombie hordes have been pushed back into Florida and the final containment line has been built, do you feel the worst of the crisis is over? Can America begin to rebuild?”
Tash’s head snapped up. “No!” he said fiercely. “The work still isn’t finished. One day we need to take Florida back – we need to terminate every zombie and every trace of the infection. Until then, we can’t relax, we can’t rest and we must not lose our focus.”
“Is the Army still on alert?”
“Of course,” the General gave me another one of his withering glares. “We have troops all along the abbreviated Florida border in trenches and behind barbed wire, and we have armor and infantry here at Fort Benning and more at Fort Stewart. We remain on high alert. We remain ready to finish the job we started.”
“Fort Stewart?” I flicked back through my memories. I hadn’t heard the base mentioned before.
“It’s the largest military installation east of the Mississippi,” the General explained. “It’s outside of Hinesville, Georgia. A few years ago it was the staging area for American troops en route to serve during Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
“And you have more men and tanks there?”
“Plenty,” Tash declared, “with more arriving every week. Fort Stewart is close to the Florida line. It gives us the ability for rapid response and deployment if the containment line is ever broken. It was one of the last pieces of ground we recovered when we drove the undead back.”
“So you didn’t flatten the military installations the way you devastated every town and city? You didn’t bomb the buildings in case the bases were concealing zombies?”
Tash shook his head. “No, we didn’t,” he said. “We deliberately preserved Fort Benning, Fort Stewart and several other key installations because we knew they would be needed in the aftermath of the apocalypse. We needed the runways, the facilities and the equipment that had been abandoned as the troops were forced to withdraw to avoid the spread of the infection.”
“Then how did you get them back?” I asked. “How did you recover Fort Benning, for example?”
“The hard way,” Tash said. “The fucking hard way.”
“Meaning?”
The General finally stopped pacing the floor and came to lean over his desk, palms planted on the edge of the wooden tabletop. He pushed his face closer to mine – so close that I could see discolored spots of sun-blemished skin on his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose. “I sent in the Rangers,” he said. “It was the home base for a lot of those boys before the apocalypse. They knew the lay of the land. They did the job.”
“The Rangers re-took the base?”
“Yes,” he said. “They were on the ground, fighting for every yard, face-to-face with the enemy and supported by armor and helicopters.”
“That must have been one hell of a fight,” I breathed. I was fascinated. Throughout the zombie apocalypse, the Army’s leaders had gone to great lengths to place our fighting men and women behind barbed wire and in trenches, or within tanks, troop carriers and forts. This was the first time I had heard macabre news of soldiers confronting the zombie-infected hordes in direct action.
“Can you tell me about the battle?”
“No,” the General said, and then seemed to relent only a moment later. “All I can tell you is that the operation was conducted over a twenty-hour period and in that time several thousand of the enemy were destroyed. The base was re-taken by the Rangers supported by Abrams tanks which swept the area beyond the Fort.”
It wasn’t the kind of answer I wanted, but I suspected it was the best I was going to get. Besides, I was tired of dueling with this man. He was exhausting to be around. His energy was combustible.
“So the Rangers confronted the zombies and fought a kind of urban street-fight to secure the base’s buildings, while the tanks protected and crushed the undead around the perimeter?”
Tash shrugged. “You can describe it that way if you want.”
“Was that what happened?”
Tash said nothing. He stared at me defiantly. “I’ve told you all I can about the operation to re-take Fort Benning,” he said again. “The operation to re-take Fort Stewart employed similar – equally successful – tactics.”
“But you won’t tell me exactly what those tactics were?”
“Correct.”
“Then will you tell me how many soldiers died in the battle to win back the two Forts?”
“Casualties were less than we anticipated, but more than we had hoped for.”
I sat straight in the chair and arched my back. I could feel the burn of being hunched over spread across my stiff shoulders. I tilted my head from side to side to loosen the muscles in my neck.
“General,” I said calmly, “have you ever considered a career in politics?”
He knew I was being sarcastic. He narrowed his eyes.
“Have you ever served, son?”
“No, sir. I haven’t.”
Tash’s mouth curled into an ironic sneer. “Then you have no fucking idea what it is like to go into combat. You have no fucking idea what it is to lay your life on the line for your country.”
“No,” I admitted. “I can only imagine the bravery and selflessness that would require,” I said sincerely.
He shook his head. “No!” he roared suddenly. “You can’t imagine. You can’t possibly imagine what it is like to be so filled with fear but still do your duty. And you can’t possibly imagine what it is like to aim your weapon and fire at someone with an intent to kill them.” He pushed himself away from the desk. There was a bubble of spittle in the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.
For many minutes the General stood silently in the corner of the office, simmering. I could see the tension in the way he held himself, the clench of his fists and the rigid line of his back and shoulders. Finally, he turned around to face me.
“Every man and woman who served America during this conflict was a hero,” General George Tash said in a low rumbling voice. “They deserve to be honored. Their exploits and their efforts deserve to be celebrated and appreciated. I’ve given you everything you need in order to fulfill that obligation. Now go and fucking do it!”
FORT STEWART, GEORGIA:
EASTERN COMMAND BASE – NATIONAL UNDEAD CONTAINMENT COMMAND
“Colonel, am I right in saying that your role during ‘Operation Compress’ was to serve as second-in-command to General George Tash?”
Jeremiah Richelson nodded his head. “I was in command of the eastern flank during the push into zombie-held territory,” he carefully qualified his answer. “I oversaw our tank and troop-carrier movements through South Carolina and into the eastern parts of Georgia.”
“What was that like?”
Richelson narrowed his eyes. “What was what like? Serving under the General, or overseeing the movement of almost five hundred armored fighting vehicles across a front that was over a hundred and fifty miles wide?”
“Both,” I said. “But tell me about your time working with the General first.”
The Colonel was a dour looking man. He was taller than average with a wiry physique. He had the foppish habit of glancing at his own reflection in the windows of a nearby Humvee every time he thought I wasn’t looking. Maybe it was a vanity thing, or maybe he merely wanted to ensure he presented himself in the correct military manner at all times.
“Have you spoken to the General personally?” he asked.
I nodded. “He granted me an interview.”
The Colonel’s expression became cynical. “Then you can probably
imagine what it was like.”
I could. Personally I would have thrown myself out of a helicopter. Tash had been the most demanding of all my interviews. It didn’t surprise me to know that SAFCUR III’s confrontational, abrasive attitude was something the men who served underneath him were also very aware of.
“With respect, sir – that’s not really an answer.”
Colonel Richelson conceded the point with a jerked nod of his head. He stopped suddenly and clasped his hands behind his back, straightened his stance a little and fixed me with his gaze. We had been walking around Fort Stewart in the late afternoon sun. The base was a buzz of activity, the air filled with the purposeful kind of noise that comes from men in preparation for war.
“When you work with the finest men in the military, you need to be prepared to lift your performance to meet the exemplary standards they set and expect,” The Colonel said in a monotone voice. “It has been my experience that serving under General Tash was the defining highlight of my own personal career. The man is the best we have, and he made me better for the honor of working as his second-in-command.”
His gaze flickered, to be sure I wrote everything he said down word-for-word. I did.
He relaxed a little then. I saw it in the eased set of his shoulders and the softening of his features. He gave me a speculative glance. “Do you drink, Mr. Culver?”
I nodded my head and smiled self-deprecatingly. “Colonel, I’m a journalist. We all drink. My therapist told me once that drinking alcohol was my sub conscious way of washing my mouth out.”
Colonel Richelson hesitated, processing my comment as though he analyzed everything said with great care. Finally he smiled.
“Clever,” he muttered. He turned on his heel without another word and I followed him across a vast concrete parade ground and into one of the base office blocks.
Colonel Richelson’s office didn’t come with an ornate antique desk, shelves of leather bound books or even deep comfortable chairs. The office had the feel of being temporary because it was. When the base had been re-taken from the zombies there had been no time for luxuries. The desk was standard military issue and so were the chairs. The carpet was threadbare, worn down in patches and deeply rutted where other, better furniture pieces had once sat.
The Colonel tossed his cap onto the desk, and brushed his fingers carefully through his hair. He went to the filing cabinet in the corner of the room and pulled open the top drawer. From within he produced a bottle of scotch and two small glasses. He set them on the desk and raised his eyebrows in a question.
I nodded.
The Colonel splashed scotch into both glasses and carefully screwed the cap back onto the bottle. He dropped down into his chair with a sigh and reached for his glass.
“To victory,” he said.
I picked up the other glass. “To victory.”
We drank in silence. The scotch was good. Behind the Colonel’s shoulders I could see the sky slowly darkening through a window as sunset approached. Long shadows stretched across the ground and clouds went scudding across the sky, pushed along by a strengthening breeze.
Finally I set the glass down on the edge of the desk and looked more carefully around the room. There was a vast map of old America on the side wall. It had been there for some time. There were brown water stains through the paper.
“Colonel, can you explain to me in more detail how ‘Operation Compress’ actually worked? General Tash sketched a broad outline, but it was a wide-ranging interview,” I deliberately understated my time with SAFCUR III.
Richelson set down his own glass and I noticed he had barely sipped at the alcohol. He sat up straight behind his desk and clasped his hands together in a studious pose.
“When the first wave of tanks came out through the defensive forts we formed them up into line, just as they had been at the battle of Rock Hill,” he said. “When they began the push south, I was in a Black Hawk controlling the advance.”
“And were there any problems?”
“There are always problems in battle,” the Colonel said seriously. “Good leadership requires a commander to deal with those issues.”
“So… what were the problems, and how did you resolve them?”
The Colonel looked thoughtful for a moment. He was an organized man. He had an organized mind. I felt like all the information he shared was sorted and processed. Nothing came out of his mouth that was unfiltered or thoughtless. I had a hard time believing he would be capable of spontaneous decisions during something as harrowing as a major tank battle – but clearly he was. General George Tash was no fool. He had selected this man as his second-in-command for good reason.
“Coordinating the tanks with the rolling barrage of protective artillery fire was the first obstacle,” Richelson said. “The artillery was firing at map co-ordinates in a carefully scheduled plan that was designed to keep the shelling five miles ahead of the tank line. As the tanks moved forward, so would the bombardment move. That didn’t always happen with the precision required.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“What problems did that cause?”
The Colonel shook his head. “It didn’t, but it could have – if we hadn’t stayed vigilant. We needed to keep open lines of communication with the various elements of artillery we were working with, and we had to adjust the speed of the tanks. There were a couple of times when the armor was moving through flat open ground where they got too close to the barrage. We had to slow them down.”
“Couldn’t they have just stopped?”
“No. We were in zombie territory. The first rule of our tactics was that we must be constantly on the move at a pace that is faster than the undead.”
I nodded. I should have remembered that. Maybe I needed another drink…
“Were there many undead? What casualties did the rolling column inflict?”
Colonel Richelson probably knew down to the last zombie. He was the kind of perfectionist who would probably have had other helicopters in the air counting the bodies as they fell beneath the heavy tracks of the Abrams and Bradleys.
“We estimate enemy casualties at between fifteen and twenty thousand over the first few days,” he said. “That was only from the troops and tanks under my command on the eastern flank of the offensive. Those numbers became even higher as we pushed closer to the Florida border.”
“How much higher?”
The Colonel shrugged. “Another thirty thousand,” he said with concealed pride.
I was impressed. I didn’t ask about our own casualties. Instead I asked about the lessons the Army had learned between the time of the Rock Hill engagement and the massive armored push into the southern states.
Richelson considered the question, naturally.
“We didn’t modify the concepts we had already developed,” he said at last. “The only variation was the need throughout this massive assault to keep the tanks constantly on the move. In finding the solution to the problem, we also inadvertently were able to significantly reduce the number of casualties the Army on the ground incurred.”
More careful technical speak. I was becoming accustomed to the sanitized, antiseptic answers to my questions from the men who had commanded our soldiers. At another time and in another place I might have been satisfied with the vagueness of the answer. But not this time.
“What does that mean, exactly?” I asked. “Can you explain in terms my readers will actually understand?”
If he was offended, the Colonel didn’t show it. His expression remained the same. He swung around in his chair and glanced out through the window. I saw him sweep his hand through his hair, then turn back to me.
“We advanced in long lines of closely connected tanks, and two miles behind the advance was another long line of M113 personnel carriers. We had Apache helicopters in the sky, covering the flanks of each line… all that, I suspect you have already been told.”
I nodded.
“But during the offensive, the need to con
stantly press at the enemy demanded a second wave of tanks be moving behind the advance in order to take up the assault when the first line of vehicles needed to refuel, and required maintenance. Now the Abrams is one of the most reliable Main Battle Tanks the world has ever seen. It proved itself in the deserts of the Middle East. It’s reliable and trustworthy, so we didn’t factor on long maintenance delays. We did factor in the need to rest the men and refuel.”
“And so you had a follow up column of more tanks?”
“Yes. They trailed the line of personnel carriers. When the first line of tanks reached the objective of its advance, the rear column of tanks moved forward and spread out to continue pressing the zombies. The first vehicles were refueled.”
“And this saved lives?”
“Yes. Undoubtedly.”
“How?”
“Because at the Battle of Rock Hill the troops in the M113’s were the last line of our attack. They were required to head-shoot any of the undead that were not eliminated by the tanks. With the rolling assault that pushed south, we had the column of tanks in the rear that meant we could deploy them in instances where the men in the M113’s were unable to deal with the vast numbers of maimed zombies requiring extermination.”
I was writing all this down, but even as I did so, my mind was racing ahead to the next questions I wanted to ask. The Colonel’s explanation of the way the attack had been coordinated had made me more curious.
“What about at night?” I asked. “Did the attack roll on in darkness as well?”
“No,” Richelson said. “It was deemed too dangerous.”
“Too dangerous?” I frowned. “In comparison to waiting in the darkness for the zombies to attack?”
Richelson pressed his lips together. “The times when the vehicles were being refueled and repaired were always the moments fraught with the most hazard. It was always possible that stray surviving undead might break through our perimeter. Fortunately the covering Apache’s were thorough.”
“And during the night, when the advance was forced to halt. How did you handle that situation?”
Zombie War: An account of the zombie apocalypse that swept across America Page 24
