A Zombie's History of the United States

by Worm Miller

  State of animation.

  Trials of the Living Dead

  I have here in my hand a list of forty-five individuals

  that are known as being undead and who nevertheless

  are still working and shaping the policy of the State

  Department.

  —Senator Joseph McCarthy, Chicago speech, May 20, 1951

  The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) is best known today for its investigations into so-called anti-American activity in the American film industry. Forgotten are HUAC’s origins and its decades-long probe into a rumored secret cabal of the undead.

  The original incarnation of HUAC began its life in 1918. Standing then for the House Un-Dead Activities Committee, HUAC was spun off of a special agency created to enforce the Mann Act, or White-Slave Traffic Act, which prohibited the interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes.” During a routine Mann Act bust in 1917, agents stumbled upon a zombie brothel, which apparently left enough of an impact on the agency to warrant the formation of a special committee for the sole purpose of investigating zombie prostitution. In 1924, when J. Edgar Hoover was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation), HUAC broadened the scope of its undead investigations. Hoover believed hybrids to be deeply involved in the world of bootlegging and organized crime, though HUAC never collected concrete evidence to support Hoover’s theory.

  In 1938, the mostly irrelevant HUAC was folded with the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, which had been created in 1934 to investigate Nazi activities in the United States. Rebranded the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC investigations now ran the gamut on so-called anti-American groups: Communist, Nazi, undead, KKK, and so on. The irony is that during this period, the hybrids were the exact opposite of a group, and generally so secretive that they actively avoided interaction with each other. It was largely due to the unrelenting persecution by HUAC that hybrids were to band together in the 1960s.

  During World War II, HUAC did not greatly concern itself with hybrids. That status may have continued after the war, were it not for the arrest and trial of Craig Sherman. In 1920, Sherman was born to a family of German-Jewish immigrants in New York City, and by the late 1930s, he had become an active leader in New York’s Young Communist League. In 1942, after graduating from City College of New York with a degree in electrical engineering, Sherman got a job at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Around this time, a hybrid attacked Sherman, and he became one himself.

  Then in January 1950, the U.S. Army discovered that Klaus Buechler, a German refugee and theoretical physicist who had worked for Project Phantom, had smuggled important materials to the Soviets throughout the war. The Soviets were eager to experiment with zombie technology, in particular the possibilities of the Z-bomb, as many had taken to calling Neil Moore’s Death’s Head. Buechler confessed to his crimes and eventually gave up the identity of his courier, Arnold Yates, who was then arrested in April 1950. Yates too confessed, revealing that he had also given the Soviets hybrid blood samples, samples that came from one Craig Sherman, who Yates said had recruited him into the Communist Party.

  In March 1951, Sherman was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death under the Espionage Act of 1917. When imposing the death sentence, Judge Benjamin Kaplan declared to Sherman:I consider your crime worse than murder. I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians a weapon that our best scientists predicted Russia would otherwise never have developed, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000, and who knows but that millions more of innocent people, may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. The civilian defense activities throughout the nation were already aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack, now we must bother ourselves with this new treachery.

  On August 2, 1951, Craig Sherman was terminated at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility by firing squad. During his trial, Sherman had admitted to being a member of the Communist Party, to recruiting Yates, and to being a hybrid—but had denied the charges of espionage right up to the end. Considering that the Russians never produced any hybrid soldiers (and still have not), it is most likely that Sherman was indeed innocent, and that Yates lied, fingering Sherman merely for the purposes of plea-bargaining. In either case, Sherman’s conviction fueled a storm of paranoia over hybrid activity, inspiring the “witch hunts” of both Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations into hybrid activity in the government and HUAC’s attacks on the entertainment industry.

  HUAC’s hearings investigating the “pro-undead” themes in Hollywood may have been the most misguided of all hearings the committee ever held. Filmmakers, including producer Val Lewton (Cat People) were brought in to answer for films such as I Walked with a Zombie, which HUAC claimed was presenting zombies as mostly harmless or misunderstood. Most of these films were dealing with fantastical Haitian voodoo zombies, not actual zombies, but this seemed to matter little to HUAC. When the film The Great Escape was released, the film’s star, actor Steven McQueen, was even accused of being a hybrid after the Mirisch Company, who produced the film, hyped that McQueen had performed all his own stunts. McQueen mockingly ate a cheeseburger before the committee as proof of his humanity.

  No hybrids were successfully rooted out in either Hollywood or the government, and eventually the “Carrie hunt” hearings subsided. Yet the storm of paranoia aimed at hybrids continued to rage and served to bolster rising discontent among America’s hybrids.

  Zombies in the Jungle

  Tell the Vietnamese they’ve got to draw in their horns or we’re going to turn them into a zombie hellhole.

  —Gen. Curtis LeMay, U.S. Air Force, May 1964

  The buildup to what is generally referred to stateside as the Vietnam War was complicated, to say the least. France had invaded and pacified Vietnam in the mid-19th century, turning it into French Indochina (along with Cambodia and Laos). Various Vietnamese liberation groups attempted various oppositions over the ensuing decades, but were always thwarted by the French colonial government. Then during World War II, Japan invaded and threw the French colonial officials into internment camps. The Viet Minh (meaning “League for the Independence of Vietnam”) was formed in 1941 by the Communist Party of Vietnam (with funding from the United States) to oppose Japanese occupation.

  In August 1945, when Japan had finally submitted to Allied forces, a power vacuum was temporarily created in Vietnam. Japan no longer wielded authority, yet the French colonial government was still absent. The Viet Minh seized the moment, declaring their independence; Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Viet Minh, even paraphrased the United States Declaration of Independence when he made his speech. Unfortunately, despite funding the Viet Minh and having sympathy, one would presume, for their colonial oppression, the United States supported France’s claim on the Vietnam territories.

  When a rearmed France returned to French Indochina in 1946, the First Indochina War began. Things likely would have turned out very differently if the Chinese Communists had not won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, but they did, and they bolstered the Viet Minh’s efforts until finally, on May 7, 1954, the French garrison surrendered.

  The Geneva Conference temporarily split Vietnam in two, along the 17th parallel, allowing time for elections to be held so that the Vietnamese people could decide their own fate. However, these elections never occurred, as a civil war between Vietnamese Communists and Vietnamese Nationalists consumed the area. The north was effectively ruled by Viet Minh guerillas, while the south was ruled by a series of U.S.-supported regimes. By the early 1960s an increasing number of American troops were being sent to Vietnam to aid the south. The action was not being referred to as a “war”—it was termed a “conflict.”

 
President Eisenhower had shut down Project Phantom after World War II and aimed to keep it that way. The Korean War had been fought entirely without zombies, though many in the military thought we could have cut down on American casualties if the Berserker Corps were brought out of retirement. Then, in October 1951, the Eisenhower administration learned through our spy channels that the Soviets had suffered a devastating zombie accident at a secret test facility in Soviet Kazakhstan. Construction on a prototype zombie bomb had gone awry, zombinating the facility and parts of the surrounding area (we now know that the incident, the Black Creek Fallout, occurred when a zombie bomb prototype accidentally detonated during construction). Though a disaster for the Russians, the incident was taken as equally disastrous for America. This confirmed our worst fears…

  Infection projection based on intelligence of Strategic Undead Capability Scenario (S. U. C. S.).

  The Russians had the Z-bomb.

  Despite hysteria over the possibilities of Russia “zombing” New York City or Washington, D.C., Eisenhower remained staunchly against the proliferation of weaponized zombie technology. “It took our fathers and grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers hundreds of years to get rid of the buggers; the Russians won’t make me bring them back,” he supposedly told his secretary of defense, Charles Erwin Wilson. In fact, Eisenhower wanted to go so far as to destroy all the remaining zombies and samples of the zombie contagion still housed at Fort Dead. In a 1953 television address to the American people, Eisenhower alluded to this desire:Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with the undead or with split atoms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Disarmament and de-animation, with mutual honor and confidence, is our continuing imperative.

  While Eisenhower may have had the power to keep zombies out of Korea, he did not possess enough authority to dispose of our zombie stockpiles. The last-recorded zombie encounter in the wild had occurred in 1944. Zombies were all but extinct. The majority of our leaders, both civic and military, felt that we could not allow the Soviets to have the only zombies, as they would surely be used against us. Like nuclear bombs, zombies had become an ugly but necessary commodity.

  With America and the Soviets playing will-they-or-won’t-they with the Z-bomb, the one upside was that zombies stayed out of the Vietnam conflict up through the John F. Kennedy administration. But as fighting continued to increase in Vietnam, the pressure was on to do something. In December 1963, President Lyndon Johnson authorized the creation of the Council for Undead Studies (CUS), which, despite its passive name, was for all intents and purposes a reestablishment of Project Phantom. The CUS’s aim was to devise new forms of zombie warfare outside of the Z-bomb.

  ANOTHER ZOMBIE PRESIDENT?

  Lovers of strange-but-true cosmic connections have long liked to discuss the eerie links between President Abraham Lincoln and President John F. Kennedy. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846; Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946. Lincoln was elected president in 1860; Kennedy was elected president in 1960. Both were shot on a Friday. Lincoln’s successor was Andrew Johnson, born in 1808; Kennedy’s successor was Lyndon Johnson, born in 1908. Lincoln was shot in the head by a man who believed the president was a Carrie—was the same true of Kennedy?

  Some contemporary conspiracy theorists believe so, hypothesizing that Kennedy did not support using zombies in warfare out of sympathy for his undead brethren, and that this got him terminated by enemies who wished to escalate zombie involvement in Vietnam. Of all the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, this holds the least water. Unlike with Lincoln, there were no rumors that Kennedy was a hybrid. In fact, it was well known among White Housers that the president suffered from a variety a physical ailments, including intense back pain, that required him to receive routine medical attention. This was not the sort of thing that makes people suspicious of hybridity.

  If there has ever been a hybrid president of the United States, he was able to successfully conceal it. More than likely, though, no hybrid has ever been able to successfully conceal their nature well enough and long enough to rise to such a publicly scrutinized position.

  The CUS’s crowning achievement was 2,4-zicorodenoxyacetic acid (2,4-Z), better known by its code name, London Fog. A highly potent variant of the zombie contagion, 2,4-Z could be sprayed from low-flying planes and helicopters like an insecticide or herbicide. The name London Fog was given to the concoction because of the dense mist that was left on an area after a spraying occurred. Inhaling 2,4-Z would lead directly to zombination, as would ingesting anything the mist had coated, which served the added purpose of also depriving the enemy of crops and other food supplies. Between 1964 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed roughly 1.3 million gallons of 2,4-Z on South Vietnam as part of Operation Rainy Day.

  The success of Operation Rainy Day was not simply turning Vietnam into a zombie badland. London Fog was just step one. Step two was 2,3,7-peradizodioxin (2,3,7-P), known as Raid (named after the recently introduced bug spray). Conceived by Project Phantom’s Dr. Stephen Ingpen decades earlier, 2,3,7-P was a chemical agent that attacked the nervous system in both humans and zombies. The chemical was also sprayed from low-flying aircraft. Zombies who came in contact with 2,3,7-P would start to experience muscle failure within moments and would become completely de-animated in a matter of minutes. Humans safely wearing appropriate breathing gear could move amongst the mists unharmed. The combination of London Fog and Raid allowed the United States to zombinate, then de-animate, entire villages and jungle patches without ever committing troops to the ground.

  Operation Rainy Day was as effective as it was morally dubious. There is no way to tally the number of innocent civilians who became zombinated by 2,4-Z or accidentally poisoned by 2,3,7-P. Most disturbing were the numerous cases of pregnant women who ate food grown from soil and water contaminated by 2,4-Z. Here the doses were not enough to zombinate the mother, but they were enough to zombinate the unborn child inside her, who would then eat and claw its way out of the womb.

  Furthermore, the de-animating clouds of 2,3,7-P certainly did not claim all the zombies created by London Fog. Soon the number of zombies roaming the jungles was enough to pose a real problem to U.S. forces on the ground. Dealing with the Vietcong was a handful enough, but worrying about zombies skulking through the rice patties too was more than forces could handle. Finally, in 1971, President Richard Nixon put an end to Operation Rainy Day.

  Whether America ever could have succeeded in Vietnam is impossible to say, but Operation Rainy Day had insured that it was almost impossible. As the Vietnam conflict had never officially been a war, it also had no official end, merely petering out over the course of five years as troops were sent home, and funding and aid dollars were cut off. Eventually North Vietnam prevailed. Now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Vietnamese government struggled through the remainder of the 1970s and the 1980s to get their zombie problem—a lasting testament to America’s involvement—under control. In the early 1990s, John Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and a Vietnam veteran, spearheaded a zombie relief program for Vietnam to help them de-animate the remaining creatures.

  UNDEAD SPACE

  Historian Frederick Jackson Turner had proclaimed that the frontier was the source of the American character. President Kennedy cleverly resurrected this language when he referred to the United States’ space policy as the New Frontier. Part scientific exploration, part massive PR move, the space race was the only aspect of the Cold War that Americans could be excited about. The whole nation cheered when Mercury astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., became the first American in space. The public was not even informed when Pvt. Matthew Sell, or rather the zombinated remains of Pvt. Sell, went up into space two months earlier, as part of NASA’s secret Pluto program.

  The Pluto program’s Pvt. Matthew Sell, the first mobile being in space.

  Scientists could only hypothesize what effect space travel would have on the human body. It only made sense for NASA to use some of th
e zombies currently going to waste at Fort Dead. After all, zombie physiology reacts almost identically to that of a human. Without the Pluto program, many early space race accidents would have claimed a human life.

  The Carrion in Space Program was a short-lived, privately funded project testing hybrid pilots for astronaut fitness in the early 1960s. Some researchers speculated that because hybrids required less food and could withstand environmental extremes no human could, they might make perfect occupants for the space capsules. Several prospective hybrids were located and brought into the program, though finding hybrids with flight training was difficult. It mattered little though. With the way things were in that political climate, NASA would never have used hybrids for the Mercury or Apollo programs.

  In March 2006, the Vietnamese government happily declared that they were once again zombie free.

  David Z

  If it’s necessary to form a hybrid nationalist army, we’ll form a hybrid nationalist army. If we cannot succeed with the ballot, then we will succeed with our teeth.

  —David Z, hybrid activist, Temple Round speech, April 1964

  Inspired by the African American Civil Rights Movement, by the 1960s many fed-up hybrids decided to publicly “come out of the grave,” as unsympathetic journalists liked to mockingly say. While African Americans sought equal rights, hybrids sought rights of any kind. There was no existing federal law that made being a hybrid illegal, but this was a minor technicality for most law enforcement branches. Many states employed the tactic of charging captured hybrids with conspiracy to murder, arguing that left free, the hybrid would surely attack a human eventually (which did, in fact, occur somewhat routinely). Furthermore, most courts did not recognize hybrids as people, thus someone who killed a hybrid was not guilty of any crime, or at least not guilty of murder; a man who killed a hybrid in San Marcos, Texas, in 1957, was fined for “improper trash disposal” after leaving the terminated hybrid lying in the street.