The Military and the Living Dead, Part Two

If you haven't read it yet, The Military and the Living Dead, Part One is available here.

If you have ever taken a writing course, there's a chance you've heard the line, "Write what you know." When I write about zombies and the military, a fair reviewer might say, "Justin Tiemeyer doesn't really know anything about the military." Fortunately, I make up for this by being fairly knowledgeable of zombies and zombie affairs. I've even been called in as expert counsel when Lime Green Shirt devoted an entire podcast to zombies.Rather than deducing how the military would respond in the event of a zombie apocalypse according to my partial knowledge of modern military, I wonder if we might gain more insight into the matter by examining the situations presented in zombie films.

The central "text" when it comes to zombie films is George A. Romero and John A. Russo's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. While this is certainly not the first zombie film, it is easily the foremost zombie film. Night of the Living Dead makes an article like this possible, because it presents the zombie film genre as one of the most significant critiques of society and so-called human nature. If you can't survive an attack by unintelligent, slow-moving, single-minded, hobbling bodies, then there's something wrong with the world. There's something wrong with us.

After Night of the Living Dead, Romero and Russo went their separate ways. Romero continued the franchise as "of the Dead" films: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). Russo offered a series of "of the Living Dead" films (The Return of the Living Dead: Part One in 1985, Part Two in 1988, Part Three in 1993, Necropolis in 2005 and Rave from the Grave in 2005) that refer to Night of the Living Dead as a fictional account based on true stories. His films are usually looked upon as more of a farce than a continuation of the Night of the Living Dead story. In light of the works of these giants, all latter zombie films are seen along this spectrum, from insightful to ridiculous.

Romero's zombies are weak and slow. (You would do well to forget the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.) Their decomposing bodies would break apart at high speed. They can sense the bodies of living human beings and attack with vicious strength once they are within melee distance. These zombies can be disabled if shot int he brain or whacked hard enough on the head. There is no reason small groups of human beings shouldn't be able to survive in Romero's depiction of the zombie-infested world, and yet by the time of Dawn of the Dead the structure of the nation's government already appears to be crippled. It can be argued that Romero has a negative perspective on human nature. The only reason we can't rise up against the zombies is because we're too busy arguing with fellow survivors. I don't see this as a negative perspective on human nature so much as I see it as an accurate reflection on the world sociopolitical climate. It's just a fact at this point in history that humans are incapable of getting along with one another at any level of organization for any extended period of time.

In Romero's world, the military is an unorganized force. It exists as small pockets of armed men, besieged by zombies and left to make their own decisions. Like everyone else on the planet, life becomes a matter of "taking care of me and mine." The negative image of the military merely points out the important moral question that Romero poses: How does one act in the absence of rulers to tell one what to do? Without the leisure time needed to contemplate ethical issues thoroughly and/or restructure society, the answer seems to be: We fall apart. The accusation is never made solely against the armed forces; all of humankind, the military included, are on trial here.

Russo's vision is more of a comedy of errors, and it poses a serious accusation against the military. Unlike Romero's vision, we always see the chain of command of the military and the system of American government completely intact. The zombie evil is created by a chemical that was invented for spraying on fields of marijuana. By fighting what is viewed as an unnecessary war on pot, the U.S. has inadvertently created an invincible army of brain-hungry infected undead. Russo's zombies are juggernauts that are just as deadly without their brain intact. Burning them simply spreads the re-animating chemical in the form of acid rain. The military's only response is to store these zombies in metal barrels. But the barrels roll off of trucks. They break easily. They're opened in order to weaponize zombies. The result is always a zombie outbreak. How is containment accomplished? Nuclear detonation of an American city by the U.S. military is the answer in the original Return of the Living Dead (further spreading the re-animating chemical). Shooting anything that moves, zombie and human alike, from a militarized perimeter is the answer in the first sequel. Russo, as we can see, poses a much more difficult accusation against the military.

As a dark comedy, the Russo line of zombie films does not present a probable account of realistic events. Instead, it presents military foibles that the viewers cannot rule out as impossible in light of current events. Is the government involved in science and technology that could have unexpected results? In light of terrorism and war, we'd be foolish not to. Is it possible that military engineers could fail to keep citizens safe from an immanent threat? The ninth ward of New Orleans is proof of this possibility. Would the military drop a nuke on U.S. soil to stop an otherwise unstoppable infection from wiping out the continent? While every military commander seeks to minimize collateral damage, there is always a level if justified risk. Nuclear destruction becomes a matter of calculus if we think like this. It's Jack Bauer utilitarianism.

For both Romero and Russo there is a process. Observation is the first step. People argue. People war. People make foolish mistakes. People abuse power. We see it on the news eacha nd every day. Then comes analysis. A certain ethic or sociology or concept of human nature emerges that represents these cases. Finally, there is a new creation. Romero and Russo translate what they see every day and their judgments on this phenomena into movies. Zombie movies are a reflection, whether realistic or hyperbolic, of everything we learn about humanity from day to day. If the military were the only problem in zombie movies, I might raise my own objection, but zombie movies present a world where civilian and soldier alike live in corruption and idiocy.

The accusation is against all of us, not the few and the proud; in some sense we're all responsible for this zombie apocalypse we're currently experiencing.

The Military and The Living Dead, Part One

In the beginning of the 1985 film Return of the Living Dead, a foreman named Frank (played by James Karen) tells a scary story to a teenage employee named Freddy (Thom Mathews). He explains that the film Night of the Living Dead is a fictional story, but that it was based on true events. (This is funny because the same person who wrote the book this film is based on, John A. Russo, also co-wrote Night of the Living Dead with George Romero.) It seems the military had created a gas called 245-Trioxin, an agent they intended to spray on marijuana plants. When 245-Trioxin was released into the morgue in the basement of a Pittsburgh VA hospital the bodies there began to move about as if alive. "How would Frank ever find out about such a story?" Freddy wonders. To answer this question, Frank takes Freddy into the dark basement of the Uneeda medical supply warehouse.

In the basement are three military vats of a mysterious chemical. Upon looking through the transparent dome atop one of the canisters, Frank and Freddy see the remains of one of the bodies from the morgue. It seems that these three barrels were accidentally sent to Uneeda instead of the military storage facility where they were supposed to go. Freddy questions Frank about the safety of storing such a dangerous chemical in the basement of the warehouse, but Frank is confident. He explains that they were made strong by Army engineers, and to prove his point he slaps the side of a container. The barrel springs a leak and the entire complex is invaded by the 245-Trioxin vapors which effectively animate the dead.

A Facebook friend once posted a Facebook rant regarding this very topic. He wondered (never) to himself (because it's Facebook, duh!), "Why is the military always portrayed in such a negative light in zombie films?" If you don't know what we're talking about here, you need only see the film 28 Days Later. (Some of you may stop me right there and make the claim that the enemies in 28 Days Later weren't actually zombies. They were, in fact, infected. For the sake of this article, however, zombies, infected and revenants are all included under the umbrella word zombie.) In this film, we watch civilians running here and there in order to escape the speed-demon zombies all around them for somewhere near an hour before they are finally "saved" by the military. While the immanent threat of zombie evisceration seems scary enough, the threat of execution and rape at the hands of these crotch-driven soldiers makes this movie truly horrifying.

I used to be the kind of guy who was against even the idea of a military. Force only begets force. Violence only begets violence. There is no such thing as a just war. I perceived those who joined the military to be either crazy, foolish or inhumane, and that's not even counting the ones who were convinced that their financial poverty gave them no other choice. At first, I was incredibly frightened that some of my friends were considering going into the military. The first close friend I remember going off to serve our country was Tom Steenwyk. Tom could be a hothead, but he was also one of the kindest, most loyal guys you could know. He tended to his relationships as best as he could and embodied virtue wherever possible. After that was Jeff Kingsland and Stephan Mathos, kids who really seemed to stand for something, but who had also dreamed of joining the Navy since they were in diapers.

Tom joined the Army and served for several years, often in hotbeds like Iraq, before devoting himself to the family life. Jeff and Stephan went to the Naval Academy immediately after graduating from high school. Stephan continues to work toward his lifetime goal of becoming a Naval aviator. He recently got his wings after working hard at the base in Corpus Christi, Texas. Jeff has become a Navy seal and a legend to those who meet him. My brother and I have randomly encountered people who went to the Academy at the same time who were in awe when we mentioned that we know Jeff Kingsland. Whatever I had previously believed about the military had to change. At the very least, the military was home to three of the best men on the face of the planet.

But three men do not a military make.

My awareness of the American military, it's policies and it's various endeavors began in 2001. The terrorist attack of September 11 happened when I was less than a month into my first semester in college. I was in a strange place where I didn't really know anybody when I found out about the catastrophe. But then I kept hearing about more catastrophes. About faked information regarding weapons of mass destruction that guided America into a war where a whole lot of people my age were dying on both sides of the gun. As soon as American soldiers were deployed overseas, reports started coming in that some of these soldiers were responsible for horrible breaches of human rights. I don't want to go too far into depth, but I think the words Abu and Ghraib might be enough to bring home the point. It seemed that there were crimes being committed at nearly every link in the chain of command. It made a good chunk of the population doubt the nobility of our nation's military and the administration that sent them their marching orders. I'd be a liar to say I wasn't similarly affected.

It seems awfully difficult to decide which way the United States military would fall in the event of a zombie apocalypse. In Return of the Living Dead, the military quickly resorted to dropping a nuclear bomb on American soil to stop a possible outbreak of infection. But the anti-American, radical Muslim, terrorist ideology that brought about the destruction of the two towers of the World Trade Center and as a result the subsequent wars that America would become entrenched in, that ideology was treated as an outbreak that needed to be contained and stopped as well. We had decided that the perpetrators of this horrendous crime were in one of a couple particular areas, and yet we didn't resort to nuclear arms in this situation. For some, this might be enough to suggest that the military ought to get more credit in zombie films. Others realize, possibly because of the last decade of violence, that a great deal of atrocities can be committed without the use of nuclear weaponry. It is far from clear whether or not the critique of the military seen in zombie films is accurate, but so long as there is a seed of reason to the indictment we ought to follow this line of thought further.

Part Two of The Military and The Living Dead can be accessed by clicking here.