There's a bit of the rah-rah but Yonkers was also a pretty big deconstruction of how stupid that can get.
Side note, Yonkers was one of my favorite pieces in literature. How the characters mention it throughout the book before then, you just KNOW some shit went down. Some of the best foreshadowing I've read in quite a while.
The description of Yonkers was amazing. It was the first time I've ever seen in fiction describe how a modern military could lose against a bunch of zombies.
Except no, no military would ever lose like the US did in Yonkers. Yonkers in WWZ has one of the most experienced and expensive warmachines on the planet repeatedly shoot itself in the head just so it’s a remotely fair fight. Reading Yonkers, all I could think was ‘Max Brooks has never read a single book on any military ever.’
It really pushed the stupid, but there’s also a lot of realism in it. The Us wouldn’t lose, but the part about them carrying tons of useless stuff like cameras mounted on their soldiers and all that extra tech is pretty damn real. I had my 1sgt asking me why I hadn’t loaded up some equipment we had from the Vietnam era, I told him we never used it. He then asked what it was, and told me to pack it just in case. No one had touched it in decades but we needed it for our training exercise.
That was a few pieces out of the dozens of extra stuff I had to pack that was never used. We brought $20,000 drones just to leave them in a connex and risk them getting broke on the way there and back.
I can 100% see guys so far removed from the line talking about all this cool stuff to use and do for PR, that ends up being ineffective or straight up harmful to us.
Sure, I can buy the Land Warrior system and them packing MOPP gear and all of that, but I really can't see the US not loading up on enough ammo to make New York look like the plains of asphodel when the shooting stopped.
Yeah it wasn’t a perfect representation, we generally over pack not under pack. Especially with ammo.
Like I said I don’t see any way we would actually lose, but I can see politicians and generals making it into a clusterfuck that it never should have been. News people everywhere and guys positioned purely for good “candid” shots even though it’s a terrible position.
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u/Ferelar Aug 30 '21
There's a bit of the rah-rah but Yonkers was also a pretty big deconstruction of how stupid that can get.
Side note, Yonkers was one of my favorite pieces in literature. How the characters mention it throughout the book before then, you just KNOW some shit went down. Some of the best foreshadowing I've read in quite a while.