World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

PATRIOT’S MEMORIAL, THE FORBIDDEN CITY, BEIJING, CHINA
[I suspect Admiral Xu Zhicai has chosen this particular spot on the off chance
that a photographer would be present. Although no one since the war has ever
remotely questioned either his or his crew’s patriotism, he is taking no chances
for the eyes of “foreign readers.” Initially defensive, he consents to this
interview only on the condition that I listen objectively to “his” side of the story,
a demand he clings to even after I explain that there is no other.]
[Note: For the sake of clarity, Western naval designations have replaced the
authentic Chinese.]
We were not traitors—I say this before I’ll say anything else. We loved our country, we loved our
people, and while we may not have loved those who ruled both, we were unwaveringly loyal to our
leadership.
We never would have imagined doing what we did had not the situation become so desperate. By
the time Captain Chen first voiced his proposal, we were already on the brink. They were in every
city, every village. In the nine and a half million square kilometers that made up our country, you
couldn’t find one centimeter of peace.
The army, arrogant bastards that they were, kept insisting that they had the problem under
control, that every day was the turning point and before the next snow fell upon the earth they
would have the entire country pacified. Typical army thinking: overaggressive, overconfident. All
you need is a group of men, or women, give them matching clothes, a few hours training,
something that passes for a weapon, and you have an army, not the best army, but still an army
nonetheless.
That can’t happen with the navy, any navy. Any ship, no matter how crude, requires considerable
energy and materials to create. The army can replace its cannon fodder in hours; for us, it might
take years. This tends to make us more pragmatic than our compatriots in green. We tend to look
at a situation with a bit more…I don’t want to say caution, but perhaps more strategic
conservatism. Withdraw, consolidate, husband your resources. That was the same philosophy as
the Redeker Plan, but of course, the army wouldn’t listen.
They rejected Redeker?
Without the slightest consideration or internal debate. How could the army ever lose? With their
vast stockpiles of conventional armaments, with their “bottomless well” of manpower…“bottomless
well,” unforgivable. Do you know why we had such a population explosion during the 1950s?
Because Mao believed it was the only way to win a nuclear war. This is truth, not propaganda. It
was common knowledge that when the atomic dust eventually settled, only a few thousand
American or Soviet survivors would be overwhelmed by tens of millions of Chinese. Numbers, that
was the philosophy of my grandparents’ generation, and it was the strategy the army was quick to