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

when your weapon would “click” at the moment a ghoul was upon you. That happened a lot in the
Thirty-second Motor Rifle division.
We weren’t as neat and organized as your army. We didn’t have your tight, light little Raj-Singh
squares or your frugal “one shot, one kill” combat doctrine. Our battles were sloppy and brutal. We
plastered the enemy in DShK heavy machine-gun fire, drowned them with flamethrowers and
Katyusha rockets, and crushed them under the treads of our prehistoric T-34 tanks. It was
inefficient and wasteful and resulted in too many needless deaths.
Ufa was the first major battle of our offensive. It became the reason we stopped going into the
cities and started walling them up during winter. We learned a lot of lessons those first months,
charging headlong into the rubble after hours of merciless artillery, fighting block by block, house
by house, room by room. There were always too many zombies, too many misfires, and always too
many bitten boys.
We didn’t have L pills 1 like in your army. The only way to deal with infection was a bullet. But
who was going to pull the trigger? Certainly not the other soldiers. To kill your comrade, even in
cases as merciful as infection, was too reminiscent of the decimations. That was the irony of it all.
The decimations had given our armed forces the strength and discipline to do anything we asked of
them, anything but that. To ask, or even order, one soldier to kill another was crossing a line that
might have sparked another mutiny.
For a while the responsibility rested with the leadership, the officers and senior sergeants. We
couldn’t have made a more damaging decision. To have to look into the faces of these men, these
boys whom you were responsible for, whom you fought with side by side, shared bread and
blankets, saved his life or have him save yours. Who can focus on the monumental burden of
leadership after having to commit such an act?
We began to see a noticeable degradation among our field commanders. Dereliction of duty,
alcoholism, suicide—suicide became almost epidemic among the officer corps. Our division lost four
experienced leaders, three junior lieutenants, and a major, all during the first week of our first
campaign. Two of the lieutenants shot themselves, one right after committing the deed, and the
other later that night. The third platoon leader chose a more passive method, what we began to
call “suicide by combat.” He volunteered for increasingly dangerous missions, acting more like a
reckless enlisted man than a responsible leader. He died trying to take on a dozen ghouls with
nothing but a bayonet.
Major Kovpak just vanished. No one knows exactly when. We knew he couldn’t have been taken.
The area was thoroughly swept and no one, absolutely no one left the perimeter without an escort.
We all knew what probably happened. Colonel Savichev put out an official statement that the major
had been sent on a long-range recon mission and had never returned. He even went so far as to
recommend him for a first-class Order of the Rodina. You can’t stop the rumors, and nothing is
worse for a unit’s morale than to know that one of their officers had deserted. I could not blame
the man, I still cannot. Kovpak was a good man, a strong leader. Before the crisis he had done
three tours in Chechnya and one in Dagestan. When the dead began to rise, he not only prevented
his company from revolting, but led them all, on foot, carrying both supplies and wounded from
Curta in the Salib Mountains all the way to Manaskent on the Caspian Sea. Sixty-five days,
thirty-seven major engagements. Thirty-seven! He could have become an instructor—he’d more
than earned the right—and had even been asked by STAVKA because of his extensive combat
experience. But no, he volunteered for an immediate return to action. And now he was a deserter.
They used to call this “the Second Decimation,” the fact that almost one in every ten officers killed
themselves in those days, a decimation that almost brought our war effort to a crushing halt.