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

Of course we got our copy of the Knight-WarnJews report, what do you think we are, the CIA?
We read it three months before the Israelis went public. Before the Pentagon started making
noise, it was my job to personally brief the president, who in turn even devoted an entire meeting
to discussing its message.
Which was?
Drop everything, focus all our efforts, typical alarmist crap. We got dozens of these reports a
week, every administration did, all of them claiming that their particular boogeyman was “the
greatest threat to human existence.” C’mon! Can you imagine what America would have been like
if the federal government slammed on the brakes every time some paranoid crackpot cried “wolf ”
or “global warming” or “living dead”? Please. What we did, what every president since Washington
has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct relation to a realistic threat
assessment.
And that was the Alpha teams.
Among others things. Given how low a priority the national security adviser thought this was, I
think we actually gave it some pretty healthy table time. We produced an educational video for
state and local law enforcement about what to do in case of an outbreak. The Department of
Health and Human Services had a page on its website for how citizens should respond to infected
family members. And hey, what about pushing Phalanx right through the FDA?
But Phalanx didn’t work.
Yeah, and do you know how long it would have taken to invent one that did? Look how much time
and money had been put into cancer research, or AIDS. Do you want to be the man who tells the
American people that he’s diverting funds from either one of those for some new disease that most
people haven’t even heard of? Look at what we’ve put into research during and after the war, and
we still don’t have a cure or a vaccine. We knew Phalanx was a placebo, and we were grateful for
it. It calmed people down and let us do our job.
What, you would have rather we told people the truth? That it wasn’t a new strain of rabies but a
mysterious uber-plague that reanimated the dead? Can you imagine the panic that would have
happened: the protest, the riots, the billions in damage to private property? Can you imagine all
those wet-pants senators who would have brought the government to a standstill so they could
railroad some high-profile and ultimately useless “Zombie Protection Act” through Congress? Can
you imagine the damage it would have done to that administration’s political capital? We’re talking
about an election year, and a damn hard, uphill fight. We were the “cleanup crew,” the unlucky
bastards who had to mop up all the shit left by the last administration, and believe me, the
previous eight years had piled up one tall mountain of shit! The only reason we squeaked back into
power was because our new propped-up patsy kept promising a “return to peace and prosperity.”
The American people wouldn’t have settled for anything less. They thought they’d been through
some pretty tough times already, and it would have been political suicide to tell them that the
toughest ones were actually up ahead.
So you never really tried to solve the problem.