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

TAOS, NEW MEXICO
[Arthur Sinclair, Junior, is the picture of an old-world patrician: tall, lean, with
close-cropped white hair and an affected Harvard accent. He speaks into the
ether, rarely making eye contact or pausing for questions. During the war, Mister
Sinclair was director of the U.S. government’s newly formed DeStRes, or
Department of Strategic Resources.]
I don’t know who first thought of the acronym “DeStRes” or if they consciously knew how much it
sounded like “distress,” but it certainly could not have been more appropriate. Establishing a
defensive line at the Rocky Mountains might have created a theoretical “safe zone,” but in reality
that zone consisted mainly of rubble and refugees. There was starvation, disease, homelessness in
the millions. Industry was in shambles, transportation and trade had evaporated, and all of this
was compounded by the living dead both assaulting the Rocky Line and festering within our safe
zone. We had to get our people on their feet again—clothed, fed, housed, and back to
work—otherwise this supposed safe zone was only forestalling the inevitable. That was why the
DeStRes was created, and, as you can imagine, I had to do a lot of on-the-job training.
Those first months, I can’t tell you how much information I had to cram into this withered old
cortex; the briefings, the inspection tours…when I did sleep, it was with a book under my pillow,
each night a new one, from Henry J. Kaiser to Vo Nguyen Giap. I needed every idea, every word,
every ounce of knowledge and wisdom to help me fuse a fractured landscape into the modern
American war machine. If my father had been alive, he probably would have laughed at my
frustration. He’d been a staunch New Dealer, working closely with FDR as comptroller of New
York State. He used methods that were almost Marxist in nature, the kind of collectivization that
would make Ayn Rand leap from her grave and join the ranks of the living dead. I’d always
rejected the lessons he’d tried to impart, running as far away as Wall Street to shut them out. Now
I was wracking my brains to remember them. One thing those New Dealers did better than any
generation in American history was find and harvest the right tools and talent.
Tools and talent?
A term my son had heard once in a movie. I found it described our reconstruction efforts rather
well. “Talent” describes the potential workforce, its level of skilled labor, and how that labor could