World War Z: Chapter 7: Total War Summary & Analysis

 Aboard the Mauro Altieri, Three Thousand Feet Above Vaalajarvi, Finland. The narrator is with General D’Ambrosia aboard the Combat Information Center (CIC), Europe’s command and control dirigible. He tells the narrator he was shocked and reluctant to go to war against the zombies. He was afraid he’d be sending his soldiers to die since there were 200 million zombies for them to contend with. The prospects for victory were slim. Everything he knew about war had to be thrown out the window since this new enemy was unlike any that humanity had ever known—it didn’t need to be “bred, fed, and led” like people, and “Zack operated [by] swelling his ranks by thinning [theirs].” This enemy would “never negotiate, never surrender.”

Denver, Colorado, USA. The narrator has just finished dinner with Todd Wainio at his house. He tells the narrator that the “new army” was “like stepping back in time.” While the army he’d fought with at Yonkers had been completely mechanized, this time the soldiers marched on foot carrying Lobos, using a few vehicles only to carry their ammo. Their BDUs (battle dress uniforms) were light and comfortable, and were interwoven with Kevlar, which were bite-proof threads. Their primary weapons were standard infantry rifles that were very basic but “super accurate.” The rifles had a flip-out spike that was about eight inches long that they could use if they didn’t have their Lobos handy.

This time, it was very important for the soldiers to be able to have the endurance for long battles, and many otherwise good soldiers couldn’t take the long hours and the strain. The new army was composed of many former civilians who could stay calm under pressure, and Wainio says that they were all “veteran[s] in some sense” since they had survived until that point. For instance, his battle buddy was a 52-year-old nun who’d protected her Sunday school students for nine days, armed with nothing but an iron candlestick.

At around 1 p.m., they got ready for battle at Hope, New Mexico. The Canine Units were bringing the zombies in and the soldiers loaded their guns and waited. They could see “Gs on the horizon, hundreds,” and Wainio began to shake. They called the dogs off and played loud Iron Maiden songs to entice the zombies, which also worked to “psych” the soldiers. Then the music faded and as the zombies crossed the markers on the ground, the front line was ordered to fire. The soldiers didn’t miss a single shot. They had been training in this exact way for months, and it was almost instinct now. They had been trained to fire “one shot every full second. Slow, steady, mechanical-like.” They were taught to pace themselves, and not hurry or panic. The Recharge Teams or “Sandlers” made sure their guns didn’t run out of ammo.

The battle continued into the night, with swarms of Gs approaching nonstop. There was a pile of corpses and the soldiers kept shooting “every head that popped over the top.” The zombies started approaching from all directions, and the soldiers were ordered to form a Reinforced Square, a technique they’d picked up from Raj-Singh. They kept their ammo and supplies in the center of the square. If the soldiers needed a short break, they had to just raise their guns and a Sandler would take their place. They also had Knock Out teams of “combat shrinks who were observing everyone’s performance” and would identify who needed a rest even if they hadn’t asked for one.

At around 4 a.m., the number of zombies started reducing, and finally stopped. The officers began looking relieved. In the light of the day, they saw that they “were totally walled in [by corpses], all sides were piled at least twenty feet height and over a hundred feet deep.” The next day, everyone felt optimistic after their first success.

Ainsworth, Nebraska, USA. Darnell Hackworth and his wife run a canine retirement center for veterans of the army’s K-9 Corps. He tells the narrator that the dogs don’t get enough credit for all they did. Their first important job was triage, or to sniff out the infected. Later, they were trained to lure zombies towards the soldiers, like at the Battle of Hope, and also to work as decoys to keep them away if the soldiers weren’t ready for them yet. They could also sniff out zombies from long distances and warn their handlers, and were also sent deep into infested territory wearing harnesses that had video cameras.

Hackworth says that many dogs died in duty, and a large number of their handlers ended up committing suicide when their canine partners died. In fact, handlers were recruited for the ability to form deep bonds with the animals. Hackworth himself had been hired for this reason. He’d run from his house after the outbreak, and was sick and weak. Yet, when he’d seen two men mistreating a dog, he had fought them. The Guardsmen who broke up the fight had told him they had a job for him.

Siberia, The Holy Russian Empire. The narrator meets Father Sergei Ryzhkov, an old cleric, in a primitive shantytown. During the war, Ryzhkov served as chaplain at a Motor Rifle division. Unlike the Americans, they weren’t organized and suffered “many needless deaths.” When soldiers were bitten, their comrades did not want to kill them—it reminded them too much of the decimations. So, their leaders—officers and sergeants—were forced to do it, which was very damaging for them, and led to alcoholism and suicide. Another option was to let the bitten soldiers kill themselves, which was heartbreaking to witness. 

Ryzhkov says that he was a religious man in a country that had forgotten religion, so none of these soldiers turned to him for comfort. As a chaplain, his only duties were to collect letters that the soldiers wrote to the families, and to distribute vodka. After one attack, he was walking among the bitten soldiers when he decided that he would be the one to kill them and save their souls from Hell. He realized that only holy men “should bear the cross of releasing trapped souls from infected bodies.” This message spread to every chaplain and civilian priest, and became known as the act of “Final Purification.” It was the reason Russia “emerged from that war as a nation of faith”—its people realized they could turn to God for “direction, courage, hope.”

The narrator asks Ryzhkov if those ideas were “perverted for political reasons” since the president had declared himself head of the Church. He wants to know if it’s true that priests were organized into “death squads” and assassinated people by falsely claiming they were infected. He asks Ryzhkov if that’s the reason he was moved to this shantytown. Ryzhkov evades the questions.

Aboard USS Holo Kai, Off the Coast of the Hawaiian Islands. The narrator speaks with Master Chief Petty Officer Michael Choi inside a minisub called the Deep Glider 7. The ship lowers them into the ocean as Choi tells the narrator that his war hasn’t ended since millions of zombies are still being washed up on beaches everywhere. That’s why he is diving now to see how “to find them, track them, and predict their movements.”

Choi wears an Atmospheric Diving Suit (ADS) when he works, which looks like “a space suit and a suit of armor all rolled into one.” It protects his body from pressure even at great depths. While mesh suits are much more agile, they don’t protect the wearer from zombie bites, which the ADS does. Also, ADS models have 48-hour life support, so divers can just wait for help to arrive if they get attacked by a zombie horde. Since it is impossible to fire a gun underwater, the weapon Choi uses is an M-11. It attaches to his forearm and fires four-inch-long steel rods. Initially, DeStRes thought they were too expensive but changed their minds after divers were attacked by a horde when they were trying to repair a natural gas platform.

The minisub reaches the ocean floor, and Choi spots some zombies. The narrator sees around 60 of them approaching. Choi begins to fire darts at their chests, and says it is hard for him not to kill them, although he knows it is important to study their movements to set up “an early warning network.” Choi tells the narrator that soon, they’ll be using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) for recon dives. The narrator says that he knows there is a lot of controversy about using ROVs for battle. Choi says that will never happen because droids lack “heart, instinct, initiative, everything that makes us us.” They might be cost-effective but can never replace ADS divers. He says that he’ll quit the navy if the divers are ever replaced with machines.

Quebec, Canada. Andre Renard meets the narrator in his small farmhouse and asks that he keep his exact location a secret because he doesn’t want to be found by people. He says that all the other countries had it easy compared to those like him who battled the zombies under Paris, which has several tunnels underground. A quarter million civilians tried to take shelter in these underground tunnels during the Great Panic, and they had become infected. Renard and his fellow soldiers had to fight them in the dark, dank tunnels, with just one pair of night vision goggles per platoon and not enough batteries for their flashlights. The filters in their gas masks had expired, and they had to use hardwired radios to keep in touch since airwave transmissions often didn’t work underground. 

It was easy to get lost in those tunnels, and the maps they had were outdated. Sometimes, they’d hear another squad being attacked underground but wouldn’t be able to place their location because of the echoes. And other times, the screams would come from members of his platoon but it was hard to find them in the winding tunnels. They often reached them too late to save them and had to fight their reanimated friends. 

They had to fight the zombies at very close range, just inches from them, because they couldn’t use firearms underground since the air around them was too flammable. The only thing they had that was similar to a gun was a carbon dioxide pellet gun that had maybe six shots. They had to be careful while aiming their shots because if they struck the stone walls of the tunnels, they might have caused a spark and then a fire. The best way was hand-to-hand combat, but the narrow tunnels gave them no room to swing a weapon. Their weapon of choice was one consisting of steel spikes that Renard had designed. They put the spikes through the zombies’ eyes or down on their heads.

The men tried to cover themselves in armor of some kind—“chain mail or heavy leather” that ended up being “too heavy, too suffocating.” Unlike the Americans, they didn’t have bite-proof battle uniforms though they could have certainly used them. They had to wade around in water in the tunnels, and sometimes the zombies attacked them from under the water. At such times, they retreated and sent the Cousteaus in, “scuba divers trained to work and fight specifically in those flooded tunnels.” They, too, didn’t have the right safety gear to protect themselves and “had a one in twenty chance of survival.”

Renard is angry that their authorities had hurried them to go in and fight “at a time when the war was winding down all over the world.” They lost 15,000 soldiers in just three months. In contrast, the English had taken five years to slowly and carefully clear the whole of London because their general had believed they had “enough dead heroes.” France, however, wanted a lot of heroes since they had lost at other wars in Algeria, Indochina, and against the Nazis. Renard’s brother, too, had died in the war while storming a hospital filled with hundreds of zombies.

Denver, Colorado. The narrator has accompanied Todd Wainio to a  neighborhood picnic in Victory Park. There hasn’t been a single zombie sighting all spring. Wainio says the entire campaign to eliminate the zombies in America took three years as the army advanced slowly across the country. They went on foot, and their orders were to advance slowly, making two thorough sweeps. Some of the older zombies, the ones who had been infected at the start of the war, were decomposing, and some couldn’t even stand. Whenever they spotted zombies, a Force Appropriate Response (FAR) Unit would stop and take them down. The number of the zombies they found determined the size of the FAR.

Wainio explains that they also made it a point to stop every night to rest and says that they also couldn’t fight in heavy fog. Also, they had promised to help the armies in Canada and Mexico fight zombies after they had secured America, which extended the fighting, though Wainio was discharged before that. He also adds that one of the biggest things that slowed them down was “urban combat.” Clearing suburbia was very time-consuming.  

Wainio was in Army Group North, which he was initially happy about because he thought that meant he would encounter mostly frozen Gs in cold weather. However, he hadn’t considered the problems of quislings and ferals. They eventually discovered that they could rehabilitate ferals but not quislings, but many soldiers were badly hurt while trying to capture them. There were also packs of F-hounds—feral dogs—and F-lions or huge, feral cats that attacked humans. There were some people the army nicknamed LaMOEs (Last Man of Earth) who had successfully fought off the zombies and didn’t want the army to show up and change their lifestyles—and so attacked them, too. The cold also was a huge problem, with Gs getting buried and covered in the snow and reemerging as soon as it turned warm.

The narrator wants to know what it was like to liberate “the isolated zones” and Wainio says that each one was a struggle. One area was surrounded by a million zombies, and liberating it made the Battle of Hope seem small in comparison. Some of the military personnel in these zones were happy to be rescued, while others believed they needed no rescuing. Civilians, on the other hand, were usually happy to see the army and would greet them with cheers. Sometimes, though, a few of them would be angry that it took the army that long to get there, and that they’d lost their loved ones by then. Very rarely, they came across entire towns that were angry because they’d been abandoned by the army earlier.

The secessionists or Rebs took an even stronger stance against the army and shot at them as they approached. The army superiors sent special units to deal with the Rebs. Wainio once saw tanks headed their way and knew the Rebs had put themselves in a tough spot.

The narrator asks him if he’d heard about the questionable survival methods some people in isolated zones had used, and Wainio says that he didn’t want to hear about them even when those people wanted to talk. He says he didn’t want to bear more burdens. Wainio did talk to some of them later, and even read about the trials, but feels that he can’t judge them since he wasn’t there and didn’t have to live through the things they did.

While historians say that American casualties were way less than other countries, Wainio says they were still very high. Also, the statistics ignored deaths that were not caused by zombies and there were plenty of those. Many soldiers died of illnesses. Others died from LaMoEs attacking them, like one of Wainio’s friends. Some died from decrepit buildings collapsing on them, which is what happened to another soldier he was in love with. There were also many psychological casualties. Wainio says that the president was one of these people.