It might have been put to better use. It still could be, should the Americans accept his offer. First, Gehlen was to have complete autonomy within his organization and total control over its activities. He even reserved the right to approve U. Third, when a new German government was set up, the Americans would constitutionally install the Gehlen organization in it Clandestine America 41 as its official central intelligence agency and cancel automatically all outstanding Gehlen commitments to the United States.
Fourth, the Americans would never require Gehlen to do anything he considered against German national interests. In the long and the short, our guys fell for it. Look what power the victors conceded the vanquished. Exclusive purveyor of intelligence on the Soviet Union and East Europe to the United States, West Germany, and NATO, Gehlen and the spirit kept alive in him and his staff had more power over official American perceptions in the postwar world than even a German victory could have given them. The Gehlen- Vlassov intelligence system had become a main source and fountain of official American consciousness.
Behold the span of this concatenation. First in the time of Trotsky there is General Vlassov and his anti-Bolshevist army and spy ring. The Vlassov apparatus is then at a certain 42 The Yankee and Cowboy War later point assimilated to the Gehlen apparatus. Then just as the White Russian spies jumped to the Nazis when their own army went down, so now the German Nazi and Russian Czarist spies together jumped to the American army as the Wehrmacht was falling.
Vlassov first became a department of Gehlen, then Gehlen became a department of Allen Dulles. This is how it came to pass that a Czarist spy ring inside a Nazi spy ring took up the inner seats in the American foreign intelligence apparatus at the precise moment that this apparatus was starting to come forward as a major player in the great policy wars of Washington and the world.
This is how it came to pass that everything official Washington would know about the Soviet Union and East Europe on most believable report, everything about the enemy our policymakers would most confidently believe, would come by way of Czarists and Nazis installed at the center of our national intelligence system. That was a buzzard that would come home to roost again and again. Clandestinism is a disease of republican twilight. Its coming bespeaks the degeneration of the constitutional republic into the military empire.
It worsens when the empire shakes, as in the Vietnam war America was shaken. Rather, such accidents themselves were given significance by the larger transformation taking place around them: But one must always return to the specific events in which these larger forces unveiled themselves. And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad. My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed.
My conscience tells me that only I, as President, have the Constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book. If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing would be a fiasco. The whole problem unintelligible Hunt By the time of the invasion, Nixon had already been out of office for three months. What did Nixon have to do with it? What could Hunt now add to the story of the Bay of Pigs that would put Nixon in such steep new peril? So far in the national analysis of Watergate, this question has been largely overlooked. What was fastened upon in the June 23 tapes was rather the brief passage in which, unmistakably, Nixon tells Haldeman to cover up White House complicity in the Watergate cover up.
That bit of evidence convicted Nixon in the public mind of an impeachable offense and remaining salvos were left unfired. The book of standard American impressions badly overstates the respect in which the Bay of Pigs Fiasco was a Cold War confrontation between the Free World and communism and understates the respect in which it was also a confrontation between rival American power elites, each with its strengths and weaknesses, Kennedy on one side and Nixon on the other, and as I would say, Yankee and Cowboy in makeup.
In the campaign, Kennedy promised to get tough with Castro, trying to get to the right of Nixon on the Cuban issue at the very moment that Nixon was secretly operating as the chief political officer in the invasion planning group. Within scant months of taking office, Kennedy seemed to keep his promise; within hours more, he had failed to make it good. As a result of the Fiasco ending, the Russians got more deeply involved in Cuban affairs and brought Kennedy to the test of wills of the October Missile Crisis a year and a half later, in which Kennedy is supposed to have stood his ground and regained his manhood.
To this general picture, the activists of the anti-Castro invasion, such as Nixon and Hunt, add a critical detail, namely, that the fault for the failure of the Cuban invasion 50 The Yankee and Cowboy War lies with Kennedy. Kennedy, they say, cut back on critical U. But it does recognize that the Kennedy administra- tion was in sharp internal conflict over what to do about Cuba, and that the formulation and implementation of Frontier Camelot Cuban policy were affected by this conflict or, as might be said, disfigured by it.
That is the key point which the Cold War conception of the Bay of Pigs Fiasco cannot bring into focus: One group of activists urged him to go forward with the invasion plan. His liberal advisors ,. What was the actual significance of these two last-minute changes? From the sophistication, if not the overwhelming competence, it has shown in other such operations, the CIA should not be thought vain enough to think its Free Cuba exile army could actually endure against the arms of the Cuban revolution, much less march to the capital.
The CIA strategy was more roundabout: The fate of such a strategy would hinge on the missions of the B26s and the assassination squad. The Bs were important because in order for the invading forces to hold a position on the beach without direct U. This amounted only to two trainer jets left behind by Batista on which Cuban mechanics had mounted rudimentary armament systems.
But if the invaders were to have a chance at their basic positional objectives, 52 The Yankee and Cowboy War those two little jets would have to be kept out of the air. Crude as they were, unopposed against ground forces on a beach, they could be decisive in the battle. Had the Bs flown in from the Atlantic out of the sunrise, as first planned, and caught the Cuban jets on the ground, the landing forces would have encountered no Cuban air resistance. That might have made it possible to hold the beachhead a little longer. The revolutionary government was at that time a little more than two years old.
The particular importance of the Castro hit to the overall success of the invasion may be inferred from the intensity of the struggle about it. Kennedy is finally infuriated and breaks plates and scatters flowers to convince Smathers he must stop asking. Early in an item long familiar to conspiracy researchers became big-time news: The immediate question posed by this now-authenticated story is whether it was Kennedy who actually authorized the CIA to use a Syndicate hitman to liquidate Castro, or somebody else.
Why should the CIA have to rent assassination capabilities from the Syndicate? The timing of these events is uncertain. We do not know at what moment Kennedy vetoed the Castro assassination plot or at what moment the CIA used its Hughes-Maheu connection to retain a Syndicate assassination squad.
Yet few outside the government understood these divisions. The CIA conservatives and swashbucklers found warm support for their position in Congress; the Agency liberals were forced to fend for themselves. In any case, there was no internal Frontier Camelot consensus on Cuba or on the Bay of Pigs invasion project. I was reading a book last night. A fascinating book, although fun book, by Malcolm Smith Jr. And one of them was the Bay of Pigs. And what happened there was Chester Bowles had learned about it, and he deliberately leaked it.
Deliberately, because he wanted the operation to fail. And he admitted it! From the standpoint of the Nixon side, the Kennedy side wanted the Cuban invasion to fail. Obviously it sharpened with his arrival. Yet the left denounces Kennedy for invading Cuba as casually as the right denounces him for invading it too timidly. It is general knowledge that Kennedy was at odds with powerful hawks from the outset of his administration on the question not only of Cuba but of Laos, Vietnam, and the Congo, on the questions of the Third World as a whole, disarmament, Berlin, nuclear weapons, etc.
Why then do Halberstam and other liberals not weigh this division in with the other forces acting on policy? And still misread it a decade and more later? How could they have read the Bay of Pigs invasion as a Camelot project while at the same time claiming to be baffled at the inconsistency of that invasion with Camelot values and consciousness? Yes, Kennedy would have been foolish some other way.
The trick to how the invasion could come about nevertheless, how there could be a Bay of Pigs against the will of the president, is that the president is not an absolute 56 The Yankee and Cowboy War monarch ruling a submissive bureaucracy. The president in person proper is only one among many others on the larger board of national directors — a special stronghold clearly but by no means the only power source on the scene.
The presidency of the corporate state is the presidency of factional and bureaucratic coalitions that can weaken, grow old and brittle, fail in crises. Nixon says Eisenhower realized the majority view was wrong: Eisenhower was not a major partici- pant. Eisenhower himself has said publicly that there was no plan for an invasion while he was in office; that the only plan was to train guerrillas.
He did this kind of work for some eight years, operating as a staff-briefing officer to the Joint Chiefs and the secretary of defense on vital policy memoranda. His claims therefore have a certain interest. Prouty says it was the other way around. This is an intriguing and subtle dispute: What Eisenhower had approved in the way of an anti-Castro action program, said Prouty, was a thirty-three man project looking toward the feasibility of forming a guerrilla base in the countryside.
One might find it an incredible spectacle were it not before us as a model , so to speak, that Howard Hunt himself, black- propagandist par excellence, sat down with gluepot, a typewriter, a Xerox copier, a light-table, an X-acto knife, and sample and related communiques from the inner- sanctum files of the State Department to prove in that the Kennedys in had ordered the assassination of Diem and his brother-in-law Nhu as well as the coup that toppled them from power.
This makes it easier to picture someone like Prouty — big, distinguished, honorable — sneaking around the office at night with a flashlight carefully typing in two zeros after every 33 in all the records of the anti-Castro guerrilla project, records which may for that matter at that moment have been few. Thus it was, in any case, according to Prouty, that the myriad approvals of the man job were fobbed off on Kennedy by the pro-invasion group as approvals of a much bigger project, the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Tragedy in Our Hemisphere. Uniformly, the CIA translations being presented to Schlesinger and the Kennedys for analysis made Castro sound harsher and more belligerent than he was, encourag- ing the picture of a tyrant governing against popular will. This played into a wider concert of Hunt-style disinforma- tion being orchestrated from somewhere outside the Oval Office with the purpose of making the Oval Office, the Kennedy brothers, think Castro had an unstable popular base and would be overthrown by the Cuban people if the United States would show support.
Or as Fred J. When Kennedy took office, he was confronted with what amounted to a fait accompli. The invasion plans were perfected; he was given to understand that they had been drafted under the direction of his predecessor, a man of awesome military reputation. During the election campaign, he had called for aggressive action to topple Castro. Now he was presented with the opportunity. If he turned back, he would have to pit his untested judgment against, presumably, that of Eisen- hower and all the military experts.
He was on the spot. In his work, Strategy of Peace , Kennedy wrote of Castro as follows: This is not to sentimentalize our picture of Kennedy. His reformist strategy was after all a strategy of imperialism. But we have at the same time no need to condemn him for the crimes of his political adversaries. He did not accept the assumption that America could ever take as its enemy a foreign population as a whole.
Special Forces had been deployed, and that the insurgent forces could be isolated from the general population. Hunt also objected strongly to being instructed to put land reform in the new Cuban constitution he was drafting. They had their instructions from the White House. Hunt finally blurted out that he would rather withdraw from the operation than compromise on the issue. President Kennedy readily gave his approval;. The Cuban invasion is a total failure. Halberstam reports that Undersecretary of State Bowles, a blood Yankee liberal, stumbled onto the invasion plans as they were hatching and hurried to the office of Secretary of State Rusk to protest.
This makes it a highly risky operation. Yet the argument seems cynical. Equally ruthless acts, but effective, successful. On the Halberstam-Bowles argument, how do we state our objection now? Where were the Marines? In this logical Bay of Pigs invasion, the president of the United States was to have been a friend, not an enemy. Nixon would have made everything different — with Nixon in command the bombers would have flown, the assassins would have struck, the fleet would have steamed again into Havana harbor if necessary.
What came forth as the Fiasco, so-called by all parties, each with its own private irony, was not the product of a unified venture. It was rather the product of palace conflict. One side began by wanting no Bay of Pigs at all. The result was the Fiasco. Vietnam is the same story writ larger. Once again the left blames Kennedy for invading. Once again the right blames him for not invading with enough strength to win. Our counter-thesis is also the same: So the first strike takes place in deep secrecy. No one knows this hidden key fact.
From a domestic political standpoint, the Special War period under Kennedy was the link between the commando- style espionage and political action taken under Eisenhower and the full-dress air, ground, and sea war waged under Johnson. But Special War was supposed to lead away from Strategic War, not toward it, much as the commando politics of the late Eisenhower period was supposed to avert the necessity of engagement in the higher strategic scale of nuclear big-power confrontation.
The spy will achieve the objective. The commandos will achieve the objective. The Special Forces will achieve the objective. The infantry will achieve the objective. The air forces will achieve the objective. But at last the objective is lost altogether in what becomes the supervening need to rescue the very rescue capability itself. Once across the line, Rostow philosophized, a society again becomes stable, as though industrial life is stable in its natural state, as though there is or has been stability in American or European life.
But just at the crossing, there is the temptation to go Red, to break faith with the universal of natural rights and free enterprise of the monopolies and turn the problem of development over to international commu- nism. That is where the Special Forces come in. They are there to hold the future for U. Protected thus from its own transient delirium, country x can lock into the world system of American technical i.
Kennedy carried the Rostowian assumptions to their combined conclusion. With an Alliance for Progress reform program depicted as working away at the larger social- economic base of the problem, he positions a Special Forces capability to nip the bud of transitional diseases in the social margin. Nipped, these diseases do not grow into revolutions, revolutions do not seize the small states one by one and carry them off into the camp of the adversary, and the United States continues to dominate a generally happy and 66 The Yankee and Cowboy War prosperous world sphere, meanwhile easing toward detente in Europe, which really counts.
What cost Kennedy his life was his attempt to impose the limits of Camelot Atlanticism on a Frontier-minded defense and security elite. His sense of the Cuban and Vietnamese situations seems to have been much the same. In each case, from a practical political standpoint, his immediate adversary was not Cuban or Vietnamese communism so much as it was the American prowar power elite to which he was so beholden and exposed.
If the Cuban exiles can make the invasion alone, let it be done, but only if. We have a few fragments, a chronology. Having discussed military affairs with him often and in detail for 15 years, I know he was totally opposed to the introduction of combat troops in Southeast Asia. His public statements just before his murder support this view.
Let us not lay on the dead the blame for our own failures. Kennedy had lived, our military involvement in Vietnam would have been over by the end of Wayne Morse, however, maintained that Kennedy was changing his Vietnam policy at the very hour of Dallas: Ten days before his assassination, I went down to the White House and handed him his education bills, which I was handling on the Senate floor. Keep this in mind.
We come to know this study through the Ellsberg Papers as the McNamara study see especially volume 8, detailing in Arthur Schlesinger Jr. They have to win it or lose it. The Kennedy administration launches a general program for disengagement while trying to make it appear we have won the war without having actually fought it. Taylor and McNamara go to Saigon and come back saying they have seen the light at the end of the tunnel.
It is announced that the American mission is beginning to draw to a successful end. It is a foreshadowing of the Senator Aiken Plan of Announce a victory at a press conference and march home as in triumph. McNamara takes to the steps of the White House to tell the press of plans to withdraw one thousand U. It is no secret that Kennedy was behind the coup and the coming of Big Minh, although there is a question as to whether he was also behind the assassinations of Diem and Nhu.
Was he helping the truth or plying his disinformation trade? Within days of taking over, Johnson issues National Security Agency Memorandum , reversing the Kennedy policy of withdrawal and inaugurating the period of build-up leading toward conventional war. The first of the one thousand U. March- April 1 J oint Chiefs draw up and submit to Johnson a list of ninety-four potential targets for bombing in Vietnam. The new government in Saigon calls on the United States to bomb the North. Johnson declines to rule it out. Johnson resists pressure for a congressional resolution and decides to step up war effort.
General William Westmoreland takes command of U. Ambassador Lodge resigns and is replaced by Taylor. South Vietnamese commandos, i. On intelligence patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, U. Circumstances of the attack remain unclear. Doubt remains as to whether the incidents were real or staged. In the posturing at which he was so adept, in his imitations of passion, Johnson terrified all but Morse and Gruening of the Pacific Northwest and got the Senate to give him the Tonkin Gulf resolution, opening the way for major escalation.
The Viet Cong attack U. The air war is on. Cuba and Vietnam bracket Frontier Camelot as the ends of a coffin. Making no attempt to be inclusive, and leaving aside the much-observed differences of style and manners between the Kennedy group and the Johnson group, I cite the following examples as making the case that from the Cowboy standpoint Kennedy was as bad as he could be. Kennedy intervened through the UN and, with direct U. Kennedy cut off foreign and military aid to seven Latin American countries, most sensationally Haiti, on grounds that repressive strongman government was incom- patible with the aims of hemispheric reform.
He struggled with Big Steel and Detroit Iron to hold down prices. When Big Steel took it all back, Kennedy fought unsuccessfully for a court-ordered price rollback. Johnson allowed another steel price raise to pass without comment in JFK proposed elimination of the oil-depletion allowance in January Kennedy had already aroused Texan ire in by attempting to collect a federal tax on state business transactions, a tax no Texan could remember having ever seen collected.
Now came the attack on the depletion allowance. JFK encouraged the civil-rights movement openly. The temperature of Congress rose ten degrees and the whole Camelot legislative program was blocked by the civil-rights debate. The feud between Johnson and Robert Kennedy was unrivaled. On the first of April, , Kennedy announced that all U. On April 4, Detective Sgt. For the past three days the Intelligence Unit has been receiving information concerning the feelings and proposed actions of the Cuban refugee colony in Miami.
In September , even as he was taking the first perceptible steps toward a Vietnam pullback, Kennedy ordered the FBI to raid secret CIA guerrilla training camps and staging bases in Florida and Louisiana. The McLaney brothers, cogs in the Lansky Syndicate, 40 were among the big losers when the Cuban revolution ejected the Syndicate and its casinos from the island. Sturgis was visible at Dallas two months later and was actually questioned by the FBI in connection with the Assassina- tion. Constant and passionate struggle to win the hearts and minds of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a leading existential feature of the actual life of Frontier Camelot.
His administration drew up three defense budgets. As of Watergate, after almost a decade of Cowboy rule, it had grown again to about twice that size. Is it not mischievous in serious polemic to decontextualize remarks made in a heightened context? Negotiations were concluded in Moscow on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water.
In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control. To get at what this mystery might be, we find we have to go beyond the conventional Cold War picture of the Bay of Pigs operation.
Instead of seeing the invasion simply as a U. The motive of the Cowboy-Nixon side in this conflict was its desire to push through with Cuban plans laid lovingly in the last days of Eisenhower.
The pro-invasion side was strong enough to break out, overcome, and be satisfied, just as the anti-invasion side was strong enough only to take the sting out of the invasion, not to stop it. The result, the Cuban Fiasco, set the model for the Vietnam Quagmire, which followed exactly the same logical course, except in giant steps.
The Massachusetts-Texas electoral coalition that squeaked into the White House in had by proved itself nonfunctional and self-destructive as a governing coalition. Whatever we decide about the evidence of the assassina- tion, whether we walk away from Warren and the Warren critics believing in a right-wing conspiracy or a Castroite conspiracy or a left-wing lone assassin, we all will still acknowledge one monumental and central fact about the Dallas killing: It got rid of one policy and put another in its place.
In the richness of his hypocrisy, Johnson successfully pretended to carry on the torch of domestic Kennedy reform and wholly mystified the question of war and peace in Vietnam by saying sometimes that Kennedy had actually been a hawk like him and other times that he, Johnson, was actually a dove like Kennedy. Yet as the Ellsberg Papers later showed and as the poet Brecht long before foretold , even as he beat his breast for peace in the ancient public dumbshow, Johnson was secretly signing the marching orders.
In this case it was the detailed, day-by-day, target-by-target JCS plans for the bombardment of the North that would be launched, as though spontaneously against unexpected provocation the VC attack on Pleiku , in February , the elections safely past. So Dallas was a turning point in any case, no matter who murdered Kennedy, no matter what the motive. Dallas brought to a close a period of Yankee dominance in the councils of state policy that stretched back essentially unbroken to the Civil War.
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Johnson easily attached to his own presidential coalition the bulk of Yankee forces willing to accept his reassurance that a military victory in Vietnam 78 The Yankee and Cowboy War would soon be secured and that the advantages of it would be real. But the now splintered and demoralized detentist group found itself suddenly under the heel of precisely the man they had just been spitting on. Old New Frontierists hung on under Johnson, some on the strength of the argument that if they left those who came after would be worse or as Halberstam suggests out of a blend of naivete and arrogance that made them think they could find a solution; others because they thought their positions in the policy apparatus gave them power to hold the line of the Kennedy vision in spite of Johnson; others because Johnson seemed an improvement after all.
Fora long moment, there was even the heady fancy that by one of the ironies of politics, the death of the liberal prince and the ascendancy of the conservative would now make it still more possible to make peace in the world, more possible to bring about lasting changes for social and economic justice because a now everyone felt sorry for Kennedy and wanted to pay tribute to him and his social ideas, and because b now Johnson would be pulling all his people in, would actually bring the Solid South into the national civil-rights and peace coalition. Was there some uneasiness about that?
But surely Johnson could be contained by the Yankess who controlled the bureaucracy around him? Outsiders are left wondering when, or if, the illusions finally wore through for McNamara, say , or if any of the philosophers of Frontier Camelot ever asked if Kennedy died for Cuba and Vietnam in vain. The illusion of the Cowboy-Yankee coalition proved ultimately the last illusion of Frontier Camelot, possibly because it was at bottom less an illusion than a gamble taken in the absence of alternatives. In any case, the consequences of that failure stretch out over the next decade like the ground path of a tornado.
Here we anticipate our story of this failure enough to note briefly the long curve of it ahead: We do not yet know if or how Nixon might have been directly involved in any of this after leaving the office of vice- president, or if he was part of any secret group manipulating Eisenhower through control of information flowing through the National Security Council.
But we have developed a more specific sense of the heart of this mystery when we come to see the Cuban invasion as a result of a conflict in which Nixon acted strongly against Camelot policy by way of an invasion group which we know for a fact included Hunt, Sturgis, the Watergate Cubans, yeasty parts of the CIA, Howard Hughes through his man Robert Maheu to whom we return , and the Lansky Syndicate through John Roselli, whom Maheu reached on behalf of the CIA.
What could be the organizational form of the ad hoc clandestine government which such details imply? Now our reconstruction comes to the turning point of Dallas. It is time to confront the question that foregoing analysis of a divided Camelot suggests, namely: Marines with an irregular discharge in order to defect to the Soviet Union, to which he may have supplied valuable military secrets.
He married in Russia, tried to settle down to a Communist domesticity with a job in an electronics factory in Minsk, but reconsidered after two years and decided to come home. He returned in mid- with his wife Marina and their two children, stayed briefly in New Orleans then settled in Dallas-Fort Worth.
He clung to his Marxist beliefs in spite of his evidently unhappy experience in Russia and became indeed an activist, setting up the New Orleans chapter of a pro-Castro group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee — a chapter of which he remained, however, the only member. Early in , he may have fired a shot at retired General Edwin Walker, a hardline rightwinger. But then Earl Warren finds him back in character a few 80 Dealey Plaza 81 days later passing out pro-Castro leaflets a courageous act in the New Orleans of that period , then going to Mexico City in September in an unsuccessful effort to get a visa to visit Cuba.
On November 22, in Dallas, at He was captured soon after by a police squadron alerted to a gate-crasher at the Texas Theater. He was interrogated for six hours off the record by Dallas officers, who charged him early with the murder of Tippit, then later with the Dealey Plaza shootings. Unlike the standard political assassin qua lone nut, who characteristically boasts of his deed and claims it before history, Oswald took an unashamedly frightened stance, begged someone to come forward to help him, and said from the beginning that he was being made a patsy and could prove it.
On the Sunday morning after that Friday, Oswald was to be transferred from the city jail to the county jail, where it was said he would be more secure. The millions absorbed in television scenes of the funeral procession were rudely switched to Dallas for the on-camera murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby in the very basement of the Dallas jail.
Ruby was a Dallas nightclub operator who said he was motivated by sorrow for the plight of the widow, who would have to come to Dallas for the trial of Oswald, a further ordeal he wished to spare her. As a result of his act, the case against Oswald was effectively closed. Like Oswald, Ruby was painted as another lone nut. Ruby died in prison in , protesting in a voice constantly breaking into hysteria that the real truth about Dallas was still not known. More than a dozen years later, the classic critique of Warren retains its original form and power.
There they stand for all who look to see — the problems of the bullet and the rifle, the medical indications, the sloppy, not to say prejudiced character of the deliberation over the evidence, the concealment of doubts, etc. If that is true, then as we see in detail below any lone- gunman theory tied to Oswald is ruled out absolutely, no subtlety to it. Yet Connally is today, as he always has been, a supporter of the Warren theory.
We do not for a moment doubt his passionate desire to do the right thing. We insist, however, that in the complex moral predicament into which the assassination of Kennedy plunged Warren and Warren liberalism , it was entirely possible that Warren lost his way and did not know what the right thing was. Then he could not resist taking the Dealey Plaza 83 path others were expecting him to take, the path of the lone- assassin pretense.
We criticize the Warren theory of Dallas in any case on purely factual terms, concentrating on 1 the physical details of the shootings of Kennedy and Connally, 2 the identity of Oswald, and 3 the testimony of Ruby. Then we take up 4 the politics of the evident Warren cover-up. Finally we attempt 5 an alternative reconstruction of the crime. The Shootings Oswald had been a stock handler at the depository since October.
At lunchtime on Friday, November 22 — accord- ing to Warren — he was alone in the southeast corner window of the sixth floor with a 6. Then the presidential limousine followed. He waited until the car had made the turn and was several hundred feet down Elm. It then deviated again to strike his right hand at the wrist, smashing the wrist bone into seven fragments.
It exited the wrist and plunged into the left thigh just above the knee. Everything else is circumstantial. But we are getting ahead. The other of the first two shots missed altogether and hit the curb far ahead of the car. A fragment of curbstone chipped off by the bullet superficially wounded the cheek of a bystander, James Tague.
The limousine had been slowing until then. At that point it sped off for Parkland Hospital. The physical and logical inadequacies of this reconstruc- tion may be grouped into three areas: There are several reasons for thinking this bullet did not do what it is said to have done. Its pristine condition is the simplest of these reasons and 86 The Yankee and Cowboy War in any other situation would easily be conclusive all by itself.
One can simply see from the Warren photos that the bullet is all but undamaged. As if indeed to force us to see this, Warren prints the photograph of CE alongside an identical bullet fired by the FBI through the wrist of a cadaver. Second, as we have noted, Connally was convinced that the bullet that hit him and the bullet that hit Kennedy in the neck were two separate bullets, not the same CE Warren Commission Attorney Arlen Specter, the author of the single-bullet theory, examined Connally before the commis- sion on April 21, The exchange on this point went as follows: In your view, which bullet caused the injury to your chest, Governor Connally governor connally: And what is your reason for that conclusion, sir?
I think I heard the first shot and the third shot. Do you have any idea as to why you did not hear the second shot? For showing the judgemental unbelievers, it is possible for a Zombie Infestation. For all of you morons who are complaining that the government is wasting money on this, please read it. This is about natural disasters. They are using the zombie angle to get people reading. Just substitute bird flu for zombie apocalypse and this is a very good article.
I for one have never gone to a CDC page and read anything except travel advisories until this, so it captured my interest. The bird flu of aka Spanish flu killed more people than WWI, so it is still a real danger. Thank you CDC for still looking out for us. Nice little posting, however: Most likely if there was a Zombie outbreak you are looking more towards Night of the living dead, Shaun of the Dead and Last of the living Zombies, they would be slow moving because of muscle deterioration and loss of a lot of mental capacity including movement.
What if there were to be a virus spread genetically that activated in the 10th year or any year of life, so nobody could prepare for it? When was the last time you got so many hits on your blog? You have got to be kidding me. No one knows when the end of time will be. An all powerful being would never let the little guy know when the final day is coming.
Why would He let you prepare. You might as well sit and suffer thinking you are going to be tortured by zombies and waste you money in the resession on your zombie kit because your zombies will be your family, friends and neighbors coming to kill, steal and distroy what you do have after the rapture does come and the anti-christ is the one controlling everything left in the world. What you eat, do, say, buy.
I am sure you people just suck! Amazing, just before finding this post I had made a game out of making a survival kit with the family. The one we had need to be updated and refreshed. The kids loved the post. Thanx for the humor but for the real world common sense. Evacuation in any bio-hazard situation should be immediate. O this is so awesome. My friend wants to be a proffesional zombie killer when she grows up. If a zombie bite a polar bear and it becomes a zombpolbear then i guess your ….
Anyone who wants a great training course for themselves and their family shoot us an email. Ask yourself why they would need an vaccine if there was no virus? And why was the vaccine not mentioned in this article? Well they made the zombie virus and they are working on the vaccine in a top secret lab but the scientists have not been successful yet.
So there will not be a zombie outbreak until they have the vaccine. For all you people out there talking about how we are wasting our tax money on talking about zombies- live a little! And for all you idiots out there freaking out about how there really will be an apocolypse- get a life. Seriously lay off, if you wanna be prepared then cool but stop stuffing your opinions down the throat of others. This is coming from a 16 year old girl, and I make more sense than all of you paranoid people. Definitely reaching a segment of the population that would otherwise not EVER care to read anything like this.
I would love to know how many people have actually read this post that would not have bothered with a normal post… Finally the CDC is providing to the level of a missed audience…. Do you know how many times I have had to explain and interpret emergency warnings to functionally illiterate individuals? Ignorance will be the leveler of the playing field. Or are you going to deny me this comment also? It is complete protection from the living dead.
Slick PR campaign to catch peoples attention! For all you people who think this is a waste of money….. You never know what will happen and it did not cost a lot of money to put this page up. And if there is a zombie outbreak you will probably get eaten first. Learn something from them and use it in case of this happens… P. Not joking u should rlly check tht out. Where is the proof of this virus. Extremely pleased with this post. What an awesome idea for informing the public what to do in case of an emergency, in such a fun and delightful manner.
A spoonful of sugar always helps the medicine go down. I will be posting this on facebook, I think alot of my friends will get a kick out of it. You should really make a printable. This was a brilliant idea. Do I remember the article about Zombie Apocalypse? Brilliant and entertaining way to bring attention to such an important issue. And a shoutout to my fellow Zombie Response Team members! Is this a joke? Do you Americans really beleave in this? If a zombir bites you on the arm, can you cut off your limb and thus be saved from the infection?
But wonderful report IF it ever happened. For those that are upset that preparedness is being address this way… GET OVER IT… this is a great way to get to people, especially young people, to really look at what they need. If you look around you see Zombies all over the place… at least talk about the impending zombie apocalypse. This was a very well thought out idea. What a fun way to get people thinking about real disaster preparation.
I can see by some of the comments that are negative — some people did not read it before replying. First of all, the CDC is not funded by your tax dollars people but if it was you should be proud. With what is going on in DC these days, it appears that there are already a bunch of Zombies in Congress and the White House…. Please put a disclaimer on this article that this is not true. My son suffers from paranoia and is extremely disturbed that what is written is actually real.
You have got to be kidding me…. The CDC has been watching way too many cheesy old horror flicks. All the advice in this article can be applied to ANY diasater situation. Now back to zombies, I would also include some kevlar gloves and even sleeves if you can afford them so you dont have to worry about getting bit on the hand. Now if only we could find a fun and innovative way to stress the importance of reading comprehension, so that the poor souls who have been upset by this blog post will have some hope of someday getting this joke.
Or any joke for that matter. For the negative complainers, the CDC really got their bang for the buck on this twist. It is the same basic disaster preparedness information that the CDC has been making available to the public, but with some tongue in cheek humor added to make it a little more enjoyable and get the public attention.
In trying to get people to read the information available, this zombie twist hit the jackpot. In all seriousness, the preparedness information contained is valid useful information. You will not be sorry. The emergency preparedness kits should also be useful during the next Rapture scheduled for this October and the cataclysm associated with the end of the Mayan calendar in December C does act fast to something so critical and crazy as something like this i would survive to the fullest.
Sanitation is an important factor to keep in mind since public water supplies might not be operational during an extended power outage. Thousands are suffering and this really does not humor me. You may also want to stop asking people for their psychiatric problem in the Oils spill also. I wrote to Joe Biden and your head of the CDC sent a tepid response to me that there is no danger in the spill and no danger in the dispersants. I think you might want to have a chat with the people because we are slammed with blood levels of people with hexane, benzine, mercury, 2 and 3 Methylpentane above the 95 Quintile, Issocatane and now Cesium 99 this is nothing to be ignored.
People are very ill all over the coast of the Gulf and this is not National News. I guess these workers and humans are delusional like Morgellons patients. This is a horrific lack of oversight and compassion on the part of the CDC and yes while the world is awash in Environmental Armegeddon you put out an article that you think is cute.
Bicycles would be essential for getting around fossil fuels would definitely run out in an Apocalypse situation. Motorcycle jump suits would provide decent armor as they can stay intact after an accident it would be hard for teeth or nails to get through. Brick walls would make a decent defense. Definitely invest in solar panels for electricity main power grids would probably go down. This is an old article.
I read it a couple months ago. I have seen this apocalypse coming. They will be here soon. I do not know at all. I agree with Dylan. This was a well thought out way to get people prepared for natural disasters. I know many people walk around care free thinking nothing can happen and everything will be provided by the government, well we seen how that worked out after a few hurricanes.
Having worked in law enforcement for over 16 years I can tell you most people are not prepared for even a small disaster and rely on the police and fire to take care of everything. Each citizen should take a little self responsibility and put a kit together with all the items listed by the CDC and Ready.
That way if a family should have to shelter in place until help arrives they can be prepared and sustain some safety and health and not tax the system should help be slow to get there. Zombies are a good example to get everyone prepared for a disaster, it makes the idea of being prepared fun and get your entire family involved. Thanks CDC for a wonderful way to get people ready for any emergency. But it surely got their attention and likely may save their life one day for making them read something they probably never would have.
Thanks for reading and for your blog comment. As we have mentioned previously this blog incurred no additional costs to the government. We used existing staff and resources and feel that it has completed our mission of informing the public about important public health preparedness messages.
What a fun, creative way to teach kids and Adults about emergency response kits! My boys now have taken interest in our 72 hr kit, where it is, and what is in it. Government money well spent! Most important is to teach them how to survive without you and the importance of proper mindset. If you are the Alpha male of your house hold, then most likely you have shielded them, provided for them, and protected them their whole lives.
Its time to teach them to protect and provide for themselves. You are going to have a horrible job of holding society together and preventing anarchy, the least that you can do for yourself is make sure you KNOW that your family is going to be OK, so you can focus on your job and your responsibilities to the greater good.
You people that commet on things such as this with negative comments are just pathetic. Amusing angle that worked as intended! Did our tax dollars go to this tripe? This all comes from the organization that for years has been at the forefront of taking our 2d amendment rights from us. Zombie defense can only be accomplished through application of accurately directed objects via kinetic energy as a function of the ejection of lead from a metal tube caused by a gaseous explosion. I agree with the saferooms, preferably having air vents, plants, heavy doors and no windows.
However, there needs to be a service that allows areas to coordinate saferooms so that there is always a saferoom within a hour walking distance of another saferoom. Also, large, strategic bridges should be destroyed and ferries be offered in place so that zombies would be better isolated to land masses. This blog article must have been read by thousands of people after it went viral. Kudos to the genius who dreamed this up! As someone who has been preparing prepping for a long time and has CERT training I think this is great!
Its a wonderful way of getting kids and adults to think about how to protect life and property. They have helped me be ready for all eventualities. And thanks to my Dad who raised me with a survival mindset. Ive been reading a lot about this subject lately and i learned a little more from reading this, thanks for the post. I never made that mistake again, and have quite the emergency preparedness kit, though it does lack a few things mentioned in the article thx, CDC!
Put it this way — no one ever died from too much good information! Keep up the fabulous work, CDC!! Therefore, they are often caught unawares when a disaster natural or worse, man-made strikes. We take so much for granted. What if law and order completely collapsed? What if those societal buttresses were suddenly maybe permanently?
So thank you, CDC, you did a marvelous job of shocking the conscience of quite a few people, myself included. Keep up the fabulous work. You forgot to include an axe. For hacking through the attic to get up to the roof. I must say Resident Evil was one of my best. It has a better plot than most and it more futuristic. We are sitting here in the store and wonder what in the hell was wrong with these slobber, sloth like fellow.
He gave us this site address and told us to read up on the zombie possibility and what to do if they are here. The zombie are here and are now populating the planet. If that happens i plan on staying in my summer house with all my supplies. I hope the president is aware of this situation and is forming a committee to look into a possible vaccine to prevent this from happening.
But just incase I got my kit already made. And if this were to happen, most government officials would treat this as someone causing a violent riot for odds reasons or even for terrorism before openly accepting that zombies are attacking. I love this article and mean no offense but this is how I would see us reacting.
Install Doors of the Dead
In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. In short great post…really amazing…Thank you so much for sharing this amazing info…. Then again, that goes without saying when talking about such idiots. How much money did this page actually cost to produce? How much is that?
Cause an increase in violence and lawlessness? No, none of the above. But if the public are reading it, then that was the point: At the price it cost, it was a bargain. I have always been a woman who is not scared of anything.. I will cower in the corner while they eat me alive terrified.. Im terrified where if i see you have been bit.. Sorry but your gonna have to be dealt with, no need to sit and ponder it.
I have always had a fear of a zombie Apocalypse.. Religiously and Scientifically it is possible.. I remembered hearing, when there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth. Not to mention the end of the world apparently coming October 28, Basically I am saying I am trying to find others in my area who are preparing and who are willing to voyage out together to look for an infection free zone. Which I feel from movies they have hinted us that Alaska might be one of those virus free areas… Anyone who lives in south florida or is willing to make their way down here to help if the event ever should happen please feel free to email me at doordie hotmail.
I just checked this out after the earthquake and hurricane. I love this blog entry. Thanks for making disaster preparedness actually fun to read about! Zombie Apocalypse is coming to Arbutus on Oct 30, We are having carnival games, food, music, raffles and a zombie walk through town. Stock up with big jars of cheap wine. I lived thru Northridge earthquake and afterwards, without power, without gas, without water, for almost a week. Suddenly there is literally nothing to do.
So, just post yourself on a coach, listen to battery operated radio, if you have one, or read a book hey, remember? Just when I thought nothing would surprise me…. We only wish that in Argentina we had something like that…. Well In my conuntry at schoool they always teach us what we should take in an emergency situation, here is what I would take: Thank you so much for such an informative post you have here.
You have certainly put so much efort in making your blogs. Chains, you have got to have chains to grip the pavement. After you run over a few hundred the tires start to get slippery with zombie slop. A good set of chains will solve this problem. For all of you that think this page is nonsense, you are obviously missing the point. But who knows… Anything is possible…even perhaps zombies: CDC knows that this will be cool and attractive to many young people.
It is a clever and cunning way to sell messages. A typical sales trick! I never really thought of this topic till now. I know I would. Cause you believe there is no such thing and believe we are alone in this Universe? I plan on locking all the doors boarding up the windows, then barricading my garage, easy escape in a car: Zombie are coming back for Halloween in few days now.
Watch behind your doors. Thanks for the apocalypse zombie subject. If a zombie apocolypse were to occur just remember to sever the brainstem of the zombie by any means necessary, or just smack the crap out of its head. To add to the kit maybe steel toed boots in case you are out of weapons and there are none in sight. Or just run away because zombies are very slow.
Also reading the comments made me realize how stupid society is. And whoever said zombies are fake better check their research. We have the capabilities of reanimating the dead and the CDC is the ones with the crap to do so…. The people were dead and they were reanimated and walking around. They were not the stereotypical zombie that we see in the movies but they were documented as zombies. Love or hate this post and think i am a nut job if you want… or look it up and find out for yourself. A face mask is always good to keep the virus from spreading through the blood and landing in your mouth in case of close combat situations,.
In a parallel universe this blog would be extremely hempful.
Where there is the posibility of a Zombie outbreak it is unlikely that it will happen in the manner we think it will. Preparedness is a great aspect and in many ways this article brought to light a fun way to get people to prepare for any sort of disaster. I am glad it was written the way it was and I am disgusted with people complaining over tax payers money. I mean seriously, I pay taxes, I support learning even if it is through unorthdox means. We were watching deadliest warrior, and saw the vampires VS zombies and looked up a guide in case of a zombie apocolypse.
If you guys could make one for vampires that would be good, start working on it. I understand the Zombie metaphor for emergency preparedness, I think a lot of people posting here do not. Emergency preparedness is not really a joking matter. What can I say? I would take zombies over influenza any day. Zombies Influenza Where Edward became a Vampire Contagion quarenteen for a more modern approach. I no longer use the van now so I welded on some steel screens over the the windows and added a high power multi frequency radio and television receiver and radio transmitter luckily I have some home made katanas if things go bad.
Also in the van there is a water purification system, a homemade extra large fuel emergency fuel tank. I n the van I used to have big subwoofers, requiring big amps requiring a big power supply, I ripped the subs and other sound gear out, leaving the power supply, 4 high output alternators and 10 deep cycle batteries. Well, call it over kill, but this was more of a fun back yard project than a zombie apocalypse, although if there ever is this kind of crisis, I will be well prepared, but for now imm putting the subwoofers back in.
What must I do if in zombie I trust, but my parents not. If it does happenlogicly it would be more like 28u days later, not dead ppl coming back noway. An the disease work likely be a form of rabies tht has mutated an took on the appearance of H5N1 avian flu with the way it rapidly spreads in humans.
Survival kits will keep u alive if u think practical wen packing. Always remember noise and light disapline. Use battle buddies buddy system be tactical about everything u do. If u ever use tht Ull understand. U can stop speaking now. This is just a way to make emergency preparation interesting! And I like it! But in the event a real zombie invasion would occur, I highly doubt it has time for government bureaucracy! Most likely during a zombie invasion martial law will be dictated so it would be best to have an abundance of supplies and protection in your home, and I would advise not leaving it until the local authorities escort you to safety!
With Halloween coming soon its time to get ready! But all joking aside I think the comment by voice and reason: Some people need to lighten up!
Take a deep breath and relax….. I think this is a great posting. Fun and still informative about what to do in general emergencies. A great way to connect with the younger crowd. This is actually good stuff. Hats off to the CDC for having a sense of humor. I truly enjoyed this — thank you! I love how prople cant see this for what it is: By the way, I disagree with the fact that defensive or offensive… weapons are completely ignored. Maybe the CDC thinks its out of the scope of a minimalist preparednedd article, but I disagree.
I think a full body condom is appropriate for bashing zombie skullz with aluminum and cricket bats, thus protecting you from evil zombie bodily fluids. Finally, a creative way to get us at least me to read about preparing for a disaster. The real zombies are the poor souls who complain that this is a waster of tax money and miss the whole point of the article.
I love that the threat of zombies will probably enlighten more people to prepare for dangerous circumstances than the threat of a hurricane or flood. Seems like there have been a lot of zombie articles from the CDC and News stations lately lol.. Can these products be used in response to rabid teabaggers? I see then wandering through the streets droning on about the end of the world all the time. Food, water, utility knife, radio, flashlight fire starting equipment ect.
Still pretty humorous however. All the better if this gets people to prepare for more realistic disasters such has hurricanes and tornadoes. When preparing this, I remembered to plan for my dog. Dont forget your Iodine pills and masks.
How to Protect Your Home in a Zombie Invasion
Knowing a bit of history about your area is always good, who knows when that abandoned mine will become handy shelter in a bind. The zombies will come!!! Be prepared, have a vehicle with plenty of fuel first off. Keep it near your safety zone which you should go to FIRST thing you learn of the zombies reaching your area. Have a group of at least 5 people that you trust with your life prefreferably and stay in the safe zone within the area of your safe zone with minimum contact with the outside, only have 1 access point for maximum safety make it hard to get to without help from your group.
Those are the basics of what you need to do when the infection hits. If you think im crazy… Good, that just means I will survive longer, and who knows. Hahaha…this is so cool. I never expected a gov related blog, i. Any way when you run out of bullets, is to get a scary zombie costume and pretend to be one of them.
And if you do that, you have to remember to cover yourself with decaying zombie juice so that they smell your human blood….. For those who comment negatively about this post, not to worry… you guys are exempt. Zombies only go after brains. I am sure that I work with zombies regularly…. They are certainly the walking dead as they enter in the morning, and do not perk up until around 5: I would strongly suggest to not cover yourself with zombie juice as this will be teaming with the virus and therefore you might as well off yourself because — well you know what will happen!!!
What an excellent way to get people to prepare for real-life emergency scenarios! Whoever thought up this post should get a bonus. Each year, I give a little speech to the local boy scout troop on emergency preparedness and living in Florida, it is a reality more often than not. This web-site helped get the speech off to a rollicking start and turned it into an interactive learning opportunity. These adolescent males are more likely to put something together in their homes if they can tell their friends and families they are preparing for a Zombie attack.
I have been observing that some people on my steet seem peeked and are lumbering about. Is this the beggining of the end? Thank gawd we support such important research with our tax dollars. Good lord, are your reading comprehension skills that low? Very few people would normally read about disaster preparedness from a government website. Those who would are likely prepared anyway. You just got the message through to a much larger cross-section of the population.
Is the general public that stale stating about tax payers dollars wasted for this? I thought this to be a very creative way to use our tax dollars to alert people on how to prepare for a disaster or emergency. Also how the CDC works to combat these situations. Sure they may be using one of the biggest hypes in media right now, but regardless it gets the message out.
The person who wrote it was already getting paid for what they do and they did a fine job if their aim was to get a message across about real situations using a popular false for now one. So this kinda gets me thinking. Dude if u get bitten by one of them ur done…. This is a great way to get youths interested and involved in preparing for an emergency.
At least they can identify an emergengy with zombie-apocalypse and act accordingly. At least they can identify an emergengy with zombie-apocalypse and act and react accordingly if and when the time comes. I love how they left out some kind of weapon for self defense or protection against the Zombie hord. Now i dont have to sacrafice one of my friends so i can escape. I do not believe that any of you guys actually think zombies exist. Emergency preparedness is not really true, better get ready for the end of the world because we are not taking care of it.
The people who are complaining that this is a waste of government money need to go back and reread the article. At least no more of a waste than normal government spending. If you read the article carefully you will notice that it is cleverly disguised message general disaster preparedness. See references to hurricanes, fires, tornados etc. I think that this a great way for the CDC to reach out to wider variety of people on how to prepare themselves for a real emergency. An I also think that some of the people that have left comments about the waste of their on working on this information are just making themselves sound stupid.
It is quite obvious from the way that different types of disasters are stressed in the article that the CDC is, in fact, just using this spin to get people prepared for common emergencies. Maybe you people who thought more about the whole zombie aspect should take more time to actually read and understand the information. While I agree with the people who are concerned about government waste, I disagree with the target. This post cost no more than — a very liberal estimate — thousands of dollars. If you are concerned with cutting government waste look no further than your elected Congressman.
People take everything so literally! You nay sayers are going on the version of zombies that are portrayed in the movies when everyone knows that movies are an overblown version of actual events or details or things that either can or have happened. God, I hope this is just a parody and not really real. Some of your writters watch too much Resident Evil. I look forward to new updates and will talk about this site with my Facebook group. Great way to get some attention to the CDC, what you do, and how you help people in times of crisis.
Seriously, you PR person deserves a raise off of this one. Great to see the CDC finally taking this issue more seriously. If you want to really outlive the zombies, however, you are going to need backpacking equipment, and it better be if you expect to outrun the zombies. The last thing you want to do is to leave your town.
Everyone else will try to leave town, so that will cause traffic jams, and will leave you all like sitting ducks. Basically waiting to get eaten. I Belive it def can happen, What about Dec. These three factors combined to lull the American populace into a false sense of security: Due to the media-as-big-business culture in America at the time, the result was that after several months the feeling settled in that the "situation" whatever it was was under control, rumors of "zombies" became yesterday's news: Thus the primary safeguard against falling victim to a zombie plague -- knowing that there is a zombie plague occurring -- was not in place.
However, the Alpha Teams were only originally meant as a stop-gap measure until the regular army could be mobilized to full-scale war levels, an action which was never taken because of the initial success of Alpha Team operations and that many were unwilling to believe the true nature of the undead plague. Soon they spread so far and so fast that the Alpha Teams were overwhelmed. Eventually, the number of zombies began increasing exponentially. Later that spring a female journalist in the USA publicly released the truth: The spread of the zombies quickly spiraled out of control, and New York City was overrun, as cable news networks showed video nationwide of waves of zombies pushing through the streets as civilians desperately struggled to defend themselves until the city was totally overwhelmed.
The Battle of Yonkers would begin 3 months after the start of the "Great Panic", after the fall of New York City, in an attempt to destroy the zombie horde numbering in the millions which was now spreading from the city. While the special forces "Alpha Teams" had been used against select zombie infestations, Yonkers would be the first time an army of regulars had faced them.
When zombies first began to trickle down the freeway, the opening salvos were fired - two MLRS rocket barrages which destroyed a significant percentage of the first wave but ultimately made few kills - zombies with limbs and torsos blown off could still advance so long as they had an intact brain and some means to drag themselves forward.
As the undead became more tightly packed, the MLRS lost effectiveness, with the thick swarms of zombies reducing the possibility of a head wound significantly. The second barrage came from M Paladin artillery stationed on a hill to the rear of the infantry. They fired fragmentation shells which had even less of an effect than the MLRS barrages.
The artillery strikes depended on the "balloon effect," which by proximity to an explosion would cause the liquid in the victim's body to burst. This did not occur, however, because of the zombie's coagulated blood. The infantry were left fighting the undead in close proximity, and there were even zombies locked in the houses behind the front line of infantry that had been freed by the explosions, ambushing and devouring unsuspecting troops.
Other soldiers could see everything, through the weapon mounted cameras of the front-line soldiers thanks to the Land Warrior system ; the hordes closing in, their fellow soldiers falling and being eaten alive and even reports of zombies not dying when being shot in the head this happened because the rounds grazed their heads, something panicking soldiers failed to notice. The bombing run decimated the oncoming wave and resulted in a few moments of eerie silence as the dazed and confused soldiers recovered from the shock of the nearby explosions. However, even more zombies shuffled up the road to take their place.
At that point, the battle turned into utter chaos, as the soldiers on the ground saw an oncoming wave of millions more zombies emerging from the smoke clouds from the bombs that had taken out the first several thousand. Satellite images from the Land Warrior system still showed a horde of millions of zombies stretching back into Times Square on Manhattan island.
In a notable act of desperation one helicopter gunship bravely tried to buy time for infantry on the ground to retreat by flying low towards the zombie horde with its rotary blades tipped forward; this sliced through many zombies and slowed their advance, but then one of the helicopter's blades hit a wrecked car, causing it to crash and explode.
News crews clambered over one another to get away from the coming onslaught and military personnel sought refuge anywhere they could from the zombies. There was crazy, random shooting from soldiers and armed newsmen in a blind panic. The Air Force dropped several thermobaric weapons on the zombies and their own troops hoping to neutralize the undead at Yonkers in one sweep which had the gruesome side-effect of ripping lungs out of individuals not destroyed by the initial blast, leaving numerous ghouls wandering around with their lungs hanging out of their mouths.
It accomplished its purpose of destroying the majority of zombies from that battle but many more still poured in from Manhattan, overpowering the American forces and proving, to devastating effect, and on national television no less, that the war with the undead could not be won with conventional tactics. Within 3 weeks after Yonkers, the eastern United States was abandoned by the United States military in a mass retreat to a new defensive line at the Rocky Mountains.
The Battle of Yonkers was an unmitigated disaster for the military. Public confidence in them and the United States Government was shattered, and this contributed heavily to the Great Panic and claimed the lives of many more Americans. The tactics used by the army dated back to plans against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. After years of fighting brushfire wars, the " Fulda Fucktards" sic who had come of age during the Cold War were overjoyed to have an opportunity to fight a conventional battle and completely ignored the new, untested nature of the undead enemy.
Instead of placing infantry in positions of overwatch and in elevated areas with excellent lines of fire, the soldiers were forced to fight on the ground and were quickly overrun. The soldiers were also outfitted with "Land Warrior" gear which, amongst other things, provided each soldier with a radar readout of the surrounding area for miles around.