A Zombie's History of the United States (23 page)

During World War II, HUAC did not greatly concern itself with hybrids. That status may have continued after the war, were it not for the arrest and trial of Craig Sherman. In 1920, Sherman was born to a family of German-Jewish immigrants in New York City, and by the late 1930s, he had become an active leader in New York’s Young Communist League. In 1942, after graduating from City College of New York with a degree in electrical engineering, Sherman got a job at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Around this time, a hybrid attacked Sherman, and he became one himself.

Then in January 1950, the U.S. Army discovered that Klaus Buechler, a German refugee and theoretical physicist who had worked for Project Phantom, had smuggled important materials to the Soviets throughout the war. The Soviets were eager to experiment with zombie technology, in particular the possibilities of the Z-bomb, as many had taken to calling Neil Moore’s Death’s Head. Buechler confessed to his crimes and eventually gave up the identity of his courier, Arnold Yates, who was then arrested in April 1950. Yates too confessed, revealing that he had also given the Soviets hybrid blood samples, samples that came from one Craig Sherman, who Yates said had recruited him into the Communist Party.

In March 1951, Sherman was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death under the Espionage Act of 1917. When imposing the death sentence, Judge Benjamin Kaplan declared to Sherman:

I consider your crime worse than murder. I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians a weapon that our best scientists predicted Russia would otherwise never have developed, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000, and who knows but that millions more of innocent people, may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. The civilian defense activities throughout the nation were already aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack, now we must bother ourselves with this new treachery.

On August 2, 1951, Craig Sherman was terminated at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility by firing squad. During his trial, Sherman had admitted to being a member of the Communist Party, to recruiting Yates, and to being a hybrid—but had denied the charges of espionage right up to the end. Considering that the Russians never produced any hybrid soldiers (and still have not), it is most likely that Sherman was indeed innocent, and that Yates lied, fingering Sherman merely for the purposes of plea-bargaining. In either case, Sherman’s conviction fueled a storm of paranoia over hybrid activity, inspiring the “witch hunts” of both Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations into hybrid activity in the government and HUAC’s attacks on the entertainment industry.

HUAC’s hearings investigating the “pro-undead” themes in Hollywood may have been the most misguided of all hearings the committee ever held. Filmmakers, including producer Val Lewton (
Cat People
) were brought in to answer for films such as
I Walked with a Zombie
, which HUAC claimed was presenting zombies as mostly harmless or misunderstood. Most of these films were dealing with fantastical Haitian voodoo zombies, not actual zombies, but this seemed to matter little to HUAC. When the film
The Great Escape
was released, the film’s star, actor Steven McQueen, was even accused of being a hybrid after the Mirisch Company, who produced the film, hyped that McQueen had performed all his own stunts. McQueen mockingly ate a cheeseburger before the committee as proof of his humanity.

No hybrids were successfully rooted out in either Hollywood or the government, and eventually the “Carrie hunt” hearings subsided. Yet the storm of paranoia aimed at hybrids continued to rage and served to bolster rising discontent among America’s hybrids.

Zombies in the Jungle

Tell the Vietnamese they’ve got to draw in their horns or we’re going to turn them into a zombie hellhole.

—Gen. Curtis LeMay, U.S. Air Force, May 1964

The buildup to what is generally referred to stateside as the Vietnam War was complicated, to say the least. France had invaded and pacified Vietnam in the mid-19th century, turning it into French Indochina (along with Cambodia and Laos). Various Vietnamese liberation groups attempted various oppositions over the ensuing decades, but were always thwarted by the French colonial government. Then during World War II, Japan invaded and threw the French colonial officials into internment camps. The Viet Minh (meaning “League for the Independence of Vietnam”) was formed in 1941 by the Communist Party of Vietnam (with funding from the United States) to oppose Japanese occupation.

In August 1945, when Japan had finally submitted to Allied forces, a power vacuum was temporarily created in Vietnam. Japan no longer wielded authority, yet the French colonial government was still absent. The Viet Minh seized the moment, declaring their independence; Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Viet Minh, even paraphrased the United States Declaration of Independence when he made his speech. Unfortunately, despite funding the Viet Minh and having sympathy, one would presume, for their colonial oppression, the United States supported France’s claim on the Vietnam territories.

When a rearmed France returned to French Indochina in 1946, the First Indochina War began. Things likely would have turned out very differently if the Chinese Communists had not won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, but they did, and they bolstered the Viet Minh’s efforts until finally, on May 7, 1954, the French garrison surrendered.

The Geneva Conference temporarily split Vietnam in two, along the 17th parallel, allowing time for elections to be held so that the Vietnamese people could decide their own fate. However, these elections never occurred, as a civil war between Vietnamese Communists and Vietnamese Nationalists consumed the area. The north was effectively ruled by Viet Minh guerillas, while the south was ruled by a series of U.S.-supported regimes. By the early 1960s an increasing number of American troops were being sent to Vietnam to aid the south. The action was not being referred to as a “war”—it was termed a “conflict.”

President Eisenhower had shut down Project Phantom after World War II and aimed to keep it that way. The Korean War had been fought entirely without zombies, though many in the military thought we could have cut down on American casualties if the Berserker Corps were brought out of retirement. Then, in October 1951, the Eisenhower administration learned through our spy channels that the Soviets had suffered a devastating zombie accident at a secret test facility in Soviet Kazakhstan. Construction on a prototype zombie bomb had gone awry, zombinating the facility and parts of the surrounding area (we now know that the incident, the Black Creek Fallout, occurred when a zombie bomb prototype accidentally detonated during construction). Though a disaster for the Russians, the incident was taken as equally disastrous for America. This confirmed our worst fears…

Infection projection based on intelligence of Strategic Undead Capability Scenario (S. U. C. S.).

The Russians had the Z-bomb.

Despite hysteria over the possibilities of Russia “zombing” New York City or Washington, D.C., Eisenhower remained staunchly against the proliferation of weaponized zombie technology. “It took our fathers and grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers hundreds of years to get rid of the buggers; the Russians won’t make me bring them back,” he supposedly told his secretary of defense, Charles Erwin Wilson. In fact, Eisenhower wanted to go so far as to destroy all the remaining zombies and samples of the zombie contagion still housed at Fort Dead. In a 1953 television address to the American people, Eisenhower alluded to this desire:

Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with the undead or with split atoms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Disarmament and de-animation, with mutual honor and confidence, is our continuing imperative.

While Eisenhower may have had the power to keep zombies out of Korea, he did not possess enough authority to dispose of our zombie stockpiles. The last-recorded zombie encounter in the wild had occurred in 1944. Zombies were all but extinct. The majority of our leaders, both civic and military, felt that we could not allow the Soviets to have the only zombies, as they would surely be used against us. Like nuclear bombs, zombies had become an ugly but necessary commodity.

With America and the Soviets playing will-they-or-won’t-they with the Z-bomb, the one upside was that zombies stayed out of the Vietnam conflict up through the John F. Kennedy administration. But as fighting continued to increase in Vietnam, the pressure was on to do something. In December 1963, President Lyndon Johnson authorized the creation of the Council for Undead Studies (CUS), which, despite its passive name, was for all intents and purposes a reestablishment of Project Phantom. The CUS’s aim was to devise new forms of zombie warfare outside of the Z-bomb.

ANOTHER ZOMBIE PRESIDENT?

Lovers of strange-but-true cosmic connections have long liked to discuss the eerie links between President Abraham Lincoln and President John F. Kennedy. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846; Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946. Lincoln was elected president in 1860; Kennedy was elected president in 1960. Both were shot on a Friday. Lincoln’s successor was Andrew Johnson, born in 1808; Kennedy’s successor was Lyndon Johnson, born in 1908. Lincoln was shot in the head by a man who believed the president was a Carrie—was the same true of Kennedy?

Some contemporary conspiracy theorists believe so, hypothesizing that Kennedy did not support using zombies in warfare out of sympathy for his undead brethren, and that this got him terminated by enemies who wished to escalate zombie involvement in Vietnam. Of all the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, this holds the least water. Unlike with Lincoln, there were no rumors that Kennedy was a hybrid. In fact, it was well known among White Housers that the president suffered from a variety a physical ailments, including intense back pain, that required him to receive routine medical attention. This was not the sort of thing that makes people suspicious of hybridity.

If there has ever been a hybrid president of the United States, he was able to successfully conceal it. More than likely, though, no hybrid has ever been able to successfully conceal their nature well enough and long enough to rise to such a publicly scrutinized position.

The CUS’s crowning achievement was 2,4-zicorodenoxyacetic acid (2,4-Z), better known by its code name, London Fog. A highly potent variant of the zombie contagion, 2,4-Z could be sprayed from low-flying planes and helicopters like an insecticide or herbicide. The name London Fog was given to the concoction because of the dense mist that was left on an area after a spraying occurred. Inhaling 2,4-Z would lead directly to zombination, as would ingesting anything the mist had coated, which served the added purpose of also depriving the enemy of crops and other food supplies. Between 1964 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed roughly 1.3 million gallons of 2,4-Z on South Vietnam as part of Operation Rainy Day.

The success of Operation Rainy Day was not simply turning Vietnam into a zombie badland. London Fog was just step one. Step two was 2,3,7-peradizodioxin (2,3,7-P), known as Raid (named after the recently introduced bug spray). Conceived by Project Phantom’s Dr. Stephen Ingpen decades earlier, 2,3,7-P was a chemical agent that attacked the nervous system in both humans and zombies. The chemical was also sprayed from low-flying aircraft. Zombies who came in contact with 2,3,7-P would start to experience muscle failure within moments and would become completely de-animated in a matter of minutes. Humans safely wearing appropriate breathing gear could move amongst the mists unharmed. The combination of London Fog and Raid allowed the United States to zombinate, then de-animate, entire villages and jungle patches without ever committing troops to the ground.