Disclaimer: I am NOT affiliated with the Department of Defense or any branch of the military. I do not own anything within these chapters except the characters. I also do not own Dawn of the Dead. Furthermore, I am not trying to paint the military, the President or anyone in a negative light.
Ok, so, as promised, I have a chapter for you. This one took me a while and you will not believe the amount of research that I had to do for this one. Firstly, I had to look up aircraft carriers, home ports, strike group affiliations, fleet affiliations, ranks, ratings, Marine units, aircraft wings on carriers, crew sizes, fleet areas of responsibility, nuclear subs, nuclear weapons and a few more things. Basically, I searched enough stuff to get me on five watch lists. I hope you're happy.
On the research, I know not everything is correct. I looked very hard to find out all I could of the Marine units mentioned as well as all the equipment and ships that would be accompanying them. I thought it best just to leave the details in the grey rather than make bad guesses.
This chapter is a bit longer than any others. As such, it took me a bit longer than most, which means I had less time to proof read my own work which rarely works for me anyways. If you see something grammatically wrong, feel free to tell me. Also, I'm going to have to go back and retcon a few things, mostly dates with earlier entries.
Back from a hiatus, I present Undead Diary Chapter 10. Please enjoy.
DoD File # 177167-NAV2FL-1103
Date of Submission: 20 December 2014
Abstract: The following is a verbatim transcript of Operations Specialist Petty Officer First Class (OS1) Victoria Ziccardi's journal kept aboard the USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77), Flagship of Carrier Strike Group Two (CSG-2) of the Second Fleet [NAV2FL, Navy, 2nd Fleet]., during the First few months of the Undead Plague. After the first tour of the Bush, all personal journals were requested to be submitted in an attempt to understand what the service men and women were going through psychologically. Petty Officer Ziccardi turned this journal over to the DoD. This was the 1,103rd such document handed over
***Begin Text***
7/17/10 2300
Well, shore leave was cancelled yesterday at 1700. I hugged my kid, Julie and husband, Greg goodbye at 0500 this morning and we're out to sea.
No one said why shore leave was cancelled. No one really needed to say why. Riots, they're calling them. They started in other countries, in China, in Lebanon, some African counties. Then, they began spreading. No one knew why, or what the riots were even about. They just spread. Stories coming out in the news were weird, something about cannibalism, rabies and general insanity.
Now they've spread to the U.S. People say it came across the oceans on planes. There's talk about grounding all civilian traffic. News agencies are saying it's some kind of virus and speculating about plagues and all that.
Not us. We don't waste our time with that. We just do our jobs. There's rumors and scuttlebutt, but no one knows much. We're just to go out to sea with CSG-2, whatever else of the 2nd we can gather to use and patrol up and down the coast.
It's not much, but it's our job to make sure no one tries anything like sneaking into the country with a bomb, or an army, or whatever.
7/18/10 2245
Well, they aren't riots. I've been seeing a lot of Fleet- and above-level traffic about this. The news, and some of the Fleet memos, say it's a virus. It kills you, brings you back, and makes you eat everything around.
Our role has been changed to setting up a blockade. We stop anyone, any ship, trying to slip past the Coast Guard and inspect the ship. Word is that some Coasties tried this and found the ship overrun with the damned things. Lost a few of the boarding party and bugged out. They had to kill their wounded. Fucking sick.
We're going down to Lejeune [Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, South Carolina] to pick up the entire II Marine Expeditionary Force. Fleet-wide prepositioning orders went out today. They're bringing in all the hardware the II MEF will need to invade a country. This doesn't bode well.
7/19/10 2350
Well, its settled. We have a full scale zombie invasion on our hands. This isn't supposed to be possible, but when your president is on the TV, every channel, telling you Martial Law has been declared, it's kind of hard to be in denial. Especially when you're part of the "martial" in Martial Law.
I'm not technically in the know, but being on comms, it's hard not to see and hear what's going on well above my pay grade. I saw on one diagram that New York, Seattle, LA, Houston, Detroit and a whole bunch of others are either totally out of contact or very near being overrun. Strategic bombing is being seriously entertained as a means of "stemming the tide" of the infected leaving the cities for the countryside and other cities, following the evacuating civilians. Read Admiral Tyson [Read Admiral Nora Tyson, then commanding officer of CSG-2] was talking with Captain Miller [Captain Chip Miller, captain of the Bush] about the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, whether the use of nuclear weapons against the Undead counted as "overwhelming conventional enemy force" and if the president would actually use them. God I hope not.
7/23/10 2300
We have the II MEF with us. A total of one Marine Division, the 2nd, as well as the 22nd, 24th and 26th MEUs [Marine Expeditionary Units]. We also have a few ARGs [Amphibious Readiness Groups] to carry them along with all of the prepositioning ships. Needless to say, I've been busy on the communications.
Well, Operation Firewall, the bombing of cities and their immediate surroundings have been going on for about 17 hours now. The different branches are doing everything they can to evacuate civilians to bases and cities that aren't infected yet. Bases are having walls and fences built further out around them to accommodate all the civilians and possibly provide farmland. Farmland for the love of God! They say this could last years and that we may never be rid of this threat. I know Greg and Julia are safe at Norfolk. Greg said that they were taking refugees like mad. He told me that they were killing anyone with so much as a scratch on them from the Undead. Apparently they're offering everyone who comes in, that isn't too old or unfit for duty, the choice of enlisting or working in the fields and as manual labor. He chose to work so he could stay with Julia.
The news, what's left of it, is going apeshit. A lot of studios got overrun, but the ones that are up are reporting that this is happening everywhere. Japan is still safe, having closed its borders and is enforcing a blockade around itself. The same for Australia, Madagascar, and most other island countries. It seems that "Zack" as the guys are calling them, can't handle underwater trips well. No one knows why, with them not having to breathe...
England seems to be the only island country that has a problem with the infected. They blew the Chunnel that was connecting them with France. That stopped the Undead from entering the country. That and the blockade they have up. They're working at clearing the cities now and are doing a fair job. So long as some country in the Atlantic is safe besides us stays up, we can do our job.
7/30/10 1340
They nuked New York, LA and Houston! God, it really has come to this, hasn't it? I shouldn't be surprised about New York really, we were the ones that nuked it.
About 1130 an Emergency Action Message came through. Just like in Crimson Tide, except we received no order to rescind this one. I called Captain Miller in the CIC and Admiral Tyson. I told them what just came through. The XO came to get it himself. The Navy, DoD or Whitehouse have never acknowledged that we carried nuclear weapons aboard our carriers, but ever since the start of the Cold War, we have. The order was authenticated and 2 Hornets [F/A-18 Super Hornets] carried it and fired it right over Central Park. I don't know what the yield was, but it was enough to level the city. And fry the 15 million plus Undead in and around the city.
Around the same time two other missiles were fired at Houston and Los Angeles. All three are smoking parking lots now. They say that there weren't many civilians in the cities anymore and that they were warned yesterday. There's no way many could have gotten out. God, have mercy on us all.
8/7/10 2037
To date, we've had no infections among the 2nd Fleet or the 2nd CSG. The same can't be said for a British destroyer. It tried to pick up a boat load of survivors from escaping from the French coast. They assured the Brits they didn't have any wounded. Turns out they lied. 287 men and women of the Royal Navy died because of that lie. A standing order went out that we were not to take on any persons under any circumstances, but to escort them to port facilities built along the coast for the purpose of processing people on boats. How they managed to set up those facilities is beyond me.
Very few cities are still intact. Washington was walled off almost overnight and the city, sewers and all, was cleared of infected. Atlanta has become the capital of medical science now. The city was 2 divisions of infantry and 1 armored in and around it, constructing barricades and protecting the scientists and the CDC [The Centers for Disease Control was the epicenter for studying the Undead Plague and trying to find a cure or means of stopping its spread, most of the scientists were evacuated early on and brought to Atlanta]. The entire state of Hawaii was blessedly saved from infection. Very few other places are safe now.
Military bases themselves are now small cities, filled to the brim of up to 500 thousand people, even with the expanded walls. The stockpiles of food and water are running low. The garrisons make runs out to the surrounding area daily via helicopter to try and get food from factories, warehouses and stores. They can't leave by foot because the walls are surrounded by Undead in numbers upwards of hundreds of thousands. Napalm has made comeback.
Thankfully, Greg and Julia are holding on. Crime and violence in the bases is relatively low, surprisingly. One's tendency to riot and be hostile towards the people who are protecting you after saving you from the literal jaws of death is pretty low it seems. That and the number of armed troops.
8/16/10 0945
It seems that more of the world is alive than we thought. Somehow, some way, we managed to get in contact with the Russians. The United States and Russia chose to celebrate renewed communications by nuking China and India. With India and China having two of the largest world populations, this makes a lot of sense, as twisted as that seems. Nuclear hell came in the form of two Ohio-class nuclear submarines [the USS Henry M. Jackson (SSBN-730) and the USS Alabama (SSBN-731)] emptying their silos [2x24 Trident II missiles carrying 5 475kt warheads apiece, 114,000kt total yield] and the Russians firing an equivalent amount of warheads at mainland China, Hong Kong, India and the Korean Peninsula. Estimates place the infected killed in the billions, and just like that, human population drops to less than half of what it was not two months ago. Millions of square miles were rendered uninhabitable for years to come. Luckily for Japan and the other Pacific countries, the prevailing winds are blowing the fallout West.
8/20/10 2305
Things seem to be at a stalemate lately. Early on, all American forces abroad were ordered to hole up and wait for evacuation. Our forces in Europe fell back to England via one of the best examples of what the Air Force can do: move a lot of shit really fast. The men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan had to wait a little longer. Of all our people in Iraq at the time, about 3/4 made it out, they're over in Japan now. The same for our people in Afghanistan, who were lucky to be in mostly low population zones. Our only major force abroad that we lost were the men and women in South Korea. Oddly, not from the people in the North, no, the minefield kept them back for a long time. The populace in the South turned fast, living in dense population centers, and with only one direction to go, they moved North.
A tentative census was released by the federal government, still entrenched in D.C. The people who joined the military since the outbreak and the people in camps number around 10 million. It's speculated that at least twice that are running around the countryside trying to survive or holed up in make-shift fortresses. The military has run into a few of these when out on runs to find food for the refugees inside the bases. Some were friendly, some were hostile "against the government that left them to die" even when they had been approached for rescue early on. No one is willing to say what happened to the other 270 million Americans.
Thankfully, someone had their heads about them early on and sent troops to secure oil fields and refineries, even some factories that were able to be blockaded off. As such, we still have fuel for our planes, tanks, ships and can still make a limited amount of munitions. Estimates were released showing that our fuel reserves would last for 10 years, and that's just what we had stored.
8/30/10 2100
Command of the military came back to the President, state Governors ceding control back to him, one even saying "Mr. President, I have no state." I'm surprised it took this long, honestly. The Army and Marines finally got tired of sitting on their hands and guarding civilians and simultaneously began to push out from their bases. In 24 hours, they estimated 5 million infected killed nationally. Large areas of land were gained, more often than not, doubling the size of the bases, letting the civilians spread out more and more crops to be planted and hopefully harvested before winter. It's a damned slim hope, but it's all that a lot of them have.
The State Department has managed to make contact with 20 other countries. Britain, Germany, Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and a few others. We never lost contact with Japan or Australia or New Zealand, which are doing better than we are and might be able to send shipments of food before winter.
We've been at sea for a month and a half now. We've seen the whole event on TV and little of it in person. It doesn't seem real. All I know is that I'll get to see my little girl and my husband again soon.
9/10/10 1400
It's official, half of the 2nd Fleet are headed to various ports for down time. The Bush is one of the ships going to port.
Other than launching aircraft to support a few of the pushes from base, we haven't done much. Just being here means that we are still a country and that we are still far from weak. We still fired one of the first nuclear weapons for use against anything but mannequins since World War II, and it was on our home soil. We traded part of ourselves that day. It feels like years ago, but it was barely more than a month ago.
***End Text***
Commentary:
Case Officer Barry Handson: Petty Officer Ziccardi stayed with the Navy and worked as a Operations Specialist for another two tours before she was recommended for Officer Candidate School. She accepted and is now a Commander.
This journal, and the many other just like it were used to understand the psychological toll the War was taking on our men and women in the military. While it is admitted that few can come through such an event unscathed, it was surprising how well the personnel were taking this. With a few exceptions, Navy personnel maintained their professionalism and their sense of duty to country. This fact is held proudly by the Navy and Department of Defense because of how well mental conditioning during Basic Training held with these men and women. It is often pointed out that the Navy had little contact with the Undead and therefore was a much less stressful branch than the Army or Marines. The topic is debated hotly in military and psychological circles to this day.
And once again, Like Mike Rowe in Dirty Jobs, I beg and beseech you to provide locations for me to set the next chapters in. Names are also in short supply, so please send me names for characters.
Thanks for reading. Now, please, review.