Portland, Oregon
Linden Barrett is shorter than most men and slenderly built. The pre-war photo in his file shows the classically thin computer nerd. Today, he turns 42 and, like many of his generation, he moves with a wiry strength, smooth yet tired. His wife is making the birthday meal in the kitchen, so we sit on the back porch, which is screened from insects and somewhat loud from the rainfall.
Thank you for speaking with me, especially so soon. I'm interested in what you can tell me about the lead up to the story that broke the news on Phalanx as a scam-
You're looking for people's stories, right? I was a millennial. I guess we'll start there. Socioeconomically, I was a lower middle class white American male millennial. What does that mean? When the recession[1] hit, I was getting college acceptance letters and I was supposed to pick one and figure out how to pay for it. Even with scholarships, I couldn't pay for it all. Then, I was supposed to graduate with more debt than a Depression-era german could carry in a U-Hall. I was supposed to pay my debt by finding a job in an economy with no jobs available.
I was lucky, as far as things went. I majored in computer science and had a job waiting for me when I started my senior year. While many of my friends had to hang their debt on making espressos or waiting tables, my starting salary was more than my dad's after working 40 years at the same place. He was a social worker who worked with kids, so that's no surprise, really.
[Pause. Linden glances back towards the living room, where pictures of his and his wife's lives before the war hang. A particular photo hangs prominently, of a family with warm faces, including a very young, fair haired Linden. Clears throat.]
So, I was lucky. I worked for a group that did contracts all over the industry. I did some contract work for a lot of the major companies, some state and federal agencies and so forth. My roommate, a friend from college, was in a similar position with having a good job as an accountant and doing well on paying off loans. Almost a year out of college, and I started living a little bit, even dating a little. I had no dependents to support and was making so much that I was happy to just be for a while. Just work, pay off my debt, and be. Comforted that I had it good.
But then you got interested in maps, public health?
It was more of a side interest, really. My younger sister was in college and spent a semester working with a professor from the geography department. She was taking a seminar in GIS[2], although none of us knew why she'd suddenly become so interested for some time.
You mean she had specific plans?
Eventually, yeah, with help from friends. She told me at the end of her junior year in college. She was planning on joining the Chair Force[3] so she could be the change she wanted to see. She went to a fancy all women's college back East. As bleak as it was for me to go to college under the cloud of recession, the cost of my college took most everything my family had, financially, even with scholarships and grants. There was no way we could afford her education unless the school could offset the cost. We'd been pushed to succeed in school all our childhoods, and I was the older sibling, always setting the bar. She already grew up trying to meet to this unrealistic image of me she had constructed. The always perfect student which, by the way, I wasn't. By the time she was applying to schools, our parents were financially spent, and they would have been lucky to afford the local university's in-state tuition.
Anyway, when we were growing up, college wasn't an option in our family, it was expected. More, even. It was required. So, when she was in high school, the recession was in full swing, our dad was constantly worried about being laid off, our mom was unemployed and couldn't find work. It lit a spark and she worked really hard in class. She did every extracurricular[4]. She was chief editor of a school literary magazine, played a rare sport, did theater, volunteered in the community, you name it. Long story short, she ended up heading back East for college. East Coast schools were older and could usually afford the best financial aid back then. It was really diverse, with students from all over the world.
She had a roommate from … I'm not sure I should say, actually. Let's just say she was from the Eurasian continent. Is that vague enough? Came back to campus at the start of their junior year with instructions from her family to not come back home at the end of the school year, to stay through the summer, through her senior year and beyond, if necessary. The girls across the hall were from Texas and Brazil. The Brazilian girl's family had given her the same instructions not to go home. In fact, just about all the chinese students, the ones who made it to campus that year, had the same or similar instructions. A lot of international students were well enough off that they could pay the full tuition. A lot of them had parents who worked for governments or some other institution in the know and the fear was getting real. The media was only just starting to cover this new disease in far off, exotic places, and talking about quarantining people who'd come on international flights from a hot area, but not much more.
Seeing classmates from all over with similar stories of seeing neighbors chewing on their doors, of the cartels working together to bring down some early cases in the streets, and of their stalwart father in a powerful government office job coming home with blood spatter, packing a bag and sending their daughter to school early. Even in the college bubble, it makes an impression.
She would call me and talk about it. What it was like stepping back on campus, where some of the international students were suddenly applying for visas for their families, or were spreading what they'd seen and heard in whispers to some of their domestic friends and asking if they and their families could stay with them until it blew over.
Did any say yes?
Not many owned a large enough house or enough land to support that kind of request. A lot of them lived in apartments in cities, things like that. But some students had a larger house with fenced or gated yards, and when the fear started to set in, some of those students' families eventually said yes, so people who could make it to the US could have a place to stay. The fallible part of this plan was that none of them thought the US wouldn't fare as well as they hoped. But we were talking about maps.
No worries.
Well, maps. She started working on a project with some classmates on mapping in epidemiology. It wasn't a new idea, by any means. John Snow[5] knew a thing or two about it. Figured out some basics pretty early on. But this group was working on a more user-friendly map. More interactive. They wanted more of the public to have access to this map. Perhaps not to read all that it contained, but at least the ability to add to it.
How does that work? How would it help?
It would be a community contribution map. It was designed by a group of students, mind you, but this is the general idea. The ebola epidemic did make progress towards the real-time mapping of confirmed cases by physicians. But those data points were only added upon the confirmation of a doctor's say so. If any nurse or technician wanted to add a case to the map, they couldn't. Or, hey, a human with eyes and a familiarity of the symptoms, watching someone with a fever puking up their guts and bleeding out their eyes can put two and two together. They would have to find an overworked doctor to confirm a clear or, at the very least, strongly suspected case, and if a map like this is to work, time is of the essence.
[Brief pause. Linden watches through the screen as one of his sons, a strapping youth of around 16 or 17, gets home, soaked from walking in the rain. After waving at us, he gathers some pre-shortened logs and a hatchet sitting under the lean-to, which stands next to a stump used for chopping wood.]
It makes sense. You don't want just anyone adding to the map. Especially in the pill-addicted West[6], especially in fearful times, you don't want people adding to the map when there aren't, in fact, any cases. Nothing hurts the fight against infections more than hypochondriacs crying wolf at every sneeze and monopolizing people's time. But the incubation period for ebola is anywhere from a couple of days to over twenty, and those conditions aren't too dissimilar from the Zombie Plague, which, in the early days, if it was contracted through a bite versus a skin graft, might develop in a few hours, or weeks.
[Linden's son has gotten into a rhythm, and is tearing through the logs, splitting them into kindling. He doesn't seem bothered by the slick conditions, or the worry of his grip slipping on the handle. Quick, decisive strokes crack into the gathering evening.]
I was never so good with an axe. That was more my dad. And my sister, after Dad ... She's the one who taught Dean [Gestures towards the muddy yard.] and the other kids to be a lumberjack whenever she came to town. Imagine, it used to be that the "cool aunt" would bring candy and fake IDs when they visited. Then, everything changed, and the "cool aunt" became cool by enforcing manual labor.
If you want a community map, you want something that will give you a pretty accurate idea of the spread pattern, and you want to be able to screen out the distractions. That's where the layers come in. Only want to see the cases as confirmed by the doctors? Done. Want to see a layer from registered nurses, who are able to see more patients, speak to more family members, able to physically get eyes on more people? Create a layer where RNs can add data points for strongly suspected cases. Another one for LPNs, who see just as many people in a day. Hell, custodial staff in any building probably see more than just about anyone else during down hours, and you don't want their input? And another one for police departments, who can damn well tell the difference between a chomper and someone on LSD. No joke, there were people who tried to spread the theory that it was all just a new variety of LSD where people lost all ability to use door knobs and had a tendency to bite but, no big deal, they were just tripping out of their minds.
Here's where the beauty comes in. It gave the possibility for a layer for self-reported cases. Before, who did you call when you thought you were sick? Either your doctor, a hospital or the CDC, all of which were inundated during outbreaks of any kind, and hospitals had all of their usual cases to deal with; car crashes, heart attacks, asthma attacks, the whole nine yards. By going to the hospital, you risk yourself, the hospital staff, other patients and anyone else you run into on the streets. With a phone and an internet connection, you had the ability to self-report your symptoms and your location is added to the map. People can go door to door and confirm or dismiss cases in a more organized fashion, which also cuts down on the overall transit of people.
That layer is no doubt an overwhelming layer. But with the other layers overlaying it, it creates a sort of topographic image of the spread and the potential to extract directional implications. You can project where new flares might pop up and nip them in the bud. If it gets too overwhelming, you can click a button, turn it off and focus on what we know with more certainty.
It didn't have to stop there. You could see that waterways slowed them down, but also hid the infected. What if you added a layer of elevations and saw that Z spread faster downhill because, quite simply, it's harder for the dead to go downhill than to climb? You could add layers that included roads, gas stations, hospitals, churches, anywhere where people congregate or pass through, and project future flares and outbreaks.
What happened to this map? Did those students or their professors ever propose it for real use?
They actually kept it relatively quiet. The school and its students were already labeled as uppity social justice warriors anytime they talked about institutionalized sexual assault. I guess their professors thought it was a worthy exercise, but they were busy; they had classes to teach, conferences to attend, papers to publish and students to advise. The government was still trying to keep everything quiet, so I'm not sure how receptive they would have been towards a map made of already dead cases, and made by a bunch of neurotic students.
Besides, the whole mapping concept was a small seminar, mostly talked about with friends during study breaks, on a weekend morning or over meals, then planned and developed over the course of my sister's junior spring semester. We'd talk on the phone to bounce ideas, and she and her friends decided to use their summer break before senior year to "prepare." A classmate from Japan had found this site where people were posting all kinds of information. Proper analysis and response theories based on legitimate data, mostly stolen through hacking, I believe, and believable anecdotes.
They decided it was as good a source as they were going to get, so they made a list of things to gather during the summer, and they'd pool their resources at the school come the start of next fall. The cool thing was, they'd decided to gather materials to fortify their campus, since it was about as far from bigger cities as it was going to get. The other colleges in the consortium were all situated in cities or towns, and one of them was just too small to support the numbers and materials they needed. A bunch of the international students, remember I told you a lot of them could afford the full tuition? Their families funded a lot of the materials, including their temporary storage at a nearby storage facility. Generators, solar panels, rebar, building materials, meds, tools, seeds, camping gear, even contraceptives.
Contraceptives?
Yeah, some of the more conservative families wouldn't have liked it. They probably wouldn't have been told that was one of the places their money was going. Anyway, the word of mouth had spread some, and there was a whole recruitment process. No one used social media as effectively as millennials. They weren't the only ones preparing, even if most did think it was a joke. The famous college consortium is over here on the West Coast since it was filmed, but you've got the Five College Consortium back east, and a few places that held out for a while down south. The stronghold in North Dakota, from what I hear, was a force to be reckoned with. I don't think they were ever breached. Not once, in ten years, which is somewhat mind-boggling.
Students from coastal city campuses came inland, where you could predict conditions a little more and you wouldn't need to contend with the tides or unexpected vessels with unexpected people. Anyway, the students got the funding they needed to buy radio equipment to supplement what the radio club had. Set up a little radio station in the geology lounge and, since the professors didn't really take notice, were able to stock the lounge with all sorts of informational manuals. Even if they noticed, I'm not sure they cared enough to do much about it. They had to hold off on walling off the campus acreage, since the administration called the suggestion ludicrously unnecessary and labeled it campus "defacement." They stored all the materials in the storage lockers for later and told everyone who was planning on moving to campus when things went downhill to start getting in shape. Every college campus had workout rooms, so access to gyms was no issue.
Sounds like quite the collective.
It was, considering many of the students themselves didn't take it seriously. I didn't, not really, and my sister would joke that if she ended up in a history book, it would be for prepper crackpots. She knew she was about as neurotic as they come. They had students planning to come from as far north as Vermont and Maine, since survival would come in numbers, and from farther east, from Ivies along the coast, and families from the local township. It's important to bear in mind there was no crush of people vying for places. This was still part crackpot exercise in paranoia and part youth project; an obsession that would fall out of fad soon enough.
What were some of the plans? How did they even tackle such a prospect?
You'd need to ask them. I can tell you mainly what they brainstormed. They'd already decided the ground floors of any building wouldn't be inhabited in case of a breach, which meant two floors for any of the buildings built into a slope. They would store things like grain, building materials, things that didn't need supervision or particularly climate controlled environments. The next floor up was dedicated to storage of any equipment, and some smaller livestock. Yes, any livestock that could climb stairs, all lived a floor up in the buildings. That's a story for another time. Ask the project members about it, if any are willing. They're the ones who drew up the plans. All I know is secondhand, so you're better off tracking down the people who were there. The second floor, or third floor for buildings built into slopes, and up would house people. Solar panels would, ideally, be installed on the roofs next to the beehives. Components for a water purification and storage system were in storage, ready to be put together.
Were you ever planning, or did you have any intention, of going to one of the preparing strongholds? Especially knowing what you knew?
No. We knew something was up, but we didn't know when things would start to turn for the worse. The Black Death, bubonic plague, ramped up over the course of a few years, and receded over another couple once the worst was over. With today's technology, our medical innovation, our military might, our interconnectedness, who knew when or if it would ever hit the fan? Who could possibly predict it would escalate to the human population being reduced to a tenth of what is was and a good two thirds of it shambling around? Whatever I had on my mind back then, a full on apocalypse didn't occur to me until after Yonkers when the government announced the retreat. I was living several states away with my roommate before the scandal broke in the news, but I knew I needed to make sure my parents had something figured out before I bugged out. Even my sister never stuck around to build her plans on campus.
She didn't?
No. When she graduated, she left behind a cache of supplies and materials, and a wealth of information in the form of manuals, how-to books and contact information for nearby resources. She'd even pre-bought a bunch of beehives to support the agricultural bit and worked it out with the guy to take care of them until future students came by to pick them up. She felt she'd laid the groundwork for her school's survival, and now there were bigger fish to fry. I think she was too ADHD to stay. She was pretty good at things she did or tried, but terrible at sticking around long enough to gain any sort of mastery. The spark she'd lit in high school was on full throttle by now, and she was in her idealistic phase of changing the world with some new project.
She had plans for joining the military to help disseminate intelligence. Tracking ghouls when they don't have human heat signatures, they aren't tied to any kind of landmarks, and they keep moving at night without flashlights or any way to keep tracking them. That was her challenge, and she was determined to be a part of the solution. Realistically, I think she knew her big weakness was sticking to things, and she was looking for structure. That's why she told our parents about her plans for joining the military during her senior year. Went over like lead balloon.
What about you? What were your plans?
Our conversations over her junior year led me to share some of what I knew with my girlfriend, which got her interested. The maps the students produced were pretty damning, both for this new disease and for whatever junk was in this miracle Phalanx vaccine. My girlfriend spent that summer contacting people, interviewing them either in person or by internet calls. By that point, I had reengaged with the world, I'd been with my girlfriend for a little while, I'd heard enough stories from my sister's classmates and done enough contract work for people with 'eyes only' under-the-table projects that I realized I had my own use. I was needed to help with the effort through programming. The internet and all of its users were about to have a huge downgrade in terms of use and actors inputting information, and I was going to be needed. I didn't know whether it would be building a new zombie-tracking system from the ground up or redesigning administrative code and I didn't care. I would be one of the few people to hit the ground running when everything went bust.
And I did. It was like graduating high school as one of the kids who would go to college in times of uncertainty with the one certainty that, if you made it through, you could make it eventually. Like graduating college and getting a job in my field, while my friends donned aprons. When the story broke, I was ready. When the government needed work done, I set up shop back at my parent's house on the West Coast and worked remotely on updating systems to better handle the fallout. Turns out I made myself valuable enough to have a couple of Army Rangers assigned to this house when an outbreak got my parents and a couple chickens. When they heard that my parents were dead and the security of the house was compromised, they realized they'd be hardpressed to find someone this side of the Cascades with both my skillset and my up-to-date knowledge of where everything stood. When the government announced a retreat to the Rockies, I was already west of there, west of the the Monitor and Bitterroot Ranges, west of the Cascades.
The US got our house in order in Hawaii and Alaska - which wasn't quite so hard, given that it was an island chain and Alaska is, well, Alaska. We got our ducks in a row in western Washington, Oregon and California, and had somewhat cleared the main safe zones in Idaho, Utah and Nevada. The LA Sweeps were still in progress, but nearing completion when the US hosted the Honolulu Conference and soon after declared the offensive strategy.
By that point, outbreaks had taken my parents, and I was rattling around in their big house with the dogs, cats and chickens. Didn't even have the Ranger Ricks to keep me company, since the town as considered safe, and my fences were intact. My girlfriend was able to talk to the Department of Housing for the resettlement program and got billeted with me. We had a retired couple, the Martins, for a while at first. We got another family, the Chowdhurys, and a few solitary survivors billeted at my place. It was nice, having people in the house again. They were happy to be there, even if the rooms were crammed with people. We had a wood stove and some stored wood that my dad had stocked up and never used. Fruit trees, too. It was idyllic, especially for a suburban house near the edge of the city. Fences, a stream, trees, chickens.
We even got a generator, since my work qualified as necessary for the war effort, and Mr. Chowdhury was ex-army. He re-upped, even though it had been about fifteen years since he'd taken his leave. He was an engineer in his civilian life. I don't know what his old army mos[7] was, I don't remember, a desk clerk or something, during an era when they were just graduating from floppies[8] to discs and flash drives, and they were figuring out that dial-up sucked. In any case, they took him back as an engineer, and we'd stay up at night, lights on. He'd be pouring over plans spread out over the table, and I'd be sitting at my keyboard.
[Linden's son, Dean, trudges up to the porch, having stacked the freshly split wood under the lean-too to dry. He is soaked, but takes the time to gather the more thoroughly dried wood stacked on the porch for the woodstove inside. Linden's eyes follow his son inside, then flick back to the yard, which has grown impressive puddles in the darkening garden. The smell of a hot stew wafts to the porch from the house.]
My mom's first husband served in Vietnam. She used to have this nickname for 'Nam vets. She called them the Drafted and Shafted, since most of them didn't have a choice in going and they had the worst conditions and survived them only to finish their service, head home and have protesters call them killers and murderers. They'd gone through hell and back for this shit? She opposed that war, but the one thing my mom was alright with was the equalizing effect of the draft. Save for some of the wealthier kids in her class, mostly with lawyers for parents who got their kids out as conscientious objectors or a religious orthodoxy classification, every male in her age group went, regardless of race or socioeconomic standing. Everyone, save for what I mentioned earlier. She'd comment that the one thing that they, meaning the government, did right was that if anyone was going to go to war, it should be every demographic in society. The draft did a better job in ensuring a more accurate cross-section of the US population at the time. That war became so unpopular and costly in so many ways that the US gave up and left, though not in so many words. The military changed to an all volunteer service.
I won't go into the nitpicking of details of the percentages of military service members and their demographics, classes and other boxes before the Z Plague. My point is, there was this huge discussion going on about gender, class and white privilege. Whether women should register for selective service. White privilege was a big one, and the political left and right were tearing into each other about whether or not it exists, and whether it would matter, and whether anyone was to blame. [Laughter. More bitter than not.] I certainly had my struggles before the war. Everyone did. But that's the American Dream and its inherent struggle. We are hypothetically created equal, but no one is actually equal. It's only through concentrated effort that we can ever come close to that goal.
Anyone who doesn't believe that inequalities exist is living in their anus and in dire need of an enema. Take that asshole [name withheld for legal reasons], a Vietnam draft dodger, by the way, who spent his days before the plague on the radio railing against people he didn't like and ranting about how white privilege didn't exist, how it still doesn't, and how he's earned everything he has fairly. He's still alive. Still yammering on about how he managed to survive the Zombie Plague. It's like he thinks he's the lone survivor who is now charged with the task of telling everyone else about what cowards they were during the war. He spent Vietnam cowering, and the years following berating everyone else. He spent the plague huddled in Cuba, a place he railed against for years for being an enemy of the US. Took one of the first rafts going the other way. Guess where he has his bank accounts today? Cuba. All while he flaps his lips about what traitors people are for continuing to live in the Stone Age by bartering, he tries to buy up housing and land before any survivors can come along and reclaim what was theirs. Well …
[Linden's wife subtly steps out onto the porch bearing a local microbrew and appetizers of fried mushrooms his son, Dean, has collected on his way home. Always bearing an aura of collected dignity, Kelli Tate departs to check on dinner's progress.]
Hey, you won't be able to publish this for a bit, right? You can keep this under your hat until we make our move?
Uh yeah, sure. What is it?
Well, it will take a while yet for us to work towards preparing a proper case against Breckinridge Scott to drag him back to the US to stand trial. That's assuming we ever manage it. But Kelli's got a contact who's just become the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He's assured us, between you and me, that nabbing that bastard is one of his top priorities. Turns out [name withheld for legal reasons] and Breckinridge Scott are pretty good friends, and he's been one of Scott's main pundits. Most of his broadcasts are designed to distract people from remembering one of the main reasons the masses were caught so off guard. [Name withheld for legal reasons] has spent every spare moment reminding people of the US's implementation of the Redecker plan, and not a single second on the Phalanx vaccine fraud that he himself helped to invest in. He cashed in on that golden goose and has only bothered to look back because karma has started raining on his parade. Now the tides have turned, he's doing everything he can to discredit the administration's decision to leave people behind and pull troops back. [Sighs. Sips on his beer.]
It was like the recession all over again. Wealthy and, let's be honest, white, men contrived to do their banking, lining their pockets with other people's money. It eventually went wrong and plunged the economy into chaos and who has to pay for it? The general public, and those people who'd gotten us into the mess to begin with got an end-of-year bonus in the millions. Already depressed communities were hit hardest, and these people have the gall to claim they didn't work hard enough, or that they're freeloading criminals.
Then, just a few years later, there's a real, tangible problem on the horizon. Here are these men with entire portions of the world's wealth and resources at their fingertips. They can, just the handful of these people, change the whole face of our survival by galvanizing governments, including the most powerful one with the most sophisticated, powerful military the world has ever seen, into action. They can arrange for prisons, schools, you name it, to be converted into sanctuaries, for hospitals to be fully prepared, for health professionals to have the information they need. Hey, if they're still too caught up with sleeping on beds of fresh greenbacks, they can make money off of pre-assembled bug out bags for city dwellers who don't know what to pack for a trek north.
What do these wealthy white men do? What they've always done. [Name withheld for legal reasons] wants to bellyache about the Redecker plan when everyone knows he spent the decade in a lawn chair sipping sweet drinks? He wants to call my wife a bitch and a skank and every name under our canopy of pollution? Fine, he can call her names. I've never been the possessive or angry type. She's a big girl who can, and has done, hold her own.
Speaking of white privilege, my white American millennial male status helped me along certain paths in life. It gave me the privilege to an education, and to be the one who helped to cut his money parade short the first time. Gave me the privilege to make it through this mess. And it's giving me the privilege to help bring the him to justice.
I know I'm biased in a whole lot of ways. I know I grew up in a hippy left-leaning state with a lot of idealism, and I know I gave my then-girlfriend the starting point to blow the whole scandal. He's recently started attacking people she's associated with on air. He claimed that Kelli Tate's husband, that's me, spent the war cowering behind a computer. He's not wrong. I spent the war in the only house for blocks with a generator, staring at a screen. But he's also completely missed the point. I spent a decade remotely accessing the last of the operating servers, which wasn't many, scrounging fragments of largely moot data. There isn't much left of our server farms around the world, but the ones that stayed intact had gold.
[He points at our empty plates, where the mushroom appetizers no longer sit.]
They call it mushroom hunting, which is funny, since it's hardly hunting. You can just stumble around and pick them. But then again, hunting spineless mold like [name withheld for legal reasons] is hardly hunting. [Brightens.]
Did I mention my roommate from before the war, my friend from college, did I mention he's an accountant? He's with the IRS, now. He's got a bone or two to pick with a few people, himself and Sinclair's got his hands full with Scott and everything else on his plate. Sinclair shouldn't have to deal with piggybacking scum like [name withheld for legal reasons]. I've got this one.
[1] The Recession of 2008, also called the Great Recession, was a major worldwide economic downturn caused by the Financial Crisis of 2008. It was by far the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
[2] GIS: Geographical Information System. Used to arrange, layer and interpret geospatial data.
[3] Chair Force: Nickname for the US Air Force to make fun of the branch's relatively high education levels and desk positions.
[4] Pre-war colleges and universities used various algorithms for enrollment. Many schools preferred to admit students who were "well-rounded" and had a level of proficiency in various areas, including academic excellence, music, sports, community service and high scores on standardized tests.
[5] Dr. John Snow, considered to be the father of epidemiology, mapped the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London, England, which led to the correlation between cholera cases and water pumps.
[6] While prescription medication is notoriously rare and difficult to come by today, prewar US pharmaceuticals were quite common. It was a running joke that Americans popped pills in the morning and bullets in the afternoon.
[7] MOS: Military Occupational Specialty code, is a code used in the United States Army and United States Marines to identify a specific job.
[8] Floppies: A floppy disk, also called a floppy, diskette or just disk, is a type of disk storage composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic enclosure lined with fabric that removes dust particles. Millennials were the last generation of students who had regular use or proficiency with the storage medium before their use was superseded by data storage methods with much greater capacity, such as USB flash drives, among others.