“You just made it out.”
“Only just,” Bond agreed gravely. “From that moment on we were utterly defensive. “We couldn’t open fire with the fifties because the undead were all over the vehicles. We just had to batten down the hatch and hold on until we could drive our way back out of hell.”
“What was that like?” I had to ask. “Did you feel the mission was accomplished at that point?”
“No,” Bond shook his head. “I didn’t feel that we had completed our mission until we had outrun the ghouls, and that was when we were twenty miles out of town, heading back towards the fort.”
It was a harrowing story – a moment in American military history that had been a triumph, but that had hung for so long on the perilous precipice of disaster.
Bond turned and strode back to the Humvee, and the four waiting Rangers at their posts folded in behind us. We clambered back inside the vehicle and the big engine roared. We were moving, and I, for one, felt a little safer.
“Can you tell me what you discovered about the undead?” I asked. “I would like to know the lessons you felt were learned on that day, and whether any of your experiences in Holly Springs were later transferred to the ‘Operation Conquest’ offensive?”
The Humvee turned a corner, and then another, while Lieutenant Colonel Bond of the 75th Infantry Ranger Regiment gazed across the gloomy cramped confines of the vehicle at me, his body swaying casually to the bumping ride over the uneven ground.
“I learned the measure of heroism,” he said softly. “That was the first lesson I got from that afternoon in Holly Springs. The Rangers of A Company that came to war with me on that day were the bravest men I have ever had the honor to serve with. They stood toe-to-toe with the most vicious, ravenous enemy in the annals of history, and they didn’t blink – didn’t flinch. They sacrificed their lives to save innocent civilians. They spilled their blood for freedom,” Bond said, and I thought I heard the barest quaver of raw emotion in his voice.
“And I realized this enemy couldn’t be fought in conventional ways with conventional weapons,” he explained, as though the thoughts were forming in his mind even as he was uttering the words. “I learned that the immense advantage of our technology was no guarantee of success. Because when it all comes down to it, the only way to fight the undead horde is face-to-face, with a weapon.” He splayed his hands. They were hard and calloused – the hands of a boxer maybe.
“We won the war against the zombies because we were prepared to get bloody and muddy,” Bond said. “In the end, the zombies were mean and ruthless, but the American soldier was just a little bit meaner.”
BURGAW, NORTH CAROLINA:
“I remember this place alright,” Captain Danville Spinks said. “Not in a fond way, either.”
As the captain and commander of B Company, 1st Battalion, 120th Infantry of the North Carolina National Guard, Spinks and his men formed part of the Danvers Defensive Line, standing in trenches behind thick coils of barbed wire for more than three months at the outbreak of the zombie apocalypse.
B Company, based at Whiteville, were drawn back behind the defensive line and posted along the I40 just beyond the picturesque little town’s outer limits.
The National Guard troops stood shoulder to shoulder with elements of the 82nd Airborne as well as other National Guard units that had been called up with the announcement of martial law during the dark early days of the plague.
“We were posted right along this section of the line,” Spinks explained. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm.
We were standing beyond Burgaw’s town limits in rolling lush countryside. I could see a patchwork quilt of ploughed fields spreading away to the south, and the ugly brown scar of the wide trench like a ragged tear. There were concrete steps leading into the ground. Spinks went down them like a man on his way to the gallows.
He stood in the bottom of the trench and looked about him, and I could see the changing emotions play across his features as memories came flooding back. I followed him down the steps and stood silently while the man paced back and forth, reaching out to touch at a blade of grass, and stomping his boots on the earth that had been packed down hard as concrete.
“When we were relieved from the line,” Spinks began speaking slowly, his voice somehow detached and distant, “I started reading books from the Great War, back in 1914. I read about life in the trenches a century ago… and it horrified me to realize that in a hundred years, nothing about this kind of warfare had changed. The lice, the filth, the mud, the rats… it was the same nightmare all over again.”
I said nothing. Captain Spinks walked over to the firing step. It was like a wooden bench that stretched for a hundred feet. Beyond it was another, and another… The firing step had been built to allow the troops to elevate themselves above the height of the eight foot deep trench, and to fire their weapons through the barbed wire at the swarming hordes of undead. The raw wood was grey with mud, coated by the feet of a thousand soldiers who had stood to their post during the months of terror and panic.
“Ninety eight days,” Spinks muttered, and I was sure he was not talking directly to me. He shook his head. “We stood in this trench and endured ninety eight days of hell – the hell of boredom and excruciating fear.”
The nearest Fort was F-039, about eight miles to the north. That fortification, like the entire original Danvers line, had now been abandoned to growing grass and spider webs.
And to the memories of the men who served.
Spinks stared silently out through the rusted coils of wire for a long time, gazing southward, his shoulders somehow slumped, seeming older than his thirty-four years. I sat on one of the concrete steps and waited patiently. The morning was overcast, and the sky charged with the kind of electrical hum that precedes a thunder storm. Heavy black clouds hung low over the ground so that the far distance seemed smudged along the horizon.
Finally Spinks stepped down from the ledge and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his camouflage fatigues. He stared down at me, his lips pressed into a thin line across his face.
He had a broad face, with a wide forehead and bright intelligent eyes. His hair was black, but beginning to grey at the temples. He blinked his eyes as if his vision was coming back into focus.
“What was it like?” I asked. It was a deliberately open-ended question, as vague as I could make it. I had a feeling that trying to pin down the captain to specific questions would turn the interview into something stilted. I wanted the reality – any aspect of it the man was willing to share with me.
“What was it like to stand in the line, you mean?”
“That will do for starters,” I encouraged him.
Spinks inhaled a deep breath. Somewhere nearby, I heard the first rumble of thunder. It rolled across the clouds like the boom of distant artillery fire and then faded away into ominous silence.
“The hardest part was the not knowing,” the National Guard Captain explained. “We were always on edge – standing at the firing platform and expecting any moment for the horizon to fill with swarms of zombies. The strain of it frayed a lot of men’s nerves.”
I frowned. “Was it like that from the very start?”
“No,” Spinks shook his head. “The first few days – even the first week were all panic and confusion – sorting out the lines of communication, the rotation of the troops, the supply lines. It was a mad-house of frantic activity.”
“But not fear?”
“No – not then,” Spinks said candidly. “We knew how far the defensive line was away from the spread of the infected. Every day we would get updates from the satellites and the helicopters and Humvee patrols. We knew the zombies were still down south.”
“Was there a point where that altered?” I asked because I was curious. “Did something happen with the lines of communication? How did you and your men go from being aware of proximity of the zombies, to the point where you were standing at your post expecting them to appear
at any moment?”
Again, Spinks shook his head. It was an emphatic gesture. “No. The lines of communication were as good as our technology allowed,” he said. “We were never left in the dark by command. There was always an update or a briefing.”
“So…?”
Spinks shrugged. “So the media…” he said, and his voice trailed away as if he was embarrassed by the confession. He kicked at a lump of clay in the ground and then looked back at me. “The boys were spending all their spare time listening to radio and television coverage – rumors and wild speculation flew along the line like a spreading brushfire.”
“So in the absence of a reason to be alert and anticipating action –”
“– We got ourselves all worked up,” he admitted ruefully. “It reached the point where we put more faith in the inflammatory sensational media coverage than we did with our own command network. The television stations were filled with terrifying reports – helicopter footage of running hordes of undead. It fucked with our heads.”
I said nothing for a few moments. Spinks walked around in an aimless circle, head bowed, boots scuffing the dirt.
“And so you and your men were in a constant state of… what? How would you characterize the state of mind of your men during those three months?”
“Fear,” Spinks said. “We were in a permanent state of fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of imminent attack. Fear of being overrun by the hordes of undead. Fear of dying…”
It was clear to me that the strain of defending this line of trenches had taken a terrible emotional toll on the captain. He glanced at me, and his eyes were skittish and nervous, as though maybe he expected my derision.
“It sounds like an utter nightmare,” I said sympathetically. I knew how dangerous a man’s rampant imagination could be. I’d talked myself into dark moments of despair readily enough. I didn’t know an honest man who hadn’t at some stage of his life.
“If there had been activity – something to focus on and apply ourselves to, well maybe it would have been different,” he speculated, then shrugged his shoulders. “But there wasn’t. There was just the monotony of standing at your post – staring out through the barbed wire, and waiting.”
I got up from where I sat and walked across to the firing platform. I stood on the timber ledge and stared across the rolling fields, trying to imagine how it must have felt. The barbed wire entanglements were rusted. The wiring posts, spread along the line at random intervals, were leaning at weary angles. The thirty foot wide snare of wire did not obstruct the view down the gentle slope towards a dense grove of trees.
Another boom of thunder reverberated through the storm clouds.
I looked back over my shoulder. “What was it like when it rained?”
Spinks huffed. “A fucking nightmare,” he said.
I stepped back down onto the floor of the wide trench. Further along the line I could see wooden beams fashioned into ragged retaining walls.
“The ground gave way when the rain got too heavy, or it rained persistently,” Spinks said. We started to meander along the trench, walking northwards. We came to an upright post and he leaned against it. “This was just one place,” he explained. “There were plenty of others along this part of the line.” He shook the upright. It didn’t move. “The engineers came along and built retaining walls to stop the front of the trench collapsing in,” he said. “Or if we couldn’t wait, we would use sandbags. It was pretty crude.”
“And the mud?”
“It got into everything. We would be standing knee deep in the stuff, and there would be torrents of water running through the trench, following the natural contours and undulations of the land. Let me tell you, when it rained, you wanted to be standing post at a high point in the line, not a low point.”
I looked. Where the men of the 1st Battalion had been stationed was a shallow saddle between two gentle rising slopes. Spinks must have guessed what I was thinking.
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “We drew a low point in the trench.”
We kept walking. “Did it rain often?”
“Often enough to be permanently wet and cold and muddy,” he said. “The mud got into our food, in our boots, in our hair and in our weapons. There was nothing you could do but accept it. Everyone suffered in some way or another.”
“Was that the worst part of trench life – dealing with the mud when you were standing at the firing line?”
Spinks shook his head. “No. The worst part was trying to sleep in the rain,” he said. “It couldn’t be done. The mud was inches deep, like a quagmire, sucking at your boots every step you took. No man could lie down. We had to sleep standing up.”
“What if you weren’t on duty?” I asked. “I mean if you were not posted to the line that day?”
“Off rotation?”
“Yeah.”
Spinks shrugged. “It was a little better,” he admitted. We walked to the rear wall of the trench and climbed more concrete steps back out of the hole. “Behind the line were thousands of tents – temporary camps for headquarters and supplies,” he explained. He made a broad sweeping gesture that seemed to encompass as far as the eye could see. “And the Army took over the town.”
“Took over Burgaw?”
He nodded. “We made use of the town’s infrastructure and the road network for transporting supplies. Burgaw became a hub for command to co-ordinate troops. It also became a USAMRIID hospital. They were all along the line.”
“So if you weren’t standing at your post, conditions were a little more comfortable?”
“Sure,” Spinks admitted.
I had seen historical photos showing the soldiers of World War 1 enduring the grind of trench life. There were differences here, but perhaps they were only cosmetic. The Danvers trench was twenty feet wide. The trenches in the First World War had been narrow warrens that had become homes for the men who inhabited them. I got the feeling the nature of the enemy had been the difference in the way this trench had been used by the men who served. There had been no need to fear artillery fire, so the trench could be wide. And there had been no need to fear air attack or naval bombardments, so the support system could be brought close to the trench and left in the open and undefended. There was no need for concealment or fear of a counter-strike from a zombie horde.
“Do you remember the rotation system?”
Spinks looked at me. His eyes had lost some of their sparkle. They seemed glazed over. “I’ll never forget,” he admitted. He stood silently for long moments, overcome by a melancholy of more bitter memories. “The first sixty days were the worst,” he said softly at last. “Because panic ruled everything. We were vulnerable – there just weren’t enough men in the line, so we stood in the trench for nine days, and then had one day behind the lines. The infrastructure was limited; the supply routes were still being established. After the first two months it got easier. Fresh troops were pouring into the defenses, and the Army was beginning to mass our forces in preparation for ‘Operation Conquest’. We stood in the trench for a week, then were relieved for three day breaks.”
“The men knew about the second phase of the zombie war?” For some reason I was surprised by that.
“Sure,” Spinks shrugged. “Along with the rumors about the zombie horde sweeping north that were fuelled by the media, we also heard rumors about a counter-offensive.”
“How did the men feel about that?”
“We were excited,” he said. “The build up of troops behind the lines was impossible to miss. The Army was bringing in artillery and tanks. We knew they weren’t for defense. We knew there had to be an attack coming sooner or later.”
“And your men were excited?”
Danville Spinks stared at me hard and I could see some emotion pass behind his eyes. He frowned.
“Don’t misunderstand the motivation of the men who served along this line,” he said with sudden passion. “We weren’t all elite 82nd Airborne. There were plenty of National Guard units jus
t like my men and me. And while the time in this trench was soul destroying, it never altered our commitment to protect this country from the zombies. We never lost our bravery or our dedication. We never wavered. What we did in this trench was endure – because America needed us to.”
“Did you ever see combat during the months in the trench? Did the zombies ever test the line this far east?”
Spinks shook his head with something like regret. “No,” he sighed. “But I wished we had seen action. It would have made the sacrifice worthwhile in a tangible way.” He lapsed back into silence and we started walking away from the trench, towards Burgaw. The ground here had been flattened and turned to earth when the Army had mobilized. Now it was overgrown with long grass and weeds and flowers.
Spinks gave me a sideways glance. “We heard about the Battle of Four Seasons at Hendersonville,” he said. “Some of my buddies were there. They saw action. When it happened, everyone was keyed up, expecting the zombie surge to come our way, but it never did,” he lamented.
There was a Humvee and a driver waiting for us under the leafy canopy a gnarled tree. Spinks pulled open his door, and then paused to take one long last look at the trench line. “Ninety eight days,” he muttered softly once again, and shook his head, “and nothing to show for our service apart from the knowledge that we did our duty. No medals, no recognition, no act of valor… just mud in our boots and a gut full of fear.”
It started to rain.
HENDERSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA:
THE BATTLE OF FOUR SEASONS
The ‘bone yard’, the man called it.
The Bone Yard.
I shook my head slowly – it was the most horrific sight I had ever seen. I walked through the long grass, and the undulating field was a riot of beautiful yellow flowers… littered by the bleached white bones of over one hundred thousand skeletons.
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