Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (23 page)

T
he most effective weapons instruction I ever received was in the French Foreign Legion, the mercenary wing of the French military. But it wasn’t what you might think.

One of my trainers, Corporal Blaga, was a short Romanian man with a chip on his shoulder. He hated the fact that he’d been assigned to a teaching unit. And he really hated anyone who was bigger than he, which was pretty much everybody. In my first week, he broke my nose swinging at the burly Russian recruit talking in the mess line in front of me. The Russian ducked, I bled all over my breakfast, and Blaga scurried off as if nothing had happened.

Steven Wieland was a stoic German kid who’d had it rough. Raised by a chronically alcoholic mother and an abusive stepfather, Wieland scrounged for basics such as food and clothes growing up. At eighteen, he was six foot two, solid muscle, and my first roommate in the Legion. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t lose his temper or even say a bad word about anybody. He was by all accounts a perfect kid who just wanted to keep his head down and go through life unnoticed. Unfortunately, Blaga had other plans.

One night, after a few too many beers and not much else going on around the unit, Blaga decided he needed to assert his authority by making an example of someone, and this time he picked Wieland. He circled us up in a large common room
and pulled Steven to the center. After lecturing him incoherently about respect and what it took to be a Legionnaire, Blaga slapped Wieland about the head, getting angrier as the German showed no reaction. Blaga then retrieved a large combat baton from a nearby closet and raised it in the air threateningly. He dared Wieland to attack. He ordered him to charge. But Steven wouldn’t move a muscle.

Frustrated, Blaga started to hit Steven with the club, screaming louder and louder. He smacked him in the mouth with its butt end and struck Wieland across the skull and shoulders repeatedly.

With no other options, Steven finally charged, prompting Blaga to deal him one last violent blow to the side of his knee. The German was meant to collapse to the floor in a lump of failure, but instead, Wieland kept coming and delivered a punch to the center of Blaga’s face that speckled the room with blood and knocked the Romanian out cold.

I think Wieland was as shocked as the rest of us, and we all just stood there with our mouths open. After what seemed like forever, another trainer came by to see what the silence was all about and quickly carried Blaga to the infirmary. He would later be transferred to a different unit in what was said to be a preapproved move, but we all knew it was because Blaga had lost control of us and we would never take orders from him again.

The next night, a group of seven or eight trainers grabbed Wieland from our room and beat him up pretty good. He came back battered and bruised, but his first words to me in his thick German accent were “Totally worth it.”

But what was the Romanian trying to do? He wanted to intimidate us to show that he was in charge, but instead, he got himself reassigned to warehouse duty at the trash yard. Wouldn’t a pistol have worked better than a stick for
intimidation? Having had both waved in my face at one time or another, I can tell you the answer is a resounding yes.

The lesson I took away is that when given options, it’s crucial to pick the right weapon for the job at hand within the range of your abilities. No weapon is the best weapon for everyone or every purpose. My top choice might be last on your list, and rightly so. But ego, testosterone, and fantasy have no place in the decision process if we’re talking about actual zombie survival.

In a perfect world, your weapons choices would be endless. But after the dead rise, you may not have any options at all. With dwindling resources and limited opportunity, your weapon may well be whatever you can scrounge. In
Shaun of the Dead
, it was a cricket bat. In
Dawn of the Dead
, a screwdriver. But you don’t have to look to the movies to see that almost any object can represent a deadly threat.

On May 3, 2007, college student Jason Webster murdered a classmate at Hull University in England by stabbing her with a pen. Fifty-seven-year-old widower Jeffrey Burton killed himself with a pencil on September 27, 2009. From bottles to billiard balls, news reports around the world prove time and time again that a weapon is what you make of it.

But no group better illustrates the intersection between ingenuity and armament than the United States prison population. On February 26, 2009, guards at Baraga Maximum Correctional Facility confiscated a knife that was twelve inches long with a six-inch blade and made completely out of toilet
paper. Though it had been created in just a few hours with no special materials, the paper shank was rock solid and sharp enough to penetrate a human body easily, highlighting the bitter truth that when there is a strong will to inflict bodily harm and death, there is always a way.

When it comes to firearms for zombie defense, running out of ammunition is often cited as their Achilles heel. A second common knock is that gunshots are loud, revealing your location and inviting countless undead and living dangers. Both are valid points, but there is another much-overlooked flaw that makes your shotgun, rifle, or pistol a potential loser in zombie combat.

Despite what you’ve experienced in your favorite video game, when you pull the trigger of a firearm in actual combat, chances are you’re going to miss your target over and over again.

A study of New York City police officers found that when firing at live targets just nine feet away, their hit rate was a dismal 11 percent. When the target stood at a distance greater than twenty feet, that number dropped to 4 percent, meaning that ninety-six out of one-hundred shots missed their mark. By contrast, these same officers were more than 95 percent accurate when shooting in a controlled gun range. They receive regular training and annual qualifications and are statistically much better shooters than civilians.

When faced with a zombie horde or a gang of roaming human thugs, hearts will race, hands will shake, and bullets will fly everywhere and hit nothing. If you think you’re going to be accurate even 15 percent of the time, you’re living in a dream world and are likely to wake up to the sound of someone or something chewing your guts out.

As we’ve seen, arguably the most overlooked threat in a zombie outbreak is the human threat. It’s one thing to be prepared to take out a member of the undead, but what about someone in your group who goes violently mad? What about a seemingly friendly stranger who later plans to take your food and water, leaving you stranded on the side of the road? Johnny Law isn’t going to be around to make sure that justice is served, of that much you can be sure.

My recommendation for nonlethal human threat mitigation is a stun gun. Smaller than a garage door opener and packing upward of a million volts, most come with a lifetime guaranteed lithium battery and an option to buy discounted replacements just in case. Why waste precious ammunition or bludgeon energy when a short burst from your stun gun can incapacitate an attacker for up to ten minutes?

That’s plenty of time to get the upper hand or simply get away.

Famed samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi wrote a classic treatise on military strategy called
The Book of Five Rings
in 1645. In it, he emphasizes the need for extensive training to become proficient in the use of weapons.

Musashi compares the traditional Japanese katana to a
musical instrument, suggesting that it’s as illogical to believe you can pick up a sword just a few times and then engage in meaningful combat as it is to believe you can pick up a violin and play beautiful music. But if I had a dollar for every time I’ve overheard someone with no formal training declare a katana to be the ultimate zombie weapon, I’d be rich by now.

Zombie survival expert Max Brooks says that he doesn’t understand the obsession some have with katanas and other weapons of nobility, because they are specifically designed for use by master warriors who do nothing but train all day. He recommends instead a peasant weapon such as the common machete.

In the end, all weapons require practice for one to become truly proficient with them. Specialized weapons just require a lot more practice than most.

So, unless you’re a martial-arts enthusiast who gets professional instruction on a regular basis, leave the trophy sword on its fancy black lacquer stand and join the peasant masses like the rest of us. Looking cool is cool, but staying alive is even cooler.

Al V. Corbi is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of residential security, having been interviewed on
Oprah
, CNN, MSN, and other major networks and cable news outlets. His own home is widely judged to be the safest house on the planet.

Corbi advises that in a catastrophic survival scenario, combat should never be entered into by choice under any
circumstances. Only when all other options are exhausted and your life is in direct and imminent danger should the sword be raised. His reasoning is that no one wins when the situation deteriorates to violence. There are only varying degrees of loss.

And when push does come to shove, it turns out that we’re not all natural-born killers. In fact, according to Dave Grossman’s seminal work about the psychological cost of taking another person’s life,
On Killing
, more than 75 percent of us wouldn’t fire a fatal shot at our enemy even if our own lives depended on it.

Grossman observes that the traditional fight-or-flight model is too simplistic when dealing with violence within a single species, and a more accurate breakdown is: fight, flee, posture, or submit:

Piranhas and rattlesnakes will bite anything and everything, but among themselves piranhas fight with raps of their tails, and rattlesnakes wrestle.
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With mountains of evidence from past and current military conflicts,
On Killing
proves that it’s not a matter of cowardice that makes people passive but an unconscious drive for survival of the species. Soldiers are willing to risk great danger to rescue others, gather supplies, or run messages, but these same men purposefully aim high when firing on the enemy.

Before you discount Grossman’s work, citing your phenomenal kill rate in your favorite video game, take note that it is required reading in a wide range of law-enforcement and military institutions in the United States, including the FBI Academy, the DEA Academy, the Air Force Academy, and West Point.

To the extent that our subconscious minds register the
walking dead as another member of the human race, zombie survival isn’t going to be nearly as easy as a shotgun and ready ammunition. Even if you’re ready to go out with guns blazing, chances are that many others in your group won’t fire a single shot.

When the dead rise, consider avoiding combat as if your life depended on it, because in more ways than one, it probably will.