Warday Read online

  When my four-year tour of duty here is up, I expect to be posted back to England for six months of R-and-R and then down to the Argentine, where we have an extensive operation contending with malnutrition and its associated diseases.

  You have asked me to be as personal as possible. What is the life of a Relief officer actually like? Do I meet with any hostility on the job? Of course, a certain amount. And I have emotional difficulties of my own. I must often make decisions that shorten and even take life. When I must isolate populations to prevent the spread of disease, and sometimes even withdraw medical assistance to allocate it to areas where help will still matter, I all but sweat blood.

  On the other hand, I have been able to help enormous numbers of people. We have a large number of burn cases in Dallas, many of them scarred to the point of crippling: refugees from the South Texas firestorm, some of them profoundly crippled. I was a part of the committee that decided to allocate sufficient social resources to these people to prevent their dying of starvation or neglect and also to house them in public facilities. We do make decisions in favor of life whenever we can.

  I live in an apartment at the Adolphus Hotel, along with the rest of the British here. Our government purchased the hotel because its large number of small suites are ideal for housing single public officials. Only our Commissioner has his family with him.

  Until the Southwest Area is reclassified as safe, the rest of us may not bring our families in. So I have two lonely rooms with a long view to the south. The hotel service has been maintained quite well, so I am comfortable. Most of our foodstuffs and all of our liquor is imported. The food is all tinned, unfortunately, because we cannot risk building lifetime dosage to dangerous levels if we are to remain in our jobs for any length of time. So we cannot eat local food or drink local water. Dallas’s water supplies are from lakes, so there is a definite radiation problem, persisting even now. In the summer, long-half-life particles blow up from the south, and in the winter they come down from the north.

  There is one saving grace here, though, and that is the people themselves. These are terribly determined people here. In fact, we have encountered few Americans who have not responded to the catastrophe in some positive manner. For example, Dallas normally works a six-day week now, and goes from eight to six. I have met some of the bravest and most wonderful people I have ever known here. I will never forget their calm courage in the face of death, nor their willingness to expose themselves to danger for the sake of others.

  During the flu, for example, our main problem was keeping victims isolated from people who wanted to help them and were willing to endanger themselves to do so. At present we are turning away three-quarters of the applicants for paramedical training, because the teaching staff must concentrate on doctors. People in the paramedic job are exposed to contagious disease and radiation as a matter of routine. Another example of the high morale involves farmers. When we must condemn produce—which happens less and less often now, I’m glad to say—you would expect anger on the part of the farmers. We have come to anticipate complete cooperation. When crops are suspect, the farmers themselves are the first to tell us. “I got in a thunderstorm on the way in, looked like it had blown up from the south,” they might say, and assist us in checking the shipment for hot particles. They can be trusted to give the food to the disposal teams for burial if necessary. And these are all people who have known starvation in the most personal terms.

  I recall that we sent out an emergency call for cleanup teams after the hot thunderstorm in April of 1989. There were hot spots all over Dallas. And by ’89 it was all long-half-life stuff. This radiation was not going to dissipate. We got more volunteers than we had gear for them to wear. People who were already triaged volunteered to work without protective clothing, which was in short supply. I think that the city was probably saved as a viable human community by the men and women who gave what remained of their lives during that cleanup.

  Fortunately, most of the local thunderstorms are generated over Oklahoma and North Texas, so a hot storm coming up from the south is rare. There is the problem of radiation being carried down from the Dakotas, but this is not too severe. Most of that flow is southeastward, and affects the Midwest.

  [NOTE: At this point Mr. Shandy’s breakfast arrived. This is the morning menu of a British Relief officer: one fried egg, one sausage, two kipper fillets, one bowl of oatmeal with cream, one small pot of tea, and one tablet of vitamin C.

  Mr. Shandy ate his breakfast and made two telephone calls, one to the Reliefs human resources pool requesting a Spanish-speaking interpreter to accompany him on a field trip, and another to the Centers for Disease Control to inquire whether or not they were ready to try some newly designed kits intended for testing whole blood for contamination by what he referred to as “exotics.” He did not offer to expand on the content of these phone calls. After his breakfast he asked us what we most wanted to know from him.

  We requested that he tell us of his experiences in and around San Antonio.]

  I was a part of the South Texas Emergency Relief Project in May of ’89. There were many people living between Houston and San Antonio who had been out of touch with the outside world for seven months. As it did throughout the country, the electromagnetic pulse destroyed most of the televisions and radios, along with computers, radar stations, medical equipment, and car ignitions.

  Add the bombing of San Antonio to the general chaos, and one can see that the conditions would be truly terrifying.

  Initial reaction in rural communities was to go toward the cities. We must recall that in less than a second a silent and invisible EMP burst had plunged people from the twentieth century to the Middle Ages. So they knew absolutely nothing of what was happening beyond the borders of their own towns. People who could have direct-dialed Tokyo one second could not telephone the county sheriff the next. The disorientation was extreme. So they went toward the source of communications, which was the cities. But in South Texas this was a terrible error, because San Antonio was in flames. In fact, the city survivors were streaming into the countryside—not many from San Antonio, but hordes from Austin because of the fire and Houston because of fallout. Many Houstonians, in their confusion, went toward San Antonio, not away from it. Apparently the traffic jams to the east and north of the city were so bad that escape westward was the only alternative. The sheer massiveness of the attack on San Antonio created damage and injuries previously unexpected. There were large numbers of people with sight loss due to flash effect even miles from Ground Zero. Others suffered not only burns but toxic reactions to synthetic-fiber clothing that had melted into their skin. Like the other cities, San Antonio was struck with airbursts and groundbursts, creating a massive dust cloud. The large number of huge weapons detonating simultaneously at first blew immense quantities of dust into the air, then created updrafts that drew it upward where it mingled with particles created in the fission phase of the explosions.

  Conditions in such places as Lavaca, Gonzales, and DeWitt counties were appalling. The populations had quadrupled in the first days after the war. Gasoline and food ran out very quickly.

  Radiation sickness was virtually epidemic and was followed shortly by all the diseases we have come to associate with large groups of undernourished, debilitated people.

  Although we arrived in Dallas three months after Warday, it was not until three more months had passed that we were organized enough to arrange an overflight of San Antonio and South Texas. We were in an SC-7 Skyvan loaded with extra fuel tanks in the rear of the passenger compartment so that we could accomplish a round trip to and from Dallas if ground conditions were too unstable to permit us to land. You must recall that we had been broadcasting into this area on all available bands for some months, and getting no response. Military recon flights indicated an extensive population. So we did not know what to expect. The Commissioner wished to determine whether or not to extend British Military Rule to the area. This has not been done in many
parts of the United States, but it is generally considered for areas where the population is in a state of confusion or upheaval, and the local authorities are not able to cope.

  We flew as far south as Seguin, which is thirty miles from San Antonio. To avoid ground radiation we did not go below three thousand feet, but rather observed through binoculars. Seguin proved to be largely burnt.

  At that time I got a look at the condition of San Antonio. I remember being astonished that this little city had been so terribly devastated on Warday. People had hardly even heard of it in Britain. One would have expected Los Angeles or even Houston before San Antonio. Of course, it has since come out that a good part of the planned Soviet attack didn’t go off, so in a sense San Antonio was simply unlucky. The Soviets had given it first-strike priority because of the extensive U.S. Air Force repair and refitting facilities there, and the huge complex of military hospitals, the atomic supplies dump at Medina Base, and the presence of a mechanized army that could have been used to preserve order across the whole of the Southwest as well as seal the Mexican border.

  Perhaps, also, they knew that American intelligence did not expect this particular attack, and considered that there was value in surprise.

  It is no wonder that the American military prohibits photography in such places. The effect on national and indeed worldwide morale would be very negative. From a distance there is nothing to see but the black landscape and the gleaming fused earth around the Ground Zero points. The land is mostly flat, with some rolling hills to the north. Although I never went to San Antonio before the war and had never met anyone from there, my first experience of that blasted corpse was, quite frankly, shattering. I sat at the window of that plane unable to move, unable to speak.

  The cabin was silent. After a time we simply flew away.

  We soon found ourselves over the town of Yoakum, Texas, which showed on our charts as a population area of approximately eight thousand people.

  There were two tent communities to the south of the town. The fields roundabout were planted in corn and various vegetables, but looked to be in poor condition due to post-blast weather effects.

  There were numerous horses about, many of them hitched to cars and pickup trucks from which the engines had been removed to lighten them.

  Our appearance caused a great deal of excitement in the town.

  People rushed out of houses and buildings waving sheets or articles of clothing or just their arms. We were able to land on State Highway 77 on the outskirts of town. There was a local airfield, but the runway was too cracked to justify the risk of using it, and the road seemed solid.

  The first to meet us were a man and a woman on horseback.

  They had rifles in holsters on their saddles, and as they came to a stop they drew them. I’ll never forget the first question, from that lean, bewhiskered man with the hollow eyes: “Y’all from Russia?”

  They thought they had lost the war. This was, we were to find, generally the assumption in isolated populations. I explained that we were British. We were at once escorted into town. We had various emergency medicines, and our orderlies soon set up an aid station with the equipment we had brought. Our station was placed in the showroom of a local Ford dealership, the Wendell Motor Company. This offered us a large floor space and limited access via two doors. At the same time, the people waiting outside could see for themselves that we were working as quickly as we could. Ampicillin, keflex, and tetracycline were our main supplies, along with morphia and heroin for pain sufferers. We also carried cyanide and copies of the euthanasia rules. Cultural resistance to this program is very strong, especially in rural America. But people usually come to understand that truly unspeakable suffering ought to be relieved by death if the victim has no scruples of conscience, or is indeed begging for it.

  On that first day in Yoakum, our three doctors and six medical orderlies treated 211 of the thousands who presented themselves.

  The actual local population was approximately fifteen thousand at that time. In my estimation, there were no able-bodied individuals.

  It was fortunate that we brought the four soldiers, because violent disagreements kept breaking out among the patients, especially as to whose dying children were to have the first chance at the antibiotics.

  On that day we performed sixteen pediatric euthanasias, for the most part on children suffering both pain and brain damage from radiation or other poisoning.

  We found numerous cases of mental breakdown. Paranoia, schizophrenia, catatonic withdrawal were all present in the population. Our psychological pharmacopoeia consisted of a little Thorazine and Valium. We dispensed what Thorazine we could to the schizophrenics. We recommended that the mentally ill who were unable to function be euthanized, with the consent of their families. Nobody volunteered their psychotic relatives at first, but the prospect of being free from the burden of their presence caused people, as is usually the case, to come to us in the night to get the cyanide capsules.

  We also faced numerous cases of partially stabilized radiation sickness. These individuals were usually covered with sores from secondary infections and were in great agony. Upon being told of the hopelessness of their situation, most of them willingly accepted the death alternative.

  Because of their oaths or religious objections, many British doctors have refused to dispense euthanasia treatment, so this aspect of the program was left to me. I spent my days living out tragedies with the victims, and my nights in dreams of indescribable horror, where I heard them calling me from the grave, and imagined that I had accidentally buried them alive. But it wasn’t true, I was not the shadow of death. To these people, with their burns and their sickness and their tormented bodies, I was mercy.

  Among the problems with which we could not cope were the various parasitic diseases. They are not much of a problem in Britain, and we simply failed to anticipate their presence here. Hookworm, tapeworm, ascaris, and giardiasis were the most serious of these. These diseases were in adults unattractive and debilitating, but in children they were devastating. The acuteness of the problem can be realized when one reflects that these people, forced to live on a below-starvation-level diet, one almost absent of proteins, were being consumed from within by their own worm loads. We instructed on the use of saline enemas, developed by the CDC as a means of temporarily reducing infestation, especially in the cases of hookworm and tapeworm. But the only real relief, namely proper medication and a good, clean source of food and water, simply was not available at this time.

  Our contamination specialist surveyed the area in some detail, and found it seriously affected by radiation. Most of the population was radiation-poisoned to some degree at least. There was also malnutrition. Only a few children were free of rickets. Pellagra, the old curse of the South, had reasserted itself.

  We realized, during that first day, that we were in the presence of a whole world, small though it was, that was dying before our eyes. There were only two babies under the age of six months. One had been blinded and had lost a hand, and the other was suffering from a severe systemic infection.

  The county sheriff, Mr. Weaver, reported that they buried five or six people a day, generally in shallow graves in a field near the old town graveyard. The local Catholic priest, Father Menendez, and the Baptist minister, Mr. Harold, officiated at the brief ceremonies.

  Our one overwhelming wish was to radio out and somehow get great loads of food and clothing and, above all, medicines for these people. But we knew exactly what would come: little, and too late.

  Instead we settled on a recommendation, which we presented to the sheriff and the two religious leaders the next day, that the whole population start moving north. A hundred miles closer to Dallas there were communities that were still very much intact.

  We also offered to send what supplies we could down from Dallas, but we couldn’t provide much.

  The situation was stark. If they stayed, all of these people were going to die. As the sheriff pointed out, a l
ot of them would also perish on the journey.

  After we had dispensed all of our drugs and held as many information meetings as we could on every subject from personal hygiene to the three signs of terminal malnutrition, we took our leave of the people of Yoakum and returned to Dallas.

  Eventually a column of these refugees did set out. Along the way they had lost about two thousand stragglers, with five thousand dead or unable to continue. Only six thousand people arrived in North Texas, of whom three thousand were placed in isolation due to their infectious disease status. All three thousand of these eventually died.

  Of the fifteen thousand people alive in Yoakum on the day we visited, approximately two thousand remain alive today.

  POLL

  What We Expect, What We Fear: American Opinion in 1993

  About six weeks ago there arrived in the offices of the Herald News a familiar brown manila envelope that brought cheers when it was opened.

  It was a production of the Consolidated American Polling Group, made up of former staff members of the Harris, Gallup, and Sindlinger organizations. After two years of reorganization and preparation, they were finally beginning to distribute national polls once again. Two documents were enclosed, one a poll of attitudes about the present state of the country, and the other concerning future expectations.

  We will be presenting sections of these two polls throughout the book at points where they seem germane.

  The samples used in the surveys each consisted of more than 1,400 American adults eighteen years of age and older. The samples are statistically representative of the nation in terms of geographic and demographic design. For comparison purposes, 1992 data are given where appropriate.