BY MICHAEL WALLS
On the night of October 31, members of the U.S military, police officers, medical experts and federal workers gathered near the city of San Diego to carry out their annual counter-terrorism training session. Designed in previous years to test both the protocol and training of military personnel and first responders within the context of a hypothetical terrorist attack, the session featured a significant alteration, in that the participants were forced to contend with a very different kind of threat: zombies.
Designed as a collaborative undertaking between Halo Corporations, a private security firm, and the U.S military, the training session was carried out to resemble actual military exercises which would be undertaken in the event of a real “zombie apocalypse”. Speaking out regarding the legitimacy of the event, which instigated both criticism and incredulity amongst the general public, Halo Corporation President Brad Barker said, “This is a very real exercise. This is not some type of big costume party.” According to The Huffington Post, the training session was centered around a scenario in which a VIP and his personnel are surrounded by zombies, and must fight their way out.
The logic behind such a strange military exercise is that being prepared for the “zombie apocalypse” can also prepare people for other, more plausible disasters. Emphasizing this point, Barker would state, “no one knows what the zombies will do in our scenario, but quite frankly no one knows what a terrorist will do. If a law enforcement officer sees a zombie and says, ‘Freeze, get your hands in the air!’ What’s the zombie going to do? He’s going to moan at you. If someone on PCP or some other psychotic drug is told that, the truth is he’s not going to react to you.” Continuing from his previous point, Barker would go on to state, “Everything that will be simulated at this event has already happened, it just hasn’t happened all at once on the same night. But the training is very real, it just happens to be the bad guys we’re having a little fun with.”
This exercise serves as the most recent of a number of government-sponsored events alluding to an impending zombie-related disaster. Prior to the activities of the thirty-first, the most prominent of such events were those carried out last year by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, more commonly known as the CDC, which involved a media campaign of both television broadcasts and messages on the organization’s official website, which detailed both the symptoms of, as well as preventative measures to be taken against, infection by a zombie virus.
Despite subsequent announcements by the CDC which proclaimed the announcements to be nothing more than an advertising campaign, designed to encourage preparation for natural disasters amongst the general public, many were left with concerns regarding the extent to which the U.S government was preparing for a zombie-related crisis. For these individuals, who claim that such preparation serves as evidence of the validity of the threat posed by zombies to the general public, the exercises carried out on the night of the thirty-first, rather than provide a feeling of reassurance regarding the nation’s preparation for more plausible scenarios, are likely only to ellicit more pronounced feelings of anxiety.
