“Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.”         —Charles Peters

ROLLING FORK— Well, I’ve got to say I certainly am relieved. If there is one thing I hate, it is reanimated, flesh-eating corpses marauding around the countryside.

Zombies. Just not much to like about a zombie. Ugly. Bound to smell just awful. And they want to eat you, or at very least bite you and turn you into one of them. Nope, not much to like about a zombie.

What’s that, you say?

There is no such thing as a zombie? All the George A. Romero movies and “The Walking Dead” on TV notwithstanding, there are no zombies?

Oh, yeah? Well, there might be, someday. Some meteor might hit somewhere carrying, I don’t know, spores or something that seep into cemeteries. Or, some experiment to create, oh, I don’t know, some new super bug to be used as a military weapon could go horribly wrong and reanimate the dead.

Oh, yeah, it could happen.

But not to worry.

Even if it does, the Pentagon has a plan. No, really, it does. Last week, “Foreign Policy” magazine, a very well-respected publication, featured an in-depth article detailing something named CONOP 8888, which describes  this country’s official plan for dealing with almost any sort of imaginable zombie apocalypse. 

No, I am not kidding. But since I am just a guy writing a column in Rolling Fork, Miss., that is not the remarkable thing. The remarkable thing is that apparently they—the Pentagon powers that be—aren’t, either.

The United States Department of Defense has developed and distributed a plan of response  for “counter-zombie dominance.”
In the oh-so-dry language utilized in all military publications, CONOP 8888 reads, in part: “Given the rapidity at which zombie outbreaks spread, decisive, overwhelming, and possibly unilateral military force may be required to negate the zombie threat.”

It says the military would not fool around and would “eradicate zombie threats to human safety using military capabilities—neutralization of Zombie capabilities through denial, deception, disruption, degradation or destruction (military manuals are nothing without alliteration).

Well, I would hope so. I mean, these are man-eating zombies we are talking about. I sure hope the Pentagon’s plan wouldn’t be to send out some National Guard unit that only gets to fire their rifles once a year at Camp Shelby. Hell, send tanks after them. I know that zombies may be bad, but I don’t think they’ll cause a lot more trouble after a tank runs over them—their heads, of course, tanks running over their heads.

Yeah, that would be a good idea—tanks. Zombies are pretty slow, so it might even be a little like bumper cars for the tank drivers. Don’t run out of gas, though, that wouldn’t be good. I imagine the zombies would be a little teed off seeing all their dead friends dead again.

Now, at this point it strikes me that it might prove helpful for us all to remind ourselves again that outside of Haitian folklore, there are no such things as zombies and that as matter of biological fact, it is a practical impossibility for the dead to become reanimated.

It just doesn’t work that way; when you get dead, you stay dead and there ain’t no walking around looking for snacks.
But despite these inconveniences, and standing as prime example of your tax dollar at work, this country’s military has devised a plan that it says is no joke and a useful training tool to combat zombies.

Now, is there anybody who still wants to argue that we cannot cut the Pentagon budget even just a little bit?

(Ray Mosby is publisher of The Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork.)