The Battle of Hope is a fictional battle from the novel World War Z, fought in the town of Hope, New Mexico. This was the first serious engagement after the Great Panic, utilizing the new weapons and tactics specifically designed to fight the zombie horde.

The events of the battle are recounted by Todd Wainio, one of author Max Brooks' fictional interviewees. Wainio was also a participant in the disastrous Battle of Yonkers seven years earlier, and the later drive eastward to reclaim the continental US.

Prelude

Fall of the Eastern United States, and Afterwards

The catastrophic failure of the Battle of Yonkers brought the Great Panic to unparalleled heights. Yonkers was intended to be a highly publicized display of the full technological might of the United States armed forces against the zombie hordes. Instead, due to a combination of poor military planning and the sheer weight of numbers of the zombies (upwards of 8 million zombies which were the infected former population of New York City) led to the the technologically inferior zombies achieving a complete victory against the American military, which was broadcast on live television. As if that was not enough to spread an atmosphere of complete chaos across the country, the irresponsible mass media outlets replayed recorded footage of Yonkers endlessly on television for days, causing mass hysteria. Organized response to the zombies, and control of the country by the federal government, effectively collapsed. Slightly less than two weeks after the catastrophe at Yonkers, the US military adopted the "Redeker Plan" which had been formulated in South Africa to survive the zombie onslaught: pull back all surviving military assets to as "Safe Zone" defined by geographic barriers and consolidate their position. All of United States territory east of the Rocky Mountains was abandoned by the US military in a massive retreat, and the federal government relocated to Honolulu. The sitting United States President was incapacitated from the stress of the disaster (possibly dying), and was succeeded by his Vice President (a former military general, heavily implied to be Colin Powell. With military and government authority over most of the United States withdrawn, the media again proved destructive by constantly running the message to "Go North!", because zombies freeze in winter. However, all that was supplied was this sound bite: no information about what survival gear or cold weather advise was supplied, and 11 million froze to death in the Canadian subarctic that winter.

For the next year, the zombies seemed on the verge of becoming the dominant life form on Earth. The defenses in the mountain passes of the Rocky Line were barely holding, and meanwhile all of the western states between the mountains and the Pacific were a war zone. The concentrated forces of the US military were eventually able to sweep out the zombies and stabilize the Safe Zone, after over a year of heavy fighting. In the meantime, apart from several pockets of survivors (kept supplied from the air) everything east of the Rocky Mountains was completely under the "control" of the zombies, which now numbered over 200 million in the continental United States (25 million of which were originally refugees from Latin American states).

It was fully seven years after the beginning of the Zombie War that the United Nations begin organizing a counter-attack. In the intervening years, after the Safe Zones across the world were stabilized, the remnants of the world's governments began rebuilding their economic bases from what resources were in their respective Safe Zones, to equip new armies and train them in new tactics which would prevent another disaster like Yonkers. In the historic Saratoga Conference, held on the USS Saratoga, the US President urged the gathered representatives of the United Nations that a global counter-attack should be launched. Many argued that the Safe Zones had been more or less stabilized by this point, and they could simply wait out the zombie crisis indefinitely, or until the zombies eventually decomposed after many years to the point that they rotted to pieces and posed no more threat. But the United States' President urged that if humanity simply let the zombies win, if the nations of the world simply cowered in their Safe Zones, they would be no better off than when humans were apes hiding in trees from lions. Humanity's confidence in itself had been taken away by the zombies, and they needed to win it back. Otherwise, if another zombie outbreak ever occurred, the same mistakes and fears would rule over the human population all over again. The votes were cast, and the order was given to attack.

The New Model Army: What Went Right

The United States Army had been completely redesigned between the Great Panic and the reclamation march. The retooled force was optimized to fight the zombie threat rather than living, armed human beings. Since the enemy had no weapons, equipment, supply lines, leadership, intelligence-gathering capabilities, or sites of military importance, the Army needed to be highly streamlined in response.

Force elements were assigned cost-to-kill ratios and deployed, altered, or mothballed accordingly. Those units and weapons, such as infantry and semi-automatic rifles, which could kill the most zombies at the lowest cost with the greatest efficiency (referred to as the Resource-to-Kill Ratio) were given prominent roles; indeed, riflemen formed the vast bulk of the new fighting forces. Technologically advanced weapons such as F-22 fighter jets, which had limited applications against hordes of zombies were retired.

The standard infantry uniform underwent a drastic overhaul. As described by Max Brooks, the living dead hunted more by hearing and smell than by sight, and they had an uncanny ability to discern uninfected humans from their own numbers. As a result, camouflage became totally useless and even a hindrance when it reduced soldiers' abilities to spot each other. Accordingly, the uniforms were replaced with solid-blue BDUs, interwoven with "bite-proof" threads to reduce the incidence of infection in hand-to-hand combat. According to Todd Wainio, the new uniforms lent the war effort certain Civil War connotations as living humans in blue uniforms faced off against ashen-skinned, "gray" zombies.

The Army's main battle rifle was replaced for the first time since the Vietnam War. The M16 rifle and variants such as the M4 carbine were effective against targets which could run and hide and return fire; against slow-moving zombies with small kill zones (their heads only), full automatic fire and burst fire were merely wasteful. In addition, the M16 family of weapons required a great deal of maintenance in the field, which in turn required strong supply lines. The new SIR, or Standard Infantry Rifle, was semi-automatic and heavier than an M16, but it was extremely reliable—no jams were reported during the entire Battle of Hope. The SIR fired a 5.56mm cartridge called a PIE, or Pyrotechnic Incendiary Round, which featured a frangible bullet with a phosphorus element that would sterilize a zombie's brain tissue upon penetration. Since the brains were the most contaminated parts of a zombie's body, the incendiary round permitted greater ease in battle sanitation.

For close combat situations, the army utilized a hand-to-hand weapon called the Standard Army Entrenchment Tool, which was nicknamed the "Lobotimizer" or "Lobo" for short. It was a cross between a shovel and a double headed axe which was could be constructed from recycled steel.

The Battle

The Battle of Hope was the beginning of the United States' counter-attack against the zombies, and as such it did not actually have a strategic objective and the goal was not immediately to recapture any territory. The battle was intended to test the new model army developed by the United States specifically for fighting the zombies, as a prelude to the eventual campaign to reconquer all lost territory between the Rockies and the Atlantic. The battle was also intended to restore the morale and confidence of humanity: although military authorities claimed that Hope, New Mexico was chosen because of its tactically advantageous low rolling plains (making it easy to shoot zombies arriving from miles around in every direction), Todd Waino expressed his belief that Hope was chosen as the site of the counter-attack purely for its name, "Hope", to improve humanity's morale after a victory achieved there.

The architects of the Battle of Hope had learned a great deal from the disaster at Yonkers. Rather than deploying soldiers in traditional formations, they arranged the soldiers at Hope in a formation called a Raj-Singh square (after an Indian general described earlier in the book). "Rear-echelon" components were located at the center of the square, while the perimeter consisted of two lines of riflemen. The two lines allowed continuous fire even while soldiers changed magazines, and the radial nature of the formation left no flank to be attacked.

The battle began at dawn, when the formation was assembled and spotters detected a horde of zombies within range. A "Primary Enticement Mechanism" was engaged, consisting of Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" played very loudly. This served the dual purpose of attracting the zombies (who, in the absence of immediate prey, would seek out any stimulus) and bolstering the courage and morale of the living troops. Meanwhile, the moans of the zombies in the immediate vicinity attracted other zombies, who would in turn moan loudly at the appearance of prey, continuing in a series throughout the countryside until a massive "chain swarm" descended upon the US army's position.

Combatants were expected to target zombies, fire, and acquire new targets in one-second cycles until the entire horde had been neutralized. Ammunition supplies were replenished by reserve soldiers colloquially called "Sandlers." Primary combatants were watched closely for signs of fatigue; whenever one soldier was seen to be firing too slowly, he was instructed to "take five" while a Sandler filled his place.

By the end of the battle, which lasted through the night and into the next morning, the entire Raj-Singh square had been encircled by an impassable wall of destroyed zombies. Armored vehicles and bulldozers were required to clear a path for the victorious soldiers. Through the entire battle, there no living casualties are described. Zombies never even came into physical contact with the soldiers until the shooting had stopped, and a path was being forged out of the mass of dead zombie bodies. A handful of zombies were still not destroyed, instead simply buried underneath piles of other zombies, and at this point infantrymen switched to using their "Lobos" to finish these stragglers off.

Thousands of zombies were destroyed, and apparently not a single human casualty was sustained. As the sound of Lobos cracking apart Undead skulls reverberated over the mountains of corpses, it was clear to all soldiers present that it was the beginning of the end: humanity, not zombies, would be the dominant life-form on planet Earth.