American Soldier Zombie Tales: The Desperate, the Drafted, and the Dead
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores an under-examined subgenre of the scholarly zombie canon: soldiers who have returned as the undead. The primary theme of this paper is that zombies are an apt metaphor for military soldiers. Indeed, throughout the history of U.S. warring actions, soldiers often seem to be treated like faceless, disposable units sent to enforce the will of the country. So stated, our work explores the warrior zombie in literature and film, from three distinct time periods: the US Indian Wars, World War I, and the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts. The specific works examined include two short literary works, “Ghost Dance” by Sherman Alexie and “Herbert West: Reanimator” by H.P. Lovecraft, and one film, “Homecoming” written by Sam Hamm and directed by Joe Dante. We contend that the military zombie is a metaphor for persons conscripted into combat against their own social, political, and economic wills.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".