![]() ![]() ![]() I am particularly grateful for the information he provides in this section of the book. He visits the Ossuary of Verdun and humbly witnesses the devastation brought upon the degradation of human spirit in the war. He visits places where people are prohibited to walk because of munitions and the unearthed remains of the fallen. He visits Verdun and is allowed to see sections of France that are uninhabitable more than 100 years since the conflict started. After all, the author makes it his quest to find out what remains of some of history’s bloodiest conflicts. Aftermath excavates our century's darkest history, revealing that the destruction of the past remains deeply, inextricably embedded in the present. In riveting and revelatory detail, Aftermath documents the ways in which wars have transformed the terrain of the battlefield into landscapes of memory and enduring terror: in France, where millions of acres of farmland are cordoned off to all but a corps of demolition experts responsible for the undetonated bombs and mines of World War I that are now rising up in fields, gardens, and backyards in a sixty-square-mile area outside Stalingrad that was a cauldron of destruction in 1941 and is today an endless field of bones in the Nevada deserts, where America waged a hidden nuclear war against itself in the 1950's, the results of which are only now becoming apparent in Vietnam, where a nation's effort to remove the physical detritus of war has created psychological and genetic devastation in Kuwait, where terrifyingly sophisticated warfare was followed by the Sisyphean task of making an uninhabitable desert capable of sustaining life. That would change, of course, if the design flaws in the Utah nerve-gas incinerator and our arrangements for storing nuclear bomb waste turn out, after all, to pose something besides “acceptable risk.In riveting and revelatory detail, Aftermath documents the ways in which wars have transformed the terrain of the battlefield into landscapes of memory and enduring terror: in France, where millions of acres of farmland are cordoned off to all but a corps of demolition experts responsible for the undetonated bombs and mines of World War I that are now rising up in fields, gardens, and backyards in a sixty-square-mile area outside Stalingrad that was a cauldron of destruction in 1941 and is today an endless field of bones in the Nevada deserts, where America waged a hidden nuclear war against itself in the 1950's, the results of which are only now becoming apparent in Vietnam, where a nation's effort to remove the physical detritus of war has created psychological and genetic devastation in Kuwait, where terrifyingly sophisticated warfare was followed by the Sisyphean task of making an uninhabitable desert capable of sustaining life.Īftermath excavates our century's darkest history, revealing that the destruction of the past remains deeply, inextricably embedded in the present. That is what happens when you have wars on your land, not on the land of your enemies.”Ĭitizens of a country with the most advanced war technology in history, we have never been on the receiving end of such a thing, let alone lived and died with it for generations after. Surveying the still-unhealed Flanders plain, he remarked: “Decades of rebuilding. He remains crippled by mustard gas.Īnother demineur said something that must catch at the conscience of any American. ![]() Not long after Webster’s visit, Belot, who spoke of the buried explosives as “asleep” and demonstrated the pains taken to keep them from “waking up,” awakened an 80-year-old shell. “We have plenty of time,” Henri Belot, a section chief, remarked when he and his men knocked off for lunch. Near Verdun alone, an estimated 12 million shells remain. No billions are available to remove the mines on the other hand, thousands of plastic limbs are being turned out at $38 apiece. In his vividly reported, dismaying book, Donovan Webster charts the growing horror of the “aftermath” of his title.Įach of the six chapters is a visit: to France, where sappers are still digging up and dying from the bombs and shells of the First World War to Kuwait, where 4,000 technicians sift sand in a billion-dollar effort to disarm 7 million mines to Vietnam, where much of the same work is done involuntarily by peasants who then arrive legless at the hospitals. Unfortunately it is a lesson ignored, and the ignoring has had ever more terrible consequences as war succeeded war through the 20th century. When you finish playing, you have to put everything away. Apart from the fact that they’ll always want to, it is not entirely absurd to think that in some fashion play violence eases the other kind.Įither way, it does offer one valuable lesson to real war. ![]() There is also quite a lot to be said for it. There may be something to be said against little boys playing soldiers, cowboys-and-Indians, and other kinds of war. ![]()
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