It is definitely an underlooked aspect of war, and his book is a great introduction to the subject. I learned some very interesting things from this book, and I like the format of chronologically covering from ww1 to modern wars and their differing geographic legacy.

For Vietnam I recommend The Hill Fights: The first battle of Khe Sanh. If you’re interested in World War one Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel is an excellent read. I will also suggest reading Guy Sajer’s book, The Forgotten Soldier. I’m going to do something different and suggest listening to Dan Carlin’s excellent pod cast on the history of World War One, Blueprint for Armageddon. Normally, I end these reviews with a suggestion for another book. Ultimately, I think this was the purpose of this book. Excavations of battlefields from the past seldom reveal the carnage of the 20th century. The author makes a hell of a point about how we treat each other and ultimately the land where these events takes place. You might be quite surprised by some of the locations. They live it every day.Īt this point, I’ll let you find out where the author goes next.

His descriptions of land that was once part of a French plantation are vivid. The book continues to Vietnam to the place where one of my great mentors served: Khe Sanh. Those who do continue to farm stack bones high as the Earth slowly reveals its history And in many places the land cannot be used again as the munitions found there are still dangerous. These units were annihilated, some historians even use the word vanished, to describe what happened to them in the soul crushing Soviet counter attack. In an astonishing moment the guide stops and informs the author that he found the artifacts and remains of Italian and Romanian units in this area assigned to the German 6th army. The author then travels to Stalingrad with a guide who can tell you where units of both Russian and German armies camped at the height of the battle. It truly shows the hellacious nature of the conflict and the results of man’s inhumanity to man. 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. 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.

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