12/9/2023 0 Comments Aftermath bookThe chapter on Kuwait has a lot of information about the state of mine warfare in the world at the time, though the focus is on the mines laid during the Gulf War. It is very hard to comprehend and picture mentally, this book helps give you an idea of that scale. The number of artillery shells fired in WWI, the number of soldiers that died in WWII, and the number of bombs dropped by the US on Vietnam is staggering. The chapters on France, Russian, and Vietnam helps give the reader an idea of the scale of those conflicts. It addresses unexploded WWI ordnance in France, the untouched skeletons of WWII German soldiers still laying outside of Stalingrad, unexploded ordnance and the effect of "The American War" in Vietnam, mine clearing in Kuwait following the Gulf War, and finally ends with an epilogue covering the disposal of chemical weapons and the effects of nuclear testing in the Nevada desert. This book was highly informative and engaging. I read this book as supplementary material to Dan Carlin's excellent Hardcore History Podcast, specifically his series "Blueprints for Armageddon" and "Ghosts of the OstFront", in which he references and recommends this book. 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 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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