In riveting and revelatory detail, Aftermath documents the ways in which wars have transformed the terrain of the battlefield into landscapes of enduring terror and memory: 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 1950s, 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 biologic and psychological devastation; in Kuwait, where terrifyingly sophisticated warfare was followed by the Sisyphean task of making an uninhabitable desert capable of sustaining life.Only now, at century's end, can we begin to see how the destructive, often lethal remnants of past wars remain deeply, fatally embedded in the present. Read Less