Aftermath: The Remnants of War. Random House, 1998
“The soldiers moved on. The war moved on. The bombs stayed.”
-Donovan Webster, Aftermath
In July 2015, seven farms in Northern France were quietly ordered to destroy their entire harvest without selling it. The cause, they were told, was contamination from heavy metals and toxic compounds in the soil. Farmers lost hundreds of thousands of Euros of milk, grain, and meat. The contamination came from nearly a ton of unexploded World War I ammunition that had remained dormant under the soil for nearly a century. After reading Donovan Webster’s Aftermath (Random House, 1996), these farmers may strike you as the lucky ones. After all, the bombs that destroyed their crops were discovered and safely disposed of. If a plough blade had so much as grazed the firing mechanism on one of these bombs, the headlines would have told a very different story.
In Aftermath, Webster provides a war story unlike any other. Even twenty years after its publication, it provides a critical understanding of the consequences of 20th century armed conflict. Unexploded ordnance and contamination from chemical weapons will remain long after the wars themselves are forgotten. In Aftermath, Webster presents a series of compelling narratives from France, Russia, Vietnam, Iraq, and the United States that all tell a single story: War is hell. And that hell doesn’t just end once the treaty is signed.
After over fifty years, the démineurs (literally, “de-miners”) who remove explosives from French forests are still hard at work. The statistics can be terrifying; the Départment du Déminage in France alone destroys 900 tons of discovered munitions annually. Some of the largest ordnance has yet to work its way back to the surface; when a thousand-pound shell from a World War I German Paris Gun was fired, it would crash back into the earth at twice the speed of sound. The Départment estimates that even after a century many shells are likely still 60 feet underground. The smaller munitions are actually even more dangerous; a mechanical sugar beet harvester will pick up grenades as easily as beets, with deadly results for the farmers operating the machinery. One démineur Webster encounters expresses the difficulty of the situation. “I doubt we’ll ever clear these forests completely,” he says. “We haven’t even gotten to the big shells yet. They’re still deep in the ground…any dreams France has of farming this land in the next century, they are just that: dreams.”
Aftermath doesn’t delve deeply into the science of radioactivity, or the studies on the lasting effects of compounds like the defoliant Agent Orange. It focuses instead on the consequences of using these weapons, and on understanding what happens after the military packs up and moves on. Though Webster arrives in Vietnam a generation after the U.S military stopped using Agent Orange in the country, he find thousands of children born with severe birth defects simply because their mothers were exposed to the chemical. The book can be difficult to read; Webster doesn’t shy away from descriptions of the horrors of war, and deaths by gas, shell, mine and artillery are a constant presence.
In the United States, Donovan focuses on the controversies that surround stockpiling and testing weapons. He concludes by warning of the risks surrounding the then-imminent activation of an incinerator at Tooele Army Depot, where the depot’s stockpile of chemical weapons would be destroyed. Critics argued that if the incinerator’s safety measures should fail, flaws in its design could unleash chemical weapons on the surrounding area. Webster’s dire warnings are undercut by the lack of historical evidence; the incinerator shut down in 2013 after over fifteen years of successful operation. The book warns of the death and destruction an incinerator malfunction would cause, but these warnings lack the gravity they would have had in 1996.
What never changes is the understanding that the actual war is only the beginning of the problem. In France, Russia, Vietnam, and the United States, the full consequences of war have taken a century to reveal themselves. Though not all Webster’s predictions for the future were on target, the concerns he raises remain urgent. The problems of France today are the problems of Syria a generation from now. In that light, Aftermath remains a crucial part of our awareness of the consequences of war, and it remains relevant even twenty years after publication.