The Toxic Landscapes of War

Gregg Mitman looks at the bodily damage that soldiers take home in Joshua Howe and Alexander Lemons’s ‘Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare.’

By Gregg Mitman January 8, 2026

• Environment

• Politics

BULLETS ARE woven into the fabric of the United States. They rip through flesh, shatter bone, fracture relationships, alter and take lives. Every day, Americans, and especially those who serve in the US military, are reminded of this projectile.

Alexander Lemons, a former Marine Corps scout sniper whose training earned him the Hunter of Gunmen title, is no stranger to what bullets do to humans, whether targeted fighters or civilians caught in the cross fire. After four tours in Iraq, Lemons describes himself as someone more comfortable holding a “bolt action rifle than a baby or a Louisville Slugger.” But when he enlisted in the summer of 2002, he did not yet know that firing thousands of rounds in training and on the battlefield would do lasting damage to himself.

Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare (2025), co-authored by Lemons and environmental historian Joshua Howe, demonstrates how a bullet damages both the target and the shooter. Every round that Lemons fired bathed his body in lead. It entered his bloodstream, leached into his bones, and crossed over the blood-brain barrier, impairing his memory and concentration. Each year, the amount of lead used in American-made bullets equals the weight of roughly 85,000 Volkswagens—enough, Howe writes, “to poison every person who has ever lived on planet Earth.”

Lead is only one of the many toxic substances to which Lemons and thousands of other American veterans have been exposed. Warbody is an unflinching examination of war as a toxic Superfund site. Part memoir and part environmental history, the book offers an eye-opening account of life in the military and the pain that American veterans endure in what the authors call the “toxic triangle” of modern warfare—chemical exposure, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and traumatic brain injuries—where synergistic effects are often devastating.

Warbody is also an indictment of a government and nation willing to neglect veteran care. Howe, who teaches at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, first met Lemons in 2012 when the veteran enrolled in his American diplomacy class. However, Lemons lasted only four weeks. Honorably discharged in 2009, he found himself struggling to navigate the complex landscape of illness that his body had become, beset with severe allergies, plantar fasciitis, respiratory infections, insomnia, PTSD, and more. At the VA Medical Center in Portland, physicians diagnosed Lemons with mononucleosis, which he began to call “Long Mono” as symptoms continued to pile up. Desperate for relief, he noticed an ad for a doctor of “integrative medicine.” Though wary of what he saw as the “utter new-age bullshit” saturating Portland, Lemons decided to try it. The ad mentioned “environment” in relation to healing, which resonated with Lemons, who had recently found some solace working on a stream restoration project with a local Audubon chapter.

The doctor, a navy veteran, diagnosed Lemons with mercury poisoning. He dropped out of Reed, had his mercury fillings removed, sought advice online, and began a rigorous regimen of chelation therapy, designed to pull lead, mercury, and other heavy metals out of his body.

Six years later, in 2018, Lemons returned to campus. His brain fog, allergies, and other symptoms had begun to ease. He wanted help making sense of his decade-long illness. Howe, meanwhile, had been exploring the history of the Cold War and how American foreign policy had been shaped by “strategic minerals like manganese, tin, chromium, and cobalt,” and the toxic legacies that the minerals and policies left behind.

Together, Howe and Lemons embarked on what they call a project of “historical anatomy,” using Lemons’s body, its heavy-metal burden, and his memories of service to illuminate the toxic battlefield of modern warfare. Warbody is not only one soldier’s experience but also the collective narrative of countless veterans, a testimony to the long, complicated path toward healing, and an appeal for a more holistic vision of diagnosis and care in treating those who serve in the United States Armed Forces.

Warbody moves between Lemons’s raw descriptions of military life and Howe’s more analytic account of the history of modern warfare. The two narratives run parallel and complement one another, yet their stories remain largely separate. This is not a book about teacher and student or a collaboration that evolves into friendship. We learn little about the relationship between Lemons and Howe. What we find instead is a bold, unapologetic account of the building up, breaking down, and recovery of a soldier’s body relentlessly exposed to the occupational hazards of war. Warbody is a book about bodies and landscapes, their intimate relations, and the uncertainties that plague medical science’s efforts to understand the causal connections between environment and health.

Raised by three Mormon farm women in Utah, Lemons learned sacrifice at an early age. As a military recruit, he sacrificed his body to the brutal regimen of physical training, blood draws, vaccinations, and chemical contaminants that proliferate on military bases, aircraft carriers, and battleships. In the early chapters of Warbody, a haunting detachment pervades Lemons’s descriptions of his body: it is a thing, a worker ant, a cog in an organic killing machine.

As his memoir unfolds, Lemons’s body becomes a kind of environmental sentinel. Through a fine-tuned awareness of his surroundings, honed as an expert sniper, Lemons makes visible the countless pesticides, petroleum pollutants, lead particles, uranium-depleted munitions, and sarin-fighting drugs, among other toxic substances, to which his body was exposed in the theater of the Iraq War. The health impacts of such exposures did not register at the time. Nor did the military pay much attention to them. Only in post-deployment, as his body began to fail him and his mind became fogged, did Lemons—with the help of Howe, a doctor of integrative medicine, and a do-it-yourself approach to self-care—begin to connect the dots between living and working in a world of toxic exposures and their uncertain side effects.

Howe deploys his skills as an environmental historian to situate Lemons’s body, symptoms, and trauma within a powerful and provocative ecological history of modern warfare: Chlorine gas settled into the trenches and soldiers’ lungs during the First World War, spawning new forms of psychological trauma. Kuwaiti oil fields set ablaze during the first Gulf War (captured as hell on earth in Werner Herzog’s 1992 film Lessons of Darkness) released so much particulate matter that temperatures in the Gulf region plummeted an average of four to six degrees Celsius, sparked a surge of respiratory ailments, and rained down acid on people, plants, and animals. Coupled with large doses of bug-killing pesticides, a nerve-gas prophylactic, and the jet fuel JP-8, the fires formed a chemical cocktail whose synergistic effects may account, Howe suggests, for why so many Gulf War veterans suffer from a mix of maladies, labeled Gulf War syndrome, which only received an official International Classification of Diseases diagnostic code in 2025.

During the Iraq War, the hot winds of the Persian Gulf enveloped Lemons’s body in dust that was filled with lead, depleted uranium, and other heavy metals. One of the lesser-known parts of the United States’ “shock and awe” campaign was the harm it inflicted on its own troops in the name of cost-savings and profit. The US military—or, more precisely, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, was contracted to dispose of trash produced by the 20,000 soldiers and 8,000 vehicles of the First Marine Division. KBR fulfilled its contract by simply setting the waste ablaze in open burn pits. The largest and most notorious, at Joint Base Balad, was a sprawling 10-acre site that burned 100–200 tons of garbage per day, spewing out toxic pollutants continuously for six years. In 2019, the Supreme Court refused to hear a class-action lawsuit against KBR.

Uncertainties abound in Warbody. Neither the courts nor Western biomedicine is adept at adjudicating uncertainty. Meanwhile, as we know from the history of tobacco, DDT, and climate change, manufacturers are very good at sowing doubt to deflect blame. In the book’s latter pages, Lemons and Howe work to connect body and mind, and to appeal for a more holistic approach to diagnosis and treatment. “The bodies came back in life and dreams,” Lemons movingly writes of the dead colleagues, friends, and innocent Iraqi children who haunted his thoughts. But the VA’s PTSD and Long Mono diagnoses failed to resolve Lemons’s pain. War is a landscape of toxicity and trauma, where the immediate violence couples with the slow violence of chemical exposures.

How do we think about care in the face of uncertainty, when doubt too often becomes a weapon in the denial of veterans’ health benefit claims? We do further violence to service members when the complexities of trauma, toxic exposure, and their interactions do not meet the standards of evidence demanded by review boards.

Lemons took charge of his healing when the system failed to listen. Warbody is an appeal to listen: to veterans, to their bodies, and to their calls for a more compassionate system of care.