Explosive Look into Dawn of Chemical Warfare During WW I

During World War I, American University had turned over its campus to the army ... The army leased the fields and wooded dells around the campus to use as a proving ground.  They lobbed mortars and dug trenches.  They tested chemicals on dogs, goats, and other animals, and on men as well.  Many years before the area became Spring Valley, the dell behind the campus earned the nicknames "Death Valley" and "Arsenic Valley."  The soldiers called the hilltop campus Mustard Hill ... After the U.S. Army Corps on Engineers closed the investigation and declared the cleanup of Fifty-Second Court complete, questions arose about another spot across Spring Valley, where houses had been built on the back [south] side of the American University campus ... The corps resisted reopening the investigation, but when they did, they promptly found new chemical weapons detritus, including pits containing hundreds of munitions, some with mustard agent inside, buried in the backyard of the South Korean ambassador's residence.

Hellfire Boys by Theo Emery

The new discoveries embarrassed the Army Corps on Engineers and stirred lingering suspicion about the army's commitment to cleaning up Spring Valley.  The environmental remediation, estimated to eventually cost more than $300 million, was still ongoing at press time.  On a crisp November morning in 2012, I stood in a gaggle of reporters in the driveway of a stately brick two-story house ... More than ninety years earlier, Sergeant Maurer had stood on the same hillside and posed beside the pit called Hades with the jars and bottles of chemicals lined up next to him.  The house in front of us had been built atop that spot [sic], and the photo helped to pinpoint the pit's location beneath the back patio of that house ...  The cleanup of the property had proved so complicated, with so many lingering questions about what was still buried there, that the army decided that the easiest route was simply to demolish the house altogether and cart away whatever lay beneath ... In a sense, Hellfire Boys began that day.

  Hellfire Boys reading at The Wharf (11/17/17)

... The more I searched for information about the American University Experiment Station, the more puzzled I grew over how little was known about what had happened there.  It seemed strange that this history of chemical warfare in the United States, with its mysterious laboratory tucked into the nation's capital, could be so little understood and so poorly documented ... Since then, I've visited or contacted dozens of libraries and archives.  I've filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the army and the FBI ... [My research] took me into the living rooms of descendants of the soldiers in the Chemical Warfare Service, descendants who were proud of their ancestors but not always comfortable with the work nervous — they wanted it told fairly, dispassionately, factually.  I promised to do the best that I could.  I stand by that pledge.
Theo Emery
Introduction
Hellfire Boys (pgs. xvii - xx)