Attending to connections between serious health conditions (cancers and congenital disorders) and weapons residues in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, this article develops a geographical agenda for examining power in late modern war from the perspective of the ground and the life it sustains. A case is made for understanding the time-spaces of war as not compressed, vertical or remote but enduring, terranean and proximate in which violence emerges through processes (carcinogenic and teratogenic) that transcend boundaries between ‘life’ ( bios) and ‘nonlife’ ( geos). Such are the geontological time-spaces of late modern war that geographers – in both ‘physical’ and ‘human’ sub-fields – are uniquely equipped to examine.