Poison While Deployed is a series of short videos and photographs about the environmental and human health impacts of the US military's use of burn pits. The U.S. military created scores of toxic dump sites across Iraq and Afghanistan. Known as burn pits, these trash heaps burn night and day. Lit by jet fuel, they spew clouds of black smoke over US bases and civilian landscapes. Hundreds, if not thousands of servicemen and women are returning home sick with respiratory problems, skin rashes, and in some cases, tumors and auto immune diseases.  

Many have died. Veterans advocates are suggesting that exposure to burn pits may be this generations’s “agent orange,” the defoliant used in Vietnam which contained dioxin.