Sacco is a wonderful artist and journalist. I'm really excited to add this to my collection.

I rode a bike around the Somme battlefields years ago and there are so many subtle things that when you stop and consider what they really mean, just take your breath away. I was looking at headstones in one of the many little war cemeteries that dot the landscape and just kind of noting in my mind how many were "unknown". I was standing in front of a row of these markers that were side by side, with no space between them and I was literally lining myself up with a marker trying to see just how they had managed to squeeze a person into each of these spaces. It very quickly occurred to me that these were not individual graves. I was standing over a large pit with bodies piled in it and, as best as they could tell, a marker on top for each one. The brits, in their gallows humor, actually called a lot of these cemeteries "dumps". so for example, if there were a bunch of Lancashires in one, it would be called Lancashire Dump. It definitely gave me goosebumps and not the good kind.

It's possible I posted this to SLOG years ago, but here is the most wonderful (meaning horrible) war poem ever written, by WWI British officer, Wilfred Owen.

http://www.poemtree.com/poems/ParableOfT…

It's a retelling of the Abraham/Isaac story, but at the climactic moment, when the angel comes down at the very last minute to call Isaac's execution off,

"...Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one."

Benjamin Britten sets this poem and other texts to music in his "War Requiem", an amazing chorale and symphonic piece which I find almost unbearably moving, every time I hear it.

Another good comparison, it took us all of Vietnam to lose nearly 60,000 soldiers.

@ David Thompson, true but the real loss in Vietnam was the estimated 2-3 million civilians, Vietcong, and North regulars...that's getting up there