"Hitchiking beyond the Wash or riding on the (then) fabulously cheap British Rail, in each and every town square I always found a first world war monument listing name, rank and unit, followed by shorter lists of the dead from 1939-45. Standing in the rain, gazing at the honor rolls of the Accrington Lads, Leeds Chums and Grimsby Pals – whole towns' full of young men wiped out – a Great War generation, many still rotting in Passchendaele shellholes – I imagined blood rather than water dripping off the granite rifles and helmets and winged angels of the obelisks. Hearts as well as bodies go dead."
...
"A few blocks from where I live, homeless, dazed Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan vets sleep under the 405 Freeway, a stone's throw from a vast VA military cemetery – the irony lost on no one. Except perhaps on Diane Feinstein, one of my two California senators, whose husband, Richard Blum, owns a controlling interest in two war-related companies, thriving in Iraq and Afghanistan, that directly profit from the invasions Feinstein voted for."

(Clancy Sigal)

I've liked Clancy Sigal's work since I read his pieces in the Guardian in the early 1960s. His novels (romans à clef) -
"A Weekend in Dinlock", a Yank among Nottinghamshire miners (1950s)
"Going Away", the road movie Hollywood will never make
"Zone of the Interior", in which R.D.Laing stars.
Clancy S. also wrote the screenplay for that Frida Kahlo film, but nobody's perfect.