Except for the dead, that is.

A comment at Jeffrey Ford’s blog draws a chilling comparison between Iraq and the Filipino Insurrection:

Quoting a contemporary letter from an American soldier:

“Talk about war being ‘hell,’ this war beats the hottest estimate ever made of that locality. Caloocan was supposed to contain seventeen thousand inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native. Of the buildings, the battered walls of the great church and dismal prison alone remain. The village of Maypaja, where our first fight occurred on the night of the fourth, had five thousand people on that day, — now not one stone remains upon top of another. You can only faintly imagine this terrible scene of desolation. War is worse than hell.”–Captain Elliott, of the Kansas Regiment, February 27th