A grieving mother...

Photo shows Joanna Hawthorne, the mother of US Army Staff Sgt. Edward Carman, sitting in a folding chair she brought to her son's graveside in McKeesport, Pennsylvania.

For a year after Carman's death, Hawthorne took a chair to the cemetery nearly every day. Almost half of the more than 3,100 US military casualties in Iraq have come from small towns like McKeesport, where fewer than 25,000 people live.

Occasionally I publish photos like this one of a grieving mother to bring home the real cost of the war in Iraq. So many heartbroken people.

(Photo: Keith Srakocic / AP)