When a culture is steeped in a nationalist/socialist (National Socialist?) mindset, the individual life gradually ceases to matter. People are replaced by The People. The Masses. The loss of a few worker drones doesn't matter. Supply and demand make life cheap.

But Americans are not worker drones. That's the difference. Even Chirac understands this, in his own twisted way. He thinks therefore that we should be paralyzed by grief at any casualties at all. But we're more mature than that. We mourn our dead, celebrate what each of them accomplished in life (or while dying) and then move on. The collectivist mentality skips the mourning and the celebrating, and cuts straight to the moving on. But in so doing, they fail to remember just where they were moving on to.

And that's the difference between a pack and a herd.