Iran also has a deep state among intelligence and security forces that have steadily amassed political and economic power in the past quarter century, partly as payback for fighting the gruesome war with Iraq.
Sport's despairing week has brought another puncture to cycling's credibility; Barry Bonds's continued grim chase of baseball's home run record; a game-fixing investigation of a professional basketball referee; and gruesome dog-fighting accusations against the Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick.
His depictions of fighting in Vietnam are gripping, if gruesome.
In its heyday, some 30,000 spectators would howl at the era's gruesome entertainments: lions, panthers and other exotic animals fighting one another; exotic animals fighting gladiators; criminals being executed.
When she was fighting deportation in 1972, The Times quoted neighbors saying her gruesome past was impossible for them to believe.
Mr Wellstone's death in an aircraft crash in Minnesota, where he was desperately fighting to hang on to his Senate seat was a particularly unexpected, gruesome affair: his wife and daughter also died.
Still, the N.H.L. remains bound by an ethos of toughness, an arena where fighting is tolerated and even encouraged as rough justice, and where playing through concussions and gruesome lacerations are marks of courage.
But even as the gruesome effects of the battles slam the national consciousness, there has been scant effort to prepare the public for the impact of the fighting.
In May a boxer called Denis Lebedev, fighting Guillermo Jones for a world title in Moscow, set a new extreme standard of bravery by surviving 11 rounds with a gruesome set of injuries.
This is both a chronicle of American lawmaking — the fighting code published by Abraham Lincoln's administration in 1863 became the foundation of the modern laws of war — and a gruesome record of American wartime cruelty, from William Tecumseh Sherman's rampage through Georgia and South Carolina to the Indian wars.
