"even war ran up the white flag"

"He sipped his coffee and thought about the old lady in the red sneakers, the one Malenfant had killed, the one who came to visit Sully.  She wouldn't be visiting Sully anymore; there was that much, at least.  Old mamasan's visiting days were done.  It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams.  Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills.  In the end even war ran up the white flag.  Or so he hoped.  He hoped that in the end even war surrendered."

-- Stephen King, "Why We're In Vietnam," Hearts in Atlantis