Lost my taste for M&Ms

I was just sitting here at work, wondering if now was a good time to break out the big bag of M&Ms that I've had in my desk since V-day (will power, oh yeah!) when I came across this post on the "Ask Tom" food chat:

For the book club [reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried]: Don't forget to put out a bowl of M and Ms. One of the characters, a medic, always has them for injured soldiers. An original footnote to the story said that M and M was shorthand for a painkiller. After receiving letters from field medics who served in the war, the publisher corrected it -- in fact, when a soldier was injured too badly to be saved, the medic would give the soldier a few M and Ms and promise that they were pills that would take the pain away, because nothing else could be done, and it gave the soldier relief.

That could possibly be the saddest thing I've heard in quite some time.