The powerful attraction of 'thanatourism'

The 70th anniversary of the end of World War II stirs memories of the conflict sites I have visited over the years: the landing beaches of Normandy, the Kohima battlefield in northeast India, Hiroshima's Atomic Bomb Dome, the Death Railway in Thailand. And I try to probe why I and millions of others -- Westerners and Asians, young and old -- are so powerfully drawn to grounds of suffering and death.