Editorial comment: Feeling war's sting

News programs aren’t necessarily entertaining, and even at their best, news from the wars is repetitive and numbing.

There’s no place in America that hasn’t felt the impact of George W. Bush’s two wars, with soldiers being drawn from Texas, Iowa, Alaska — even the Riverdale/ Kingsbridge area.

But maybe not enough.

It’s a provocative statement to make, and for the people whose loved ones who have been killed, injured and traumatized, it’s certainly not true.

But for the rest of us, the impact has had more to do with what we’ve been stuck watching on the TV news — and more indirectly what we have in our wallets — than anything else.

What strange wars that can run for nearly a decade, show no sign of an end and yet cause no food shortages, no lack of hospital beds nor rationing of any kind. The money for the wars is largely borrowed, coming from a future that will hopefully never come — not least because it’s the same future that holds our other debts, among them the environmental crises we’re borrowing to build today.

Additionally, there’s no draft, so the only sons and daughters dying are volunteers, not a generation of America’s youth chosen at random and snatched away from their lives and aspirations as surely as if they’d been kidnapped by extortionists. And who were willing to protest civilly or even violently to prevent it from happening to them.

How can the wars be brought home to the people sitting — even in a deep recession — comfortably at home, compared to men and women on hilltops or in endless valleys or in deserts without end?

There’s a way, and no one even has to get killed.

News programs aren’t necessarily entertaining, and even at their best, news from the wars is repetitive and numbing. As Stalin is supposed to have said, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

It’s fiction that offers a path to understanding and brings an emotional impact that is hard to feel from the nightly or daily news.

Steven Pressfield is a noted writer of military historical fiction. The biography on his Web site has this to say of him:

“Mr. Pressfield is a graduate of Duke University and a former Marine. His books are in the curriculum at West Point, Annapolis and the Naval War College, as well as being on the Commandant’s Reading List for the Marine Corps.”

His books cover the fight for the continued existence of Western Civilization at the ancient battle of Thermopylae in Greece, where the Spartans fought the Persian Empire and its supposed million- man army (which included some of the same people America is fighting today, from what was then called Bactria — Afghanistan — and Mesopotamia — Iraq). The Persians won, but lost because of the delay caused by having to kill the Spartans gave the rest of Greece the time to rally. The book is called Gates of Fire and is considered a fairly accurate account and is certainly a visceral one.

Another book is The Afghan Campaign, which was written in 2006, years after our Afghan War began. It’s the story of Alexander the Great’s own war, in 330 B.C., against many of the same people who still live in the rugged terrain today.

The story doesn’t hold much back in its description of the horrors of war, from atrocities committed by both sides — committed on men women and children on a massive scale — to frostbite experienced by common soldiers and the supply problems that left many of the Macedonian army for dead. The book also deals with the various tribes who welcomed in these ancient soldiers from far to the west one moment, and then, as soon as the foreigners were out of the range of tribal hospitality, descended on those same them with fury.

Sound familiar? Mr. Pressfield certainly intends it to.

These books bring the fight home in a way that may help those who have not yet felt the impact of today’s war in their own lives. That, in turn, may help galvanize a nation that has other things on its mind, largely ignoring wars in nations where invaders never win, at least not for long.

This is part of the October 29, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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