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: