NEW YORK (AP) — The realization brought Qwynn Galloway-Salazar to tears.

She was looking for civilian work two decades ago after leaving the Army Reserves, but what she saw was the disconnect between her and the panel of interviewers. As a Black woman, she didn’t fit the stereotypes of who veterans were or what military service looked like.

“They thought of a veteran to be a white male who served in Vietnam,” said Galloway-Salazar, who has built her professional life since then around veteran issues and working to increase the public’s awareness.

“I realized the minute I sat in that room that that interview panel did not know what the heck to do with me,” she said. “And I remember going to my car and crying because my thought was, what am I going to do now?”

Her experience illustrates two delicate questions that the country rarely, if ever, confronts: In this experiment in democratic life that has run for 250 years, how can military and civilian life sit so far away from each other? And how can that divide be crossed?

Military service is threaded through American life

The soldiers. The sailors. The battles. The conflicts.

There is no recounting of the U.S. story where its very existence as a nation isn’t intertwined with its military history, from its creation in 1776 to the expansion of its physical borders to its role in the global political and economic order.

A number of those threads can be found running through the weave of ordinary American life. Some are in the lessons American students learn and the monuments people visit. Some are in public rituals at sporting events and holiday commemorations. Some are in the way that “Thank you for your service” is a commonplace saying aimed at veterans and those in uniform.

But other threads have frayed.

In a nation that lionizes an idea of military service, most American adults don’t serve, or aren’t very connected to the people who do and their families to have a sense of what their lives are like. Those who do serve often end up coming from generations of the same families, or the same communities, from certain states more than others. It’s a concentration that can make the responsibilities and burdens of military life land disproportionately on them.

The public pays little attention unless there's a crisis situation, like the concerns over mental health for USS Abraham Lincoln sailors who had been on an expanded deployment as part of the U.S. war against Iran, in which 18 service members have been killed and more than 750 injured since its start six months ago.

In fabric, decaying threads can cause holes. In the U.S., there’s a military-civilian divide, a gap in understanding and connection that carries real-world impacts on public policy, on the logistical issues of everyday military life, on the views or stereotypes each side carries about the other.

From the start, what form the relationship between the country and its military would take was something the founders were concerned with, said Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University.

After all, among the concerns leading to the Revolutionary War had been opposition to British laws requiring the colonies to feed and house British soldiers, if necessary in private homes, without needing their consent.

There was no doubt that the new country needed some kind of military to protect itself, but the idea of a large standing army did not initially appeal to them, Feaver says.

“From the very beginning, the country has wrestled with … the need to have a military to protect you from threats, but the need for that military not to become a threat to the republic itself,” he says. Hence an initial small professional army, with limited tasks like border protection.

That’s not to say there wasn’t any expectation of service. States had militias, and conscription efforts were part of major military endeavors like the Civil War and the World Wars when there weren’t enough volunteers.

That draft continued through most of the 20th century even as the military transformed into a large, professional endeavor. But the policy ended in 1973, a political decision spurred by factors including vehement public opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft. The armed services have been all-volunteer ever since.

Disconnects are ever more evident

That America benefits from having a professional, highly trained military whose members have opted into being there is not in contention, nor is there any serious effort to bring back an active draft. (There is still a requirement for adult men to register for selective service in case a draft is ever reinstated.) These days, the military includes about 2 million people on active duty or in the National Guard and reserves.

That number is a tiny portion of the roughly 230 million adult citizens and legal permanent residents in the country. Contrast it to the World War II era, says Feaver, “where everybody, every family, had somebody who had served.”

“If not themselves, if not their dad or mom, certainly they had an uncle or an aunt or somebody,” he says. “And the military was widely distributed geographically throughout society.”

That’s generally not the case these days, says Kathy Roth-Douquet, co-founder and CEO of Blue Star Families, an organization which advocates for military households and has launched the Do Your Part initiative, calling on sectors in civilian society to think of policies and other ways to support military families without being required to serve.

“Military service kind of became a cul-de-sac, where it was people who served beget people who served, who married people who were from families who served,” she says.

Take the Army. More than 75% of recruits come from families where a relative has served, according to the U.S. Army Recruiting Command. In fiscal year 2025, about half of the Army recruits came from seven states. In recent years, U.S. military leaders have spoken of the importance of shifting that, to be able to recruit from a wider pool of young Americans.

Such concentrations have meant that the hazards and dangers of military actions aren't shared equally in the public, says Jason Higgins, an assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech, where he teaches on the Vietnam War.

He pointed to the Iraq War. Repeat deployments became a frequent thing for some of those serving, creating more adverse effects like PTSD and physical injuries, as well as families having to cope with long absences and repeated attempts to reintegrate a loved one who would then have to leave again.

“You have this small group of American families who are the only ones who directly experience the consequences of war,” he says.

That lack of knowledge on the part of the American public can also lead to stereotypes and assumptions about what it means to be a military member or veteran, the different roles in which people serve, and what they might need to help them reconnect to civilian life when their service is done.

Pop culture portrayals of grizzled soldiers, usually male, often white, gun-laden and in their fatigues don't tell the full story, Higgins says. Of course, there are combat troops, but there are plenty of other roles — administrative, mechanical, logistical. “There are millions of jobs in the military that are not related to killing people,” he said.

It's what has made some veterans uncomfortable with the “Thank you for your service” refrain, feeling like they've been turned into “statues,” he said.

“Whenever you turn people into statues, you’re not recognizing their humanity,” he said. So the repeated thanks, the valorizing, “while they’re well-intended, they make people feel like outsiders of a society ... not every veteran wants to be called a hero.”

‘Get to know us,’ a military spouse hopes

It's not just in times of war and military action that the gap exists, but in understanding the realities of day-to-day military life.

Military parents are continually dealing with their kids having to transfer to new schools. Military spouses can find it difficult to build fulfilling careers if they're regularly moving regions for their partners' orders.

Trying to close the gap isn't about everyone enlisting, though, says Sheila Rupp, a military spouse for over 20 years whose life has included regular moves every couple of years as her husband got new assignments. It’s about the general public being willing to connect with military families, to understand more about the realities of their lives.

“I think the average American really wants to support military families, but they often don’t know how,” said Rupp, 43. “If people were more connected and they actually knew their friends and neighbors that do serve or have served recently, I think it would impact a lot of things.”

She added: “I just wish that there were more opportunities for people to get to know us ... because obviously the civilian population brings support to our networks. And I think that there’s a lot that military families bring to the communities in which they live and serve too. So I think relationship is really important.”

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Part of a group of stories exploring life in the United States as the country marks its 250th anniversary. Click here for more. Take a look at some of the objects that have come to define America here.