Military Civilian World America's Great Divide

There is a great article on LA Times exploring the separation between those who serve and those who ignore them.

SPECIAL REPORT U.S. MILITARY AND CIVILIANS ARE INCREASINGLY DIVIDED 
LA Times
By DAVID ZUCCHINO AND DAVID S. CLOUD
Reporting from Fort Bragg
May 3, 2015

Soldiers including Spc. Aaron Schade, center left, wait at Pope Field in North Carolina to see their families after returning from deployment in July 2014. (James Robinson / For the Los Angeles Times)

Jovano Graves' parents begged him not to join the Army right out of high school in 2003, when U.S. troops were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But their son refused his parents' pleas to try college. He followed them both into the Army instead.

Last June, 11 years later, Staff Sgt. Jovano Graves returned home from Afghanistan, joining his mother, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Sonia Graves-Rivers, for duty here at Ft. Bragg.

"My family, going way, way back, has always felt so proud to be Americans," said Graves-Rivers, who comes from a family in which military service spans six generations, starting with her great-great-grandfather, Pfc. Marion Peeples, who served in a segregated black unit during World War I.

Her father, Cpl. Harvey Lee Peeples, fought in the Vietnam War. Her uncle, Henry Jones, was career Air Force. Another uncle, Sgt. 1st Class Robert Graves, spent 22 years in the Army. Her sister, Janice, served 24 years.
read more here
Here are some highlights to think about

Despite civilians' widespread admiration for troops, there's little overlap between their worlds

Congress with lowest rate of military service authorized today's wars, led by 3 presidents with no active duty

One-half of 1% of U.S. population enlisted — lowest rate since between World War I and II

The highest-rate contributors were Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Virginia and South Carolina. The District of Columbia was last.

The previous school year was a grim one here in Fayetteville, where the Cumberland County school district serves the communities outside Ft. Bragg. Between the beginning of the term in September 2013 and the following spring, six students committed suicide.

Five of them — four boys and a girl — were from Army families, with a parent deployed overseas. Two shot themselves with military weapons.

And this is why so many just don't care about any of them,

Yet only a 65-mile drive north of Ft. Bragg, in the college town of Carrboro near Durham, the military is a universe away. Many there have no connection save for the brief moment of gratitude and embarrassment they feel when they see a man in uniform at the airport, missing a leg.

"We glorify the military in this country in a way that's really weird," said Eric Harmeling, 21, a Carrboro-area resident who often argues with his father, a politically conservative minister, about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "It's like the Roman legions.... It's like we're being told to kneel down and worship our heroes."

For me it was strange when I was growing up and my friends said their parents never served. Then the older I got, the more I realized it was odd that my Dad and uncles did. Much later after I met my husband, and he came from a military family as well, it no longer mattered what non-military families thought because we spoke a different language and live in different worlds. I didn't expect them to be willing to understand anything. While they were perfectly able to do it, they just didn't want to. We hang out with other veteran families.