Veterans and pundits often talk about the military-civilian gap. So few Americans serve, they say, that most of the nation doesn’t have any sense of what that service means. This is superficially true. The military is a professional subculture with its own rituals, traditions and jargon. There’s a military-civilian gap just as there’s a police-civilian gap, an oil rigger-civilian gap, a barista-civilian gap. But that’s not what these vets and pundits mean.

What they’re really claiming is that veterans know something civilians don’t understand or can’t imagine, and that this failure of imagination is a failure of democracy, a failure of dialogue, a failure to listen. What they mean is that veterans have learned something special through their encounter with violence, and civilians need to hear that sacred knowledge. This is where talk about the “military-civilian gap” goes awry.

The truth is, most Americans understand what our soldiers do very well: They understand that American troops are sent overseas to defend American political and economic interests, wreak vengeance on those who have wronged us, and hunt down our enemies and kill them. There is no gap there. The American military has a job, and most of us, on some level, understand exactly what that job is. The American soldier or Marine is an agent of American state power.

The real gap is between the fantasy of American heroism and the reality of what the American military does, between the myth of violence and the truth of war. The real gap is between our subconscious belief that righteous violence can redeem us, even ennoble us, and the chastening truth that violence debases and corrupts.

AFTER the attacks on Sept. 11, American troops were deployed across the Middle East and Southwest Asia for reasons that were confused then and remain dubious today, but on some unconscious level the myth of violence was at work, promising that waging war abroad would heal the wounds suffered that day. We might have to get our hands dirty, but that trial itself would prove our commitment to American values. As George W. Bush said when we invaded Iraq: “We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others. And we will prevail.”

That’s not how things would turn out, as wiser heads warned at the time, but in the frightened months after Sept. 11, the myth of violence was more powerful than the truth of war. As an American soldier in Iraq, I was both caught up in that myth and released from it: I could see what “the work of peace” really looked like, what American violence did to Iraqi homes and bodies, yet it remained my job to be an agent of that violence — a violence that neither redeemed nor enlightened.

On this Fourth of July, while American violence continues to rain down on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, as we continue to support violent regimes in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and elsewhere by buying oil that we then burn and dump into the atmosphere, precipitously heating the planet, and amid a crucial presidential election, we should ask ourselves what we’re really celebrating with our bottle rockets and sparklers.