The political spat over a civilian president’s conversation with a grieving military family produced a lot of smoke. It also shed some light on the gulf between civilian and military Americans.

It’s a divide I know something about after spending four years reporting my book “Home of the Brave,” which is about civilians working with those who served to heal war’s wounds.

I know the gap is real.  America’s military draft ended in 1973. As Pew researchers wrote after conducting a survey marking the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the conflicts waged since the Twin Towers fell “have been fought exclusively by a professional military and enlisted volunteers. During this decade of sustained warfare, only about 0.5 percent of the American public has been on active duty at any given time.” The figure at the height of World War II was nearly 9 percent.

Some 4 million Americans served in the active-duty military during the first decade after 9/11, the Pew researchers said, offering some stark comparisons: 8.7 million Americans were in the armed forces during the 1963-1973 Vietnam conflict. During the four years of U.S. involvement in World War II, 16.1 million Americans served.

Pew found that 84 percent of the veterans of the war on terror believe the general public ``has little or no understanding of the problems that those in the military face.’’  Some 70 percent of the non-vets agreed. The survey also showed that while more than eight in 10 Americans said members of the military and their families have had to make “a lot of sacrifices,” just 43 percent said the same about the rest of us. Most of those who said the military’s sacrifices have been greater saw that as “just part of being in the military.”

While I know the gulf is real, I also know, because veterans have told me, that it can be crossed.

A mental health worker once told me that she doesn’t follow the news from the Middle East and that she was surprised that many Iraq and Afghanistan vets do, and do so with intense concentration. After that conversation, I approached a young veteran Marine I know to ask him how it felt to talk to clueless civilians. He told me he does not expect civilians to understand war in the way he does, and that that does not stop them from relating to him as a fellow human being.

David George, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan whom I interviewed for a Daily Beast story, has a 20-year-old Army reservist son who could be deployed in the war on terror at any time. George worries about what it will be like for his son to come home from battle to a nation that seems oblivious to the sacrifices fighters are making. He hopes civilians can muster a welcome that will make reintegration easier, especially for those suffering from anxiety, depression or PTSD.

“I guess the best thing anybody can do is just stay informed, know what the guys and gals are going through and what it’s like to come home,” he told me. “The best thing to do to help is listening.”

Amber Blais, the impresario behind Raconteur Denver, persuades people she believes have stories to tell into getting her bi-monthly evenings rolling with a 10-15 minute story each centered around a given theme. After the opening session, Amber hopes members of the audience will be inspired to share three-minute stories.

I’m not much on public speaking. Amber got me to participate with a combination of charm and flattery. I was one of the openers on Nov. 7 around the theme “lost – and/or found.”

Amber asked me to take part more than a year ago. When I saw the theme on her schedule for November, I thought of losing my mother. I think of her so often. I calculated that a year would give me time to think of a story about her I could tell without tearing up.

I wear “I voted” stickers in celebration. I also wear them in memory of those who struggled and died so that I can cast a ballot.

And I wear them as a plea to others to willingly suspend the cynicism that is at the heart of so much of our disengagement from politics.

We’re often asked to marvel that slaves and their descendants held onto their humanity despite the violence they have endured in America. But what of slave-owners and their descendants? How did they hold onto their humanity while committing atrocities? Or turning a blind eye to brutality? Or growing up casually accepting the lie that fellow citizens were less than – even if they were raised to be polite to their “inferiors”? Those, too, are questions we should consider.

Flyover country. The world beyond the bubble. A red corner of a purple state. Those are the kinds of labels that offer simple answers.

I found people, not stereotypes, in Montrose, an isolated small town that I first visited in 2012. I was on a Stars & Stripes assignment to write about this western Colorado community's grassroots effort to help war vets reintegrate into civilian life. Montrose later became the setting for my book, "Home of the Brave."

Montrose gave me glimpses of what collaboration can accomplish even in times of bruising rancor and division. I went there with questions and returned with evidence of the human capacity for generosity, resilience and healing.

When I’d asked my 13-year-old daughter whether she wanted to join us for “Appropriate” at Denver’s Curious Theatre, she said yes immediately. I started to tell her more about the play, but she stopped me, saying, “I trust Curious.”

Curious, which is celebrating its 20th season this year on Denver’s version of Off Broadway, traffics in the ambitious and the complex, which is certainly what you would expect of a play about race a black artist wrote for an all-white cast.

“Appropriate” was hard to watch, but worth watching. We trusted Curious to challenge itself as a company and its audiences. It delivered.

Americans are taking another look at the Vietnam War. It has, for example, attracted the gaze of acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns. A 10-part, 18-hour documentary series directed by Burns and Lynn Novick airs in September on PBS stations nationwide.

Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, ending the war. The 2008 National Defense Authorization Act authorized the Secretary of Defense to mark that 50th anniversary with commemorations that began across the country in 2012 and are to culminate on Veterans Day in 2025.

All this talk of Vietnam has me thinking of the veterans of that conflict I had the privilege to meet as I worked on a book that I initially thought would be only about our current war, the one set into motion by the 9/11 attacks.