This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was adapted from Saira Mohamed’s What a Country Owes Its Soldiers.

Despite Donald Trump’s promises that he would be the peace president, the United States continues to be very much at war, from the forcible abduction of the Venezuelan president to the devastating conflict in Iran. As ever, the country professes its support for the troops, but we hear little about the military personnel in these operations — a day or two of stories on the horrendous conditions on board the USS Lincoln or the losses of American service members in the war in Iran. Typically, the deaths and the injuries are accepted as inevitable, perhaps as tragedies. War is necessarily life-threatening for those who fight it — theirs but to do and die, in Tennyson’s words. Such is the nature of military service, right? And so we thank soldiers for their service and call what they endure a profound sacrifice.

But this is not the only way to think about the military. In some countries, there’s a limit on what military personnel are expected to endure, and governments have a duty to take care of their service members — not just as veterans, but during the course of their service. There’s a basic understanding that even though war is necessarily life-threatening, not all threats to the lives of soldiers are necessary.

Here in the United States, by contrast, there is no such understanding. During these last two decades of war, hundreds of U.S. service members have died in accidents outside of combat, from rollovers of armored vehicles to collisions of ships to crashes of deteriorating aircraft. Untold numbers suffer traumatic brain injuries when they fire their own weapons because commanders won’t implement safety protocols. They develop deadly cancers because of toxic gases their leaders knew were spewing from the burn pits on bases. These are injuries and deaths that even the military admits are preventable. And this is to say nothing of those who have lost their lives in the Iran war (the number of which the Pentagon refuses to disclose), an avoidable conflict for which the administration cannot articulate a coherent rationale). In a country that claims to honor its service members, these kinds of harms should be staggering. But instead, they’re hardly noticed.