Oh come on, Slobodan! First of all, the U.S. is full of people who spent time in the military and traveled all over the world...
That does not make you a majority. You will notice that I used the term 'most' Americans. Both you and misirlou are educated enough to understand that your anecdotal evidence counts as those "exceptions that prove the rule," at best.
But lets see how numerous are your "well-traveled" Americans. In 2011, according to a...
... spokesperson for the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the US State Department. Over one-third of the population to be exact, or nearly 110 million out of 313 million Americans. That’s more than double the number of US passports in circulation in 2000 (48 million) and around 15 times 1989’s 7 million. At that last number (under 3 percent of Americans)...
So, from under 3% up to 33% in the last twenty years. Impressive growth, but hardly to invalidate my 'most' Americans (ie, 67%).
However, these are
issued passports, with the great majority of the growth coming after 9/11, due to the request that Americans must have either a passport or a passport card to come back from Canada, Mexico and Caribbean.
Having a passport still does not mean you actually travel. According to
this analysis, in 2009, only about 3.5% of Americans actually traveled overseas.
When I told my American friend (from Chicago) that I visited 33 countries, he said "Holly cow! And I've been to three only: Canada, Mexico and... Cleveland."
Joke or not, it indicates the extent of internal travel as well. I bet I visited more US national parks than
most Americans.
How eye-opening are some of those overseas travels? When I was in Moscow, working for American companies, we had numerous Americans visit our offices, some leaving USA for the first time. We send a chauffeur to pick them up at the airport, drive them in a western car to their five-star western hotels in the city, take them to our western-renovated offices, then to a dinner in $300-per head best restaurants in Moscow, and ship them back to America after that. Their comment after all that: "I do not understand why are those Russians complaining?"