Place,Space,and Identity: The Manifold Experience of Transition In and After the Military

This special edition of Illness, Crisis and Loss brings together established authors in the field of military and postmilitary life. It is an invitation to readers to critically consider the experience of those serving in the military, and what postmilitary life can look like. Each article encourages readers to develop an intellectual awareness of significant issues facing those who serve in the military and their careers and identity afterward. Each taking particular themes as their focus, they provide a rigorously informed critical investigation of military and postmilitary life. Readers of these articles will be provided with a rich, social theory-informed, approach to military and veteran studies. Transition within and out of the military institution is a substantive focus. In the reader’s engagement with each article, we encourage them to think about how and where transition occurs. What places does it take place in? What spaces does it change or create, and how are identities formed, reimagined, or recrafted by the self or others.

While securing the well-being of Britain’s Armed Forces community has been of historically fluctuating interest in British society (Dandeker, Wessely, Iversen, & Ross, 2006), since the early 2000s, this topic has come to the fore of public anxiety. This has drawn an apparently ever-increasing interest from academic, practitioner, and public-policy making sectors, both nationally and globally. British society maintains a duty to ensure that “those who serve, those who have served, and their families are treated fairly” (U.K. Armed Forces Covenant, 2000). A call to which key stakeholders have responded avidly ranging from local authorities, public health commissioners, employment support services, and from the third sector. Last year, the Armed Forces Covenant Report 2018 outlined a number of key advancements in the Government’s existing approach to supporting Britain’s military community. Similarly, the Ministry of Defence (2018) announced the first U.K.-wide “Strategy for our Veterans,” which establishes a broad remit for further multiagency work to aid veterans in their transition back into civil society. Furthermore, the Veterans’ Gateway’s 24/7 helpline is currently being trialed as a new outreach support service.

Yet, despite these steps, questions remain over enduring gaps in appropriate support for the British military community. For example, in 2015, research suggests that the proportion of veterans suffering from mental health problems following service is as high as 10% (Help for Heroes & Kings Centre for Military Health Research, 2015). A 2017 YouGov survey commissioned by Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association found that more than two in five (41%) of British Armed Forces veterans felt lonely or isolated at some point as leaving the military, a third (34%) said they had felt overwhelmed by negative feelings, and over a quarter (27%) admitted to having suicidal thoughts after finishing their military service. More than 3 in 10 (31%) reported that they had one or no close friends, suggesting a limited support network in civilian society. Moreover, this research also found that female veterans feel less supported than their male counterparts, with 43% of ex-servicewomen reporting feelings of social isolation (Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association, 2018).

This special edition contains four papers from academic researchers working on the frontline of research in military and postmilitary life. However, they draw from much more diverse sources of data than those included in the contemporary public debates described earlier. Collectively, these papers promote an understanding of overlooked losses such as a loss in military identity amidst changing imperatives of military work, the loss of a sense of belonging in veterans having contact with the criminal justice sector, the complexity of the life-course trajectories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers working within the private military contractor sector, and the significance of ensuring the transitional literature includes the experiences of female veterans. Taken together, these papers stimulate a critical challenge to a traditionally homogeneous approach to transition. This is done through an illumination of transition within the military and from the military with particular reference to well-being, gender, and offending behavior.

The first paper of this collection by Murray and Taylor considers the potential crisis of military mission when soldiers are required to attend to public policing duties. The unavoidable impact of such mission creep is likely felt on those carrying out such work. Their identity is affected by this, and military work becomes more opaque. The distinctive identity of the soldier is complicated by imperatives lodged by political actors responding to a changing global security landscape. Occupational transitions occur from a role built historically on the forging of victory from chaos to roles which increasingly signal a constabularisation of the military for purposes of domestic public policing, law and order.

Second, attention moves to transition from the military. Albertson’s paper begins by reporting the experience of transition on feelings of social cohesion and belonging from an often unheard from a group of military veterans—those having come into contact with the criminal justice and addiction recovery sector. Essentially, Albertson’s paper explores the impact of transition from a grounded theory approach, highlighting those positive renegotiations of identity and belonging can take place during that process. This paper draws on the existing literature to provide a contextual understanding for the later critical exploration of key themes of loss from original veterans’ life history narrative data.

The third article by White is a thoroughly engaging exposition of the governance of PTSD in a similarly underresearched veterans’ cohort—the soldier-turned-contractor. White applies the political economic lens to his data in order to position this topic as a rich source of learning for the reader. This article invites one to ask essential questions about the impact of the biographies of governance on those who experience PTSD are subjected to.

Similarly, Dodds and Kiernan’s final paper in the collection establishes the experiences of a further group not well represented in the research or indeed policy literature—female veterans. This article is the result of a well-informed piece of literature review work, given the lack of research focusing on female veterans’ experiences in the United Kingdom. However, this article is unequivocally timely, going on to recommend further research in this area and drawing attention to the lack of gender-sensitive support once women leave the military. Collectively, these three contributions advance important issues that raise some interesting and timely questions, which are highly relevant to the journal of Illness, Crisis and Loss’s aims of showcasing research documenting the narratives of people who gave gone through processes of crisis and loss.