(Dr David Jackson, David FitzGerald , Dr Sarah Bulmer, Dr Caroline Micklewright, Simon Weston CBE)
Last week the Military Afterlives Team met with participants, service providers and Simon Weston CBE to present our findings from the Military Afterlives project. It was a huge pleasure to have Simon join us and talk about some of his experiences of life after service, as well as discuss the different kinds of support veterans need as they negotiate civilian life. Our aim through the research process has been to challenge traditional understandings of transition out of the military by enabling veterans to talk about their own experiences in their own words. We wanted to highlight their voices to demonstrate that a ‘successful transition’ can mean different things to different people at different times. We wanted to showcase individual transition journeys to show that transition doesn’t just occur at the point of leaving the military or in the immediate run-up to discharge but that veterans can experience ‘transition’ long before and long after their last day in uniform.
Over the coming months, we will be exploring some of the themes we identified through our analysis and hope to have some lively conversations by drawing on our participants ‘transitional experiences’ to explore what transition means to you. Whether you are a veteran, family member, service provider or even someone who has never served we’d love you to get involved. We will be discussing themes such as veteran identity, connection and reconnection, what ‘successful transition’ actually means, and the how the ‘civil military gap’ can affect social and professional life after service.
Thanks to the unique make-up of the research team (three of whom served in the military) we will also be exploring what it is like to be a researcher in this area. The challenges and insights such an ‘insider view’ can bring and what it has been like to work within a team with such different backgrounds. In the next few weeks, we will also be publishing our policy paper so please keep an eye out for this. In the meantime, we wanted to say how excited we are to continue exploring veteran transition together.
Follow us @MltryAfterlives or check out our website Military Afterlives for more information.
“We are all different but we are all the same” Simon Weston, CBE