From able-bodied soldier to disabled veteran: moral striving among Danish wounded veterans

ABSTRACT

In this article, we investigate the role of military identity in Danish wounded veterans’ efforts to re-establish identity after trauma and come to terms with a disabled body. Drawing on qualitative interviews with physically wounded male veterans, we explore the two simultaneous transitions of moving from able-bodied to disabled, and from military to civilian life. Focusing on wounded veterans’ existential bodily experiences and moral striving, we elucidate how the veterans position themselves in relation to the disability label, and how military ideals of hegemonic masculinity and gender roles frame their efforts to cope with disability. Our interviews uncover that the Danish veterans strongly refuse to accept the status of ‘disabled’. In a persistent striving for normality, they invest immense efforts into their self-representation in an attempt to dissociate themselves from being victimized. Maintaining masculine military values and refusing to be vulnerable, the veterans adhere to a dichotomous notion of being either a man or a victim, thus establishing a very limited space for creating a new identity as disabled. We argue that, paradoxically, the veterans’ efforts to come to terms with and inhabit their disabled bodies aim at establishing continuity with their former soldier identity through masculine behaviour and disability sports, thus overcoming disability rather than accepting it.

KEYWORDS:

• Denmark
• disability
• identity
• military veterans
• moral striving

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank the participating veterans for giving their time to this project. Without them this study would not have been possible. We thank Mie Seest Dam and Clemence Pinel for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a strategic grant from The Danish Ministry of Health.