Rethinking Reintegration and Veteran Identity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. (The) U.S. Military: (My) Service

   • Jeni Ruth Hunniecutt

   Pages 1-35

3. My Veteran Identity (Crisis): Suicides and Reintegration

   • Jeni Ruth Hunniecutt

   Pages 37-73

4. Writing Through Layers of Veteran Liminality

   • Jeni Ruth Hunniecutt

   Pages 75-94

5. Loss of Community: Searching for and Finding Home

   • Jeni Ruth Hunniecutt

   Pages 95-115

6. Loss of Structure: Resisting and Finding (My) Voice

   • Jeni Ruth Hunniecutt

   Pages 117-135

7. You Can’t Go Back

   • Jeni Ruth Hunniecutt

   Pages 137-168

8. Adapt and Overcome

   • Jeni Ruth Hunniecutt

   Pages 169-208

9. Back Matter

   Pages 209-213

   PDF

This book analyzes and discusses the U.S. Military Veteran identity. Throughout seven chapters spanning narrative, literature, theory and analysis, the book combines the author’s own personal story of joining, serving in, and separating from the U.S. military with corresponding research about military transitions, reintegration, Veteran suicides, and psychosocial adjustment challenges. The purpose of the book is to help readers understand Veteran identity in a way that centers the social implications of belonging to and serving in the military institution. In the final chapters of the book, existing theories and models related to military transitions are dissected before a new Model of Veteran Identity Hierarchy as well as a reconceptualization of Veteran identity are presented.

• Veteran
• Identity
• Reintregration
• Military
• Autoethnography
• Liminality
• Veteran Identity
• Military Reintregration

Dr. Hunniecutt’s personal accounts as a military service member, her transition into full-time civilian life, and her academic research combined with her own journey of reconciling how her Veteran status is part of who she is has led her to develop a compelling new framework for understanding Veteran identity. Hunniecutt’s conceptualization of Veteran identity is based on the identity recruits bring to the military and a natural continuum of their experiences as a service member in relationship to the ultimate sacrifice.  As a civilian trying to understand an important group of people in my country and as a researcher looking to do research with Veterans, I will be regularly using this book as a resource to do the best I can to learn about Veterans and be there for them.

-Aaron T. Anderson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

 For anyone who has ever used the term "veteran", I urge you to read Jeni's story. It is a raw, honest look at the struggles that come with trying to find one's identity before, after, and during military service. It's also a glimmer hope that through research, communication, and deconstructing our preconceived notions that maybe we can better understand what each warrior carries in their rucksack of life. In return we may just save more warriors from taking their lives.

-Abbie Holland Schmit, Iraq War Veteran

 In this book, Dr. Hunniecutt considers a new way to conceptualize the archetype of a military “Veteran” as an identity, product, and process. She vulnerably walks the reader through her own journey before enlistment and then guides an investigation of her own destructive “non-deployment emotions” after her service. She then deftly identifies the invisible apex of “Veteran” identity and the resulting identity conflict and distress that occurs for all people who have made it out of the military alive.

-Jacob N. Hyde, Iraq War Veteran, Clinical Psychologist

 

• Ronin Institute, Montclair, USA

  Jeni Ruth Hunniecutt

Jeni Ruth Hunniecutt is a Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute, the Owner and Director of Veteran Research Consulting LLC, and an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA