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This symposium includes six personal narratives about military veterans' experiences receiving health care through the Military Health System or the Veterans' Health Administration. Five of the narratives were autobiographical accounts of men's personal experience of care and one of the accounts was written by a wife who watched her husband suffer with chronic pain after leaving the military. There is a good deal of literature in military and veteran's medical research pertaining to psychological and physical trauma rehabilitation; however, there is little reflection on what it is like for injured military personnel or veterans to overcome obstacles while in pain and attempting interface with these governmental health care systems. This symposium provides a closer look at the difficulties faced as these six men attempt to fight for personalized care in a collective heath care system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, the Institute of Medicine published a meta-analysis on current military reintegration programs, suggesting they have failed to improve postdeployment behavioral health. In this chapter, I explore some of the issues associated with the two paradigm reintegration programs supported by the Department of Defense (DoD), namely, BATTLEMIND postdeployment debriefings and Master Resilience Training. My discussion will be located within a subpopulation of military personnel I call warriors, particularly those men who have been exposed to combat. In performing a normative analysis of current reintegration programs, I rely on an ethics of embodied personal presence as a derivative focus of both nursing ethics and the just war tradition. Using an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate warriors’ experiences of training across the military life cycle illustrates how reintegration challenges have been construed as potential pathology because disembodied reintegration programs do not consider the influence of military training and lifestyle in the development of certain health behaviors. When compared to the warrior’s lived experience, a broader set of reintegration challenges emerge that cannot be fully captured by the symptoms of posttraumatic stress. Therefore, new reintegration programs need to be developed. Although I do not provide explicit details concerning what these reintegration programs should look at, I suggest that the DoD turn to something akin to the Healthy People campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]