Built. Dismantled. Upcycled.

A friend said something the other day that’s been looping in my head ever since:

“Did people just leave, or did they actually transition?”

It hit me straight away. I even messaged her back while it was still bouncing around in my mind.

Because if you just leave the Armed Forces and nothing changes, you get stuck in a liminal space but “transition” doesn’t quite cut it either, does it? It sounds too clean, smooth, orderly. Like moving between airport terminals.

But for most veterans and their families it’s anything but.

Re-Becoming

You definitely leave the Armed Forces physically, but when it’s done well, it’s more than a transition.

Maybe it’s a re-becoming.

A bit of dismantling, a bit of rebuilding.

Sometimes repaired. Sometimes repurposed.

Always changed.

We joked that it’s like flat-pack furniture, built, dismantled, rebuilt and upcycled.

If it’s cared for, it can look even better.

If it’s left in the corner, ignored, it creaks, falls apart, and collects all sorts of things that don’t belong.

And without those with lived experience helping to rebuild it, guiding, sharing, showing what works, the flat-pack often ends up handed to the family, who can’t possibly do it alone.

They don’t have the instructions. They didn’t get the training.

They just love the person standing in front of them, trying to make sense of all the parts.

When Your Flat-Pack Was Built in the Army

If your flat-pack was built in the Army, it’s built to last, solid, structured, and sometimes a bit rigid. It’s designed for strength and survival. (“Born in Bristol, made in the Army”).

But civilian life? That’s a different kind of furniture altogether.

It’s softer round the edges, more flexible, more make-it-up-as-you-go.

So when you take that Army-built flat-pack and set it down in a civilian living room, of course it stands out a bit. It’s heavier. Squarer. It doesn’t quite fit the décor.

Even the words tell the story. Rigid and regimented share old Latin roots both circling around ideas of control, order, and rule.

They’re not bad words. In the Army, they’re lifesaving ones.

But at home, they can clash with a world that runs on a different rhythm, where plans change, rules bend, and people don’t always say what they mean.

In civilian life, you’ve got to bend a bit more, be a bit more flexible.

That’s not wrong. It’s just different.

And that’s why the rebuilding matters not to erase the structure, but to learn where it can soften, where strength can meet adaptability.

What Anthropology Teaches Us

For those who don’t know me, I was the first in my family to go to university.

I grew up in an Armed Forces family, super working class, always on the move, but my dad always said to me, “education is the most important thing for you; get educated and get out.”

Social mobility mattered to him, and somehow that stuck.

So, in my early twenties, I ended up studying social anthropology. It absolutely blew my mind, didn’t get me a job like, but still, it changed the way I saw everything.

What anthropology does, at its best, is teach you to zoom out. To see people not just as individuals but as part of wider systems, stories, and rituals. It helped me understand how much of who we are is shaped by the cultures we move through, how we adapt, mask, and morph to belong.

And when I started reading about how traditional warrior societies supported their people to come home, it completely reframed how I saw my dad, my brother, and, honestly, myself.

Because in many of those cultures, returning from conflict wasn’t a solo act, it was a communal one.

There were rituals, circles, storytelling, cleansing, and shared witnessing. The return wasn’t just about survival; it was about rejoining the community safely and with care.

Contrast that with today.

When someone leaves the Armed Forces, there’s no communal crossing back, no shared ritual of return. We give out medals, maybe throw a leaving do, then hand veterans and families the emotional flat-pack and say: assemble your new life yourself.

And that’s what struck me, and what’s never really left me.

Not the idea of victimhood, but the quiet injustice of it all, that something once so deeply human, so relational, has been replaced with a form and a handshake.

The Cost of Forgetting

I really do get pissed off with the injustice of it all.

I’ve witnessed and been deeply impacted by a system that demands so much and gives so little space to return whole, to recover and come to terms with.

The armed forces has ritualised entry.

We train, we test, we transform.

But there’s no mirrored ritual for coming home.

So people end up stranded in that liminal space neither soldier nor civilian, carrying both worlds, belonging to neither.

And this isn’t about nostalgia, it’s about remembering what we’ve forgotten: how to help people cross thresholds together.

Re-Becoming (Again)

Maybe we don’t just need a new word, we need a new rite of passage back.

Not transition.

Not even reintegration.

Something closer to re-becoming and letting go, a process that honours the dismantling and the remaking, the grief and the growth.

Because the end of service isn’t the end of identity.

It’s the start of another transformation, one that deserves as much structure, support, and ceremony as basic training ever did.

And it’s work that can’t be done alone, not by the veteran, not by the family.

It takes a whole community to build something that lasts.

Looking Ahead

I’ll be following this reflection with a short series, exploring how anthropologists have understood transitions into and out of warriorhood across cultures and history.

I want to look at what wisdom from the past and from other communities around the world, can teach us about how we might do things differently now.

Because I’m on a mission to make sure my children’s children’s children, and theirs never have to live through what we did, or carry the ripples of it.

There will always be conflict; that’s human.

But maybe if we learn from the old ways, we can soften the landing for those who return and for the families who wait.

Because coming home isn’t the end of the story.

It’s where it begins again.