This book provides an analysis of the challenges and ethical dilemmas military physicians and nurses experienced while deployed on military operations--and how they dealt with them. Military medical personnel were confronted with anything from scarcity of supplies to military hierarchy, factors potentially threatening medical standards as well as their professional autonomy. They had to continuously navigate between the different expectations, priorities, and moral codes of the medical and the military profession. This book provides insight into their actual experiences of this tension on multiple levels. It thereby makes a unique empirical contribution to an academic field dominated by ethics and offers a new perspective to the problem of dual loyalty. The book first traces the developments in the deployment of medical personnel with the Dutch armed forces between 1990 and 2010. Second, the book reveals the importance of professional identity when dealing with challenges and dilemmas: when making sense of situations; when making decisions; when acting on those decisions; and when justifying them in hindsight. Oral history reveals the nature of dilemmas and the factors contributing to their origin and solubility.

Three different patterns of coping were identified through the analysis of discourse and emotions, reflecting the medical, military or--as discovered--hybrid professional identity. Moreover, it demonstrates the connection between professional identity, the meaning of professional autonomy and agency, and physicians' and nurses' ability to conscientiously serve in the armed forces. This book demonstrates that instead of considering both professions and identities as static and conflicting, and defining the problem of military service as having to choose between identities, analysis needs to transcend this tension. This books takes a closer look at how identity is shaped and continuously reshaped and how it affected military medical personnel's cognition and emotions. It demonstrates how medical personnel coped with military service and dilemmas and dealt with the tension between professional norms and priorities. It offers a new, empirically based, perspective on the paradox of the medical-military identity. This book makes an original and indispensable contribution to academic debates on medical personnel in the armed forces and dual loyalty, ethical decision-making processes, moral competence, and the salience of (professional) identity in role perception, decision-making and coping, both during and after deployment. The target audience is first academic, incl those working in social sciences, humanities, medicine, and ethics.

Second: stakeholders (incl. but not limited to military and medical practitioners, policymakers, and societal partners such as NGOs and educational institutes) will be able to use the book and benefit from its findings for policy and educational purposes.