The Long-Term Effects of Military Deployments and Their Relation with the Quality of Life of Dutch Veterans

Experiences during military deployments may have serious negative consequences for the health and well-being of veterans. The literature presents a wealth of information on these negative effects that are mostly studied relatively shortly after the veteran returned from deployment.

Our purpose was to determine to what extent the deployment plays a role in the life of Dutch veterans who have left the Armed Forces and who returned from their deployment in a time frame from 1950 until 2018. Also, we aimed to assess how several deployment related factors are associated with their quality of life. We invited 6,000 veterans to fill out a questionnaire; 2,643 (44%) participated. We found support for long-term effects of deployments among almost half of the Dutch veterans. For most of those who experience an effect of the deployment in their life at present, that effect is positive. We also found support for deployment related factors to be related to veterans’ quality of life.

Our findings underline the importance to study the long-term effects of experiences during deployment for veterans and thereby not to focus solely on the negative effects in order to get a more complete picture of the consequences of deployments veterans’ lives.