Reconstructing narrative coherence through podcasting after prolonged combat

Prolonged combat can disrupt individuals' ability to organize experience into a coherent life narrative. Senior combat officers face distinctive demands, regulating their own emotions while leading others and making morally consequential decisions under sustained threat, often leaving wartime memories fragmented. This study examines how senior combat officers describe and attribute meaning to their participation in podcast conversations following prolonged military service. Fourteen senior combat officers from an Israeli reserve brigade, each with more than 400 reserve days since the October 7, 2023 war at the time of recording, recorded podcast episodes individually or with fellow officers and completed a brief post-recording questionnaire. Ten subsequently took part in in-depth follow-up interviews, which were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants characterized podcasting as a dialogical space in which unprocessed experiences could be articulated, organized, and reinterpreted. They recounted re-engaging with painful memories, reorganizing fragmented recollections into more coherent narratives, and renegotiating their identities as military leaders. They also described deliberately postponing emotional processing during combat to sustain leadership, with the podcast experienced as a later opportunity for reflection and bearing witness. Participants did not experience podcasting as therapy but as a culturally legitimate reflective practice. The study conceptualizes podcasting as a dialogical narrative practice through which, in participants' accounts, fragmented combat experiences took shape as coherent narratives; read through a post-traumatic growth lens, these processes may be associated with growth following prolonged combat.