Images and sensations of war: a common theme in the history of military nursing.

We analyzed interviews with 22 military nurses who had served in wars or conflicts since World War II, up to and including Operation Desert Storm. Using a method of hermeneutic phenomenology, we found several common themes in the interviews. In this article, we report on the theme Images and Sensations of War. Within that theme, the subcategories sights, sounds, and other sensations (climate and weather, taste, smell, and comfort) were discovered. We categorized the images and sensations as pleasant, unpleasant, and horrible. The findings from this analysis may be useful to professionals who recruit military nurses, provide ongoing military training, help military nurses return to civilian life, and treat posttraumatic stress syndrome. Furthermore, the findings could be used as a basis for future quantitative studies to determine how widespread this theme is in larger groups of military nurses.