1 In Celso Castro, Helena Carreiras and Sabina Frederic (eds), 2016, Researching the Military, pp. 94-106. Routledge. The Effects of Military Service on Women's Lives from the Narrative Perspective Edna Lomsky-Feder and Orna Sasson-Levy The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the power of life narratives as a fruitful research strategy for investigating the effects of military service on life courses. Sociological research on the effects of military service is mostly positivistic (MacLean and Elder 2007; Wilmoth and London 2013), and relies on structural approaches to life course research (Mayer and Schoepflin 1989). The influence of military service on the life course has hardly been researched using the current approach, developed during the 1990s, that analyzes the transition to adulthood as non-linear and heterogeneous processes (Blatterer 2007; Aronson, 2008; Bradley and Devadason 2008; Furlong 2009; Wyn 2014). This approach increasingly finds of interest the diversity of life experiences and life trajectories among young people and discusses them in light of the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class. Moreover, the researchers place the social agent at the center, and focus on personal narratives that detail and interpret a range of pathways to adulthood across life domains. In light of this literature we suggest studying the influence of military service on the life course by using the methodology of narrative analysis of veterans' life stories. In this article we will first present the assumptions that underlie this research method. Subsequently, we will present examples from our study which addresses the effects of military service on the life stories of young Israeli women that illustrates how fruitful this method is. Before we launch into the analysis, we open with some background information. In Israeli society, compulsory conscription applies to women as well as men, and therefore, for most Jewish young people, military service constitutes a key scenario of participatory citizenship and constructs distinctive trajectories into civilian life. State selection mechanisms track Israeli young adults into various military roles, and thus indicate possible future life courses. Although conscription is compulsory for