Post-Injury Desk Job

Stachel: Are you the adjutant?
Kettering: I fly a desk now. [taps his leg] Antiaircraft fire.

— The Blue Max

After a Career-Ending Injury (in the line of duty or otherwise), someone is reassigned to an administrative position. If the injury is serious and permanent, the reassignment can be permanent as well; otherwise, the reassignment will last as long as it takes for the injury to heal. Usually, the injury has to be fairly serious, with a lengthy recovery time, in order to justify such a reassignment. In terms of severity, it typically takes at least a broken bone to cause this reassignment; anything less severe or with a shorter recovery time would probably result in the individual just being placed on convalescent leave for the duration of their illness or injury. On the other hand, a more severe injury, or one that causes brain damage, may result in them being permanently discharged.

Usually, this trope applies to those in the military, police, or firefighters; however, this could apply to other physically demanding or dangerous occupations, such as construction, logging or mining, or athletes.

It's worth noting that many of the tropes related to Desk Jockey and Soldiers at the Rear do not apply here; frontline soldiers often treat those who got a desk job as a result of an injury with a great deal of respect, as their wounds prove that they have served at the front themselves, and also serve as a sobering reminder of what can happen to them.

Soul-Crushing Desk Job is a related civilian trope which may cross over if the character in question really misses active duty to the point of despair.

Badass Bureaucrat may also apply if they retain some of their badass status despite their injury.

See also Paperwork Punishment.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In My Hero Academia, Ragdoll goes from an active hero to someone who supports her team with desk work after she loses her Quirk to All for One. All Might as well is forced to take a more supportive role after he burns up the last of his power taking down All for One and has to retire from front-line superheroics.

Comic Books

• In Judge Dredd, Judges injured in the line of duty who cannot recover sufficiently to meet the requirements of continuing as a Street Judge are often reassigned to administrative roles elsewhere in the Justice Department or become instructors at the Academy of Law.
  • In the story arc "The Day the Law Died" Dredd recruits several of them to aid in his rebellion against the insane Judge Cal as they have not been affected by the brainwashing the street judges were subjected to via subliminal messages in their daily briefing tapes.
  • One judge turned to crime after a bullet to the spine ended her career, resentful at having basically wasted her life. Dredd can't understand her mindset.

Film

• Bend It Like Beckham has the sports-related version of this; Joe can no longer play soccer due to a knee injury, but now works as a coach.
• The Blue Max provides the page quote; Kettering is the squadron adjutant, and throughout the film, he walks with a pronounced limp. Stachel is sent to Berlin while recovering from being shot down, although his time in Berlin is more of a publicity tour.
• Rules of Engagement has Colonel Hodges, played by Tommy Lee Jones. His leg is severely injured in Vietnam as a young Marine lieutenant. He never again sees action as a line officer, but he goes back to school to earn his law degree and transfers to the legal corps, where he serves out the following thirty years until his retirement. He develops and overcomes a drinking problem, is treated with disrespect by his father, a retired general and war hero, and despite being well respected by his peers and subordinates, never quite gets over being a Marine officer that can no longer lead men in combat.
• Starship Troopers has a soldier missing both legs and with a prosthetic arm processing the recruits' enlistment papers. An unfilmed scene in the script shows that he is there specifically to scare away anybody who seeks to enlist thinking it'll be an easy ride and later on we see Lt. Razak leading his Roughnecks while also using a prosthetic arm, showing the Federation has no issue with that as long as the damage is not too excessive.
• This is the fate of Deputy Looney in A Time to Kill, who loses his leg in Carl Lee Hailey's shooting rampage to kill his daughter's rapists, whom Looney was escorting to court. Despite this, he makes it clear that he holds no ill will towards him—"He did what I would have".

Literature

• Crops up fairly frequently in Tom Clancy's works:
  • At the beginning of Red Storm Rising, USMC Colonel Chuck Lowe has a desk job in intelligence after he broke his leg while skiing.
  • In Patriot Games, this is how Jack Ryan met Robbie Jackson; Jackson, a naval aviator, broke his leg when his airplane's ejector seat spontaneously activated due to a faulty circuit and was given a job teaching at the Annapolis Naval Academy (where Ryan worked) while the injuries healed. Ryan was himself a former Marine officer, but his injuries from a helicopter crash were so severe that he was invalided out of the service entirely.
    • Throughout the books, Jackson continues to see action and receive promotions and greater responsibility, but deep down he has a dread of his developing arthritis, which continually affects his flying. Not long after being promoted to one-star admiral, he has to go through a medical screening where the condition finally makes it impossible to maintain his flight status. At this point, he drives a desk at the Pentagon or aboard an aircraft carrier and treats his career as though he were playing with house money, figuring he'll either get promoted or not, but if he can't fly, he's not to fussed about it either way.
  • The Hunt for Red October has Commander Quentin, a former destroyer officer, manning a sonar listening post while he's recovering from chemotherapy, and "Skip" Tyler, a former submarine officer who is now teaching at Annapolis and doing consulting work after losing half a leg to a drunk driver. At one point, Tyler is offered the chance to go back to sea, but he turns it down so he can spend more time with his family.
• Starship Troopers: This is not uncommon, as the Federal Service has a policy of allowing anyone who is willing and psychologically able to serve, regardless of physical limitations:
  • Invoked by having a multiple amputee serve as a recruiting officer. The man has prosthetics that are indistinguishable from the real thing, but displays his injuries when on duty to remind potential recruits of the real dangers of joining and scare off any who may be joining for the wrong reasons.
  • The book also has several heavily-wounded veteran instructors, including a "dirty fighting" instructor who's wheelchair-bound and wears a neck brace...and is apparently still able to take just about anybody on in a fight and win.
• Shows up a couple of times in The Century Trilogy:
  • In book 1, Fitz is reassigned to an intelligence office in London after being heavily wounded at The Somme, and also has a coal miner being given a job loading and unloading minecarts from an elevator after losing a hand.
  • Book 2 has Colonel Beck, a Wehrmacht officer who is reassigned to staff headquarters in Berlin after losing a lung on the Eastern Front.
• One of the characters in Isaac Asimov's C-Chute complains he used to be a master pilot, but after he lost his hands, the artiplasm prosthetics made him useless for anything but a desk job and, sometimes, a lecture.
• Discussed in Up Front, a collection of Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe comics; at times, frontline soldiers would disparage rear-echelon troops while not realizing that many of those soldiers were assigned rear-echelon duties because they'd been injured on the front lines.
• In the Jack Reacher novel Running Blind, the investigation into a serial rapist and murderer leads Reacher and the FBI to a Colonel LaSalle Krueger, a former Green Beret who lost both his legs in Desert Storm and is now working a desk job in logistics. The embittered colonel uses his high position in military logistics to engage in weapon theft and arms dealing.
• The Sean Drummond series of novels by former US Army Colonel Brian Haig ^note  Second son of former SACEUR and Secretary of State Alexander Haig , feature Sean Drummond, a former Special Forces officer who suffered combat injuries bad enough to end his SF career and transfer to the Army JAG corps as a lawyer.
• X-Wing Series: After Nawara Ven loses part of a leg to a micro-meteorite, he gets a prosthetic replacement, but it's not quite good enough to let him keep up with Rogue Squadron. Rather than leave, he becomes the squadron's Executive Officer.
• A sports version appears in Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte. Endo was a high-school baseball team member but was forced to retire due to a Career-Ending Injury. The team manager offered him a managerial position on the team, but he declined it in favor of the Broadcasting Club, possibly intended to have a career in sports commentary.
• In the Alex Rider novel Snakehead, Winston Yu served with distinction in Northern Ireland until suddenly developing brittle bone disease, which confined him to a desk job at MI6. This to him felt like being told "You Have Outlived Your Usefulness", ultimately leading him to become a board member for Scorpia.
• In Worm, PRT ENE director Emily Piggot originally served as a PRT field agent, before a mission gone wrong resulted in kidney and muscle damage that prevented her from returning to field work.

Live-Action Television

• Legion (2017): After his encounter with David leaves him terribly burned and scarred, Clark is assigned a desk job by Division 3 as soon as he returns to the office. He then promptly refuses to take the job, claiming that he'll hunt and capture the man who almost killed him.
• On Chicago P.D., Sergeant Platt was shot in the line of duty and the injury permanently restricted her mobility, making her ineligible for street duties. She instead took the position of desk sergeant in the 21st District.
• On Space: Above and Beyond Colonel McQueen was an Ace Pilot till a head injury left him without a working inner ear. An implant allows him to live normally but exposure to high g-forces disables it, causing crippling nausea. McQueen, no longer able to fly space fighters himself, becomes the commanding officer of the 58th squadron and is restricted to desk duties on the SCVN Saratoga.
• Rescue Me had a firefighter whose injuries left him in a wheelchair reassigned to an administrative job at FDNY headquarters.
• Defied by Jackie from Roseanne when she was a cop. After she injured herself arresting a perp, she was going to be offered a desk job. Instead of taking it she instead quit since she didn't want that.
• Phil Cerreta was Put on a Bus this way in the original Law & Order.
• Subverted with Amaro from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. After being shot in the knee he was supposed to be assigned to a desk job, but he opted to retire from NYPD instead.
• In JAG Harmon Rabb Jr was once a hotshot F-14 Tomcat pilot who'd seen action in the Gulf of Sudra and the Persian Gulf War. However, he suffered from night blindness, causing him to crash his fighter during a nighttime carrier landing. Harm transfers to the Judge Advocate General corps as a lawyer. However, after his night blindness is surgically cured, he returns to the fleet briefly as a fighter pilot, then returns back to JAG due to poor career prospects if he stays in the fleet.
• One Adam-12 episode had Reed working the information desk after an arm injury. He's sporting a cast on his wrist and uses his pencil to try and stop the itching at one point. Malloy has an annoying temporary partner.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Zigagged with Space Marines: Those too far wounded to continue as line troops but not too badly that they need a Mercy Kill are instead interred as Dreadnoughts, heavily armed and armored life-support sarcophagi on legs that serve as Walking Tanks. Because of their comparative rarity and endurance, they're usually asleep for centuries until they're needed again, both for battle and to give commanders the benefit of their experience. Subverted with Chaos Space Marines, for whom the Dreadnought is punishment: When not in battle, their legs and weapons are removed and they're chained to a wall for years or centuries. When in battle they're so far gone that have a chance of shooting their own side.
  • Subverted with Guardsmen too damaged for augmetics, who are supposedly sent to medical facilities for treatment... on a planet well-known for its production of combat servitors.

Video Games

• In Assassin's Creed, Malik loses an arm due to Altair's recklessness and is placed in charge of the Brotherhood's Jerusalem branch.

Western Animation

• Parodied in Family Guy with the episode Blue Harvest, a Parody Episode of A New Hope. Joe (as Biggs) is shown at the Yavin IV base making sandwiches after an accident left him in a wheelchair.
• The Penguins of Madagascar: In "Action Reaction" Skipper is forced to pick desk job to avoid stress, which could make him explode.

Real Life

• Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was reassigned to a staff position after losing an eye, a hand, and two of the fingers on his remaining hand. He later led and carried out an assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler.
• Wehrmacht officer Siegfried Knappe's memoir Soldat mentions that one section of the staff headquarters he served with during the Battle of Berlin was manned entirely by amputees.
• Averted with pilots Douglas Bader and Hans-Ulrich Rudel, both of whom continued to fly after losing their legs (both in the case of Bader, one in the case of Rudel). In fact, Bader's lack of legs made him better at resisting G-forces than regular pilots, because the blood had nowhere to go.
• Astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton both had this. Slayton had atrial fibrillation and Shepard Ménière's disease, an inner ear condition that wreaks havoc on balance. Slayton was made Chief of the Astronaut Office and he later moved to the Director of Flight Operations job and made Shepard Chief of the Astronaut Office. Both later did one more mission each, after Slayton's a-fib went away on its own and Shepard underwent experimental ear surgery. Shepard commanded Apollo 14 and walked and played golf on the moon and Slayton flew on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission.

---